Author ORCID Identifier
0009-0009-0307-4973
Faculty Sponsor
Denise Yull
Abstract
Scholarship across youth social policy, child welfare, media studies, and criminology has documented media driven moral panic, racial disproportionality in child welfare involvement, and foster-care-to-prison pathways as related but individual, distinct phenomena. Similarly, critical frameworks by Alexander and Ritchie trace how mass incarceration unfolds across marginalized communities, yet often begin analysis at points of formal criminal legal contact.
This paper builds on an integrated framework that identifies child welfare as a distinct and underrecognized branch of mass incarceration operating at an earlier stage of the life course. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature, this analysis demonstrates how fear based media narratives shape child welfare policy, how policy expands racialized system contact through surveillance and family regulation, and how cumulative child welfare involvement contributes directly to criminalization and incarceration down the line. Rather than functioning as a neutral system of protection, child welfare is shown to operate as a mechanism of racialized surveillance and punishment that begins in childhood.
The originality of this work lies in taking these dynamics as a single, interconnected carceral process rather than parallel systems. By reframing child welfare as a structural pathway into mass incarceration, this paper extends existing carceral theory and advances new directions for youth-centered policy analysis and reform.
Citation Style
APA
Recommended Citation
Painter, D. A. (2026). The Welfare System to Prison Pipeline in America: How Media, Policy, and Surveillance Extend the Reach of Mass Incarceration through Child Welfare Practices. Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal, 11(2). Retrieved from https://orb.binghamton.edu/alpenglowjournal/vol11/iss2/7
Included in
Black History Commons, Domestic and Intimate Partner Violence Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, Social Justice Commons