WOMB-TO-PRISON PIPELINE

This story is part of an ongoing series on youth justice. Part 1: Philly locks up kids at a high rate, and a high cost. Part 2: Reforms were promised, then abandoned.

Denaisa Hansberry learned at a young age to run away from danger.

Removed from home at age 10 and placed in kinship care, she ran from an abuser.

Sent to group homes, she ran from conflict.

Placed in foster care, she ran from petty torment — the foster mother who, as she remembers it, punished her for complaining about a pizza dinner by placing her on an all-soup diet for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

But when she was on the run, danger would find her.

On her own at age 14, she was hungry, cold, and broke. The one thing all around her was drugs, and neighborhood dealers she had known her whole life. “I knew what a [crack] pipe was at 8 years old,” she said.

One of the dealers agreed to let her sell.

That’s how Hansberry was arrested and ended up in juvenile detention — creating an entanglement across systems that would follow her into young adulthood and her own parenthood, and force her to face the most heart-wrenching decision a mother can make.

Hansberry’s path into juvenile detention is a startlingly common one for young people in the care of the Philadelphia Department of Human Services.

Teens with active DHS cases are about 11 times more likely than other Philadelphia teens to land in the city’s juvenile hall, an Inquirer analysis of city and Defender Association of Philadelphia data found.

According to data provided by the Defender Association, kids who have been through the child-welfare system account for at least one-quarter of kids in Philadelphia’s juvenile justice system — and at least a third of those in detention.

Once placed in institutions, youth who are involved in multiple systems stay there for 14 months on average — three times longer than those with only delinquency cases, city data show.

Taken together, these data points suggest a DHS-to-prison pipeline — or what some advocates for children call a womb-to-prison pipeline — in which young people with child-welfare histories are overrepresented at every stage of the juvenile and criminal legal systems.

For someone like Hansberry, whose DHS case began when she was 10 and dragged on for seven years, the odds she would be arrested were little better than a coin flip.

A recent analysis by the Defender Association found the correlation is most profound among kids who are pulled into the child-welfare system at age 14 and older, and among younger children who remain in the system for many years.

Associate Deputy Mayor Jessica Shapiro cautioned against viewing the correlation as a causal association.

Child-welfare and juvenile justice issues, she said, “manifest themselves simultaneously. Youth who have unstable home lives, or who already may be involved in the child-welfare system, are at greater risk for delinquency and truancy.”

High levels of juvenile detention among DHS-involved teens can be attributed to poor choices made by young people who have few resources, extensive histories of abuse and neglect, and, often, untreated mental health needs. Researchers studying detained minors have found 15% to 30% of boys, and 25% to 50% of girls, meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.

But advocates say the correlation is also a result of repeated system failures and biases — not to mention the extra layers of surveillance to which kids in the system are subjected.

Kids in the juvenile justice system are disproportionately Black and from the city’s poorest, most heavily policed neighborhoods, according to data from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office — the same communities that see the highest rates of child-welfare investigations.

“If you’re in one system, you’re bound to get caught up in another one,” said Mimi Laver, chief of the child advocacy unit at the Defender Association.

For instance, kids who are chronically absent from school get referred to truancy court. If they don’t get on track there, they can be referred to the child-welfare system — and from there are at higher risk of landing in juvenile court. Repeated arrests or court dates, in turn, can cause kids to miss school, renewing the cycle.

Young people in the child-welfare system are also more likely to languish in detention simply for lack of any place else to put them. Parental refusal or unavailability is a factor in about 10% of cases where youth were rejected from diversion programs or were detained even though a standardized assessment deemed them safe to release.

In DHS’s 2025-26 budget, the agency reported there were 10 kids detained because no alternative placement had been identified, for an average of 42 days after they could have been released.

“We look at the [city detention center] as a jail,” said Rebecca Mainor, assistant chief of the Defender Association’s child advocacy unit. “A lot of times, on the DHS side, they look at it as a placement.”

DHS Commissioner Kimberly Ali said a multidisciplinary team is convened whenever a child is placed in juvenile detention to ensure each case is considered holistically. She acknowledged that her agency sometimes struggles to find placements for kids who have both child-welfare and juvenile court cases.

Philadelphia DHS, in its budget documents, attributes delays to teens being rejected from placements because of the nature of their charges or their behavioral histories.

With Hansberry’s permission, The Inquirer was able to review some of her records to confirm details of her account. After she was arrested for drug dealing, the records list the city juvenile hall as “the least restrictive placement that meets the needs of the child.”

A state legislative task force in 2021 proposed prohibiting placing minors in detention only because no alternative placement or parent was available, but that never became law.

