Library

Whether foster-care status leads to harsher juvenile-court processing for "crossover" or "dual-status" youth is genuinely contested: an influential early administrative study found that delinquency cases arising from child welfare were handled more punitively (less likely to receive probation), while the most rigorous recent reinvestigation, using matched cases, finds no such "child-welfare bias" and, if anything, somewhat more lenient processing. What is well established is that dual-system youth are a large, disproportionately traumatized subpopulation of justice-involved adolescents.