Frank Cervone, who led the Support Center for Child Advocates until retiring in 2023, noted that the scarcity of both child-welfare and juvenile justice beds has been a long-standing problem — even as DHS has left more than $100 million of its budget unspent in each of the last three years.

“You can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results,” he said. “They clearly have to continue to try to grow community-based homes of all sorts.”

But, he added, it’s not all DHS’s fault.

“Those young people come so broken, so fragile, and so under-resourced in their lives before they hit the system that there is no wonder they would have worse outcomes in the system,” he said. “That also makes the job more important.”

For Hansberry, those hardships began almost the day she was born.

Her birth certificate even spelled her name wrong: “Mansberry.”

Looking back, Hansberry can see why DHS took her from her mother, who was struggling with addiction and homelessness. Her father was in prison on a life sentence.

But she cycled through six different placements, her records show. Each time she was placed in a new home, something would go wrong and she would run away. Then she would be arrested and placed again.

“I’m not saying everything is the system’s fault, because I can take accountability for some things I did,” she said. “But a lot of it had to do with being taken away from my mom, being around strangers, because the system thought it was best for me — and it wasn’t.”

DHS officials declined to comment on Hansberry’s experience with the agency, even though she signed a form authorizing DHS to release information about her case. Ali said the document did not resolve confidentiality concerns and that she wanted to speak further with Hansberry before disclosing information about her case.

“A lot of it had to do with being taken away from my mom, being around strangers, because the system thought it was best for me — and it wasn’t.”

Eventually, an aunt took Hansberry in. But in 2020, when she was 16, the pandemic hit, and her school went to remote learning. She felt overwhelmed.

Soon, she dropped out of school and left home again.

While she was gone, her aunt discovered her gun missing. She told police she thought Hansberry was the culprit, and they put out an arrest warrant.

But Hansberry didn’t know that until March 9, 2023.

By then, she was 19 and eight months pregnant — working a security job and living with a boyfriend. She was trying to build a life as a young mother-to-be.

Then she was stopped by police while driving a borrowed car that had been reported stolen. The officers found the juvenile arrest warrant and took her to the city’s youth detention center.

Hansberry was still in intake when she went into labor. She said she pleaded with staff to call an ambulance. Instead, they assigned her a room in a residential unit.

An hour later, she said, “I go bang on the door and tell the staff, ‘Can you take me to the nurse? I’m having contractions. They’re back to back.’”

She said the nurse timed her contractions at one minute apart — then sent her back to her room.

Across the juvenile justice and child-welfare systems, Philadelphia has long been an outlier in its reliance on removing children from their homes.

In recent years, the city has made strides: It cut the number of kids in child-welfare placements such as foster care in half in just five years and reduced the use of congregate settings such as group homes and reform schools by more than two-thirds.

Yet its rate of youth in foster care is about 85% above the national average, a comparison of Philadelphia DHS and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data shows. And it incarcerates young people in detention and residential institutions at about four times the national rate, a recent Inquirer investigation found.

Once young people are in the system, it can feel like quicksand.

A 2021 analysis by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office found that, within five years, 57% of juvenile defendants were rearrested. Among teens with two or more arrests, that figure jumped to 80%.

When the two systems collide, there can be compounding effects.

“A lot of our kids [are arrested for new] cases, actually, in placements that DHS put them in,” the Defender Association’s Mainor said.

A complaint filed by the Education Law Center last year regarding Philadelphia’s juvenile detention center — resulting in a state order to remedy widespread failures to implement special-needs students’ individualized education plans — described how one such case unfolded.

A 14-year-old girl in foster care with complex mental health needs had been shipped to an institution in Arkansas. But that didn’t work out, and in 2020 staff there took the “unprecedented” step of driving her back to Philadelphia and dropping her off at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

She was still at the hospital about two years later when, according to the complaint, a “mental health incident” led to her transfer to the juvenile detention center in West Philadelphia. The Education Law Center’s Ashli Giles-Perkins said the teen did not face charges but spent much of the following year in detention for lack of an alternative placement.

The city, as required by the state, has a complex-case review team to look at just such cases. But, since its inception in November 2022, it has reviewed only five cases. Laver, of the Defender Association, said she has put in a number of requests for complex-case reviews but never heard back.

The team did review the case of the teen who spent two years at CHOP, Giles-Perkins said, and eventually helped identify a home for her. But, she added, “There weren’t updates for months at a time.”

Shapiro, the associate deputy mayor, said in an email that the complex-case review is reserved for the most challenging cases, and that it had been successful in developing placement resources, reunifying families, and providing youth with extra support. Ali said DHS has robust initiatives to address complex cases that do not involve that formal review team.

Even so, Mainor said teens whose cases span both systems can sit in detention “for months and months and months, only to then end up on the wait list to go to the [high-security state-run Youth Development Centers].”

Wait times for residential treatment facilities — which serve youth with serious mental illness — have been as long as nine months, she said.

Philadelphia has created a “crossover” courtroom to streamline multisystem cases. But many defense lawyers avoid it, concluding their clients fare worse in that room and often end up in delinquent institutions anyway.

As for Hansberry, despite her various child-welfare and delinquency cases, there appeared to be little coordination. By 2023, she had aged out of foster care.

Though she was now an adult, she could still face prosecution and incarceration on charges filed when she was a juvenile until she turned 21. That’s why, at 19, she was held in the juvenile detention center after her arrest.

As her labor progressed, she grew filled with panic. She was still in the facility around 1 a.m. on March 10 when, she said, she began banging on the door of her room and asking to use the bathroom.

Once there, she said, “My baby just slipped out.”

She remembers screaming for help. “I couldn’t move, and my baby was in the toilet, still attached to the umbilical cord.”

Her screams snapped the staff to attention, she said, and they finally whisked Hansberry and her baby daughter to the hospital.

The baby was healthy. But by the time Hansberry was discharged from the hospital a couple of days later, she had missed her detention hearing in juvenile court, in the gun case.

Hansberry’s public defender, Michelle Mason, scrambled to get Hansberry back before a hearing officer.

But four days postpartum, the officer refused to release her.

“He told me that I’m one of the reasons that the city is the way it is. He told me I was a menace to society,” she recalled. “All this stuff over a gun I didn’t steal.”

On March 22, the prosecutor withdrew the charges. Hansberry was released.

But that same day, she learned DHS was petitioning for protective custody of her child.

As Marcia Lewis sat in a Philadelphia courtroom last July waiting for a hearing for her 16-year-old grandson, Carmichael Lee, she wrestled with conflicting emotions.

She was “livid” with Lee, charged as an adult with gunpoint carjacking. But she also blamed his traumatic childhood in the system.

“The kid was hurting,” she said. “That’s why he did what he did.”

The hearing was to request that Lee’s case be moved to juvenile court. Lawyers at such hearings describe it as the norm for mitigation evidence to include either time in the child-welfare system or abuse or neglect that should have triggered the system’s intervention.

“The family history is consistent with many family histories [presented in the courtroom],” public defender Michael Sontchi said at a different hearing, before launching into an account of another client’s childhood, which included long stretches left at home alone while his mother, who had attempted suicide, was committed for psychiatric treatment.

That tracks with findings that foster youth face a high risk of incarceration well into adulthood. About one-third of former foster youth were incarcerated by age 21, a 2023 national survey found.

Lee had cycled through three or four homes under DHS care. His public defender told the court Lee had been treated for abuse-related injuries from ages 9 to 11, diagnosed with PTSD, and later robbed at gunpoint.

Over the years, Lewis fought for custody of Lee. But once she got it, she said, “I ran out of time.”

At the hearing, the carjacking victim testified to her losses. The assailants got away with her wallet. Lee’s CashApp account was linked to her debit card, and $75 was taken. The terror stayed with her for months, the victim said. “I don’t like to stay at red lights too long. I’m scared someone is going to try to take my car or take my life.”

Assistant District Attorney Brian Schroeder Jr. said the crime was “sophisticated,” even if using a personal CashApp account exposed Lee’s identity. “[Lee] wants to make adult decisions, so he should be treated as such,” Schroeder argued.

The hearing had previously been delayed after another teen had wrapped his shackles around Lee’s neck on the way to court.

Jamier Parker, the alleged attacker, had also been charged with a gunpoint carjacking.

Like Lee, he had been in DHS care: His father was absent, his mother died using PCP, and his older brother was fatally shot, his lawyer told the court.

The defense offered that history as mitigation, given the strong links between childhood trauma and offending.

In each of the proceedings, Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott ruled it was in the public interest for the teens to remain in the adult system.

“I see someone who is a danger to the community,” she told Parker. “I see a threat to the public. I don’t see any redeeming information.”

After Hansberry was released from custody, Mason, her lawyer, walked her from the criminal courthouse to Family Court to address a judge about custody of her daughter, now almost 2 weeks old.

Given Hansberry’s childhood in DHS care, she said, the idea of losing her child to that same system was her worst nightmare.

She wanted to end the cycle of generational trauma that began long before she was born.

Thinking back to her own mother, she said: “She hasn’t forgave my grandmom and my great-grandmom. She hasn’t let go of what happened to her childhood. And quite frankly I’m kind of in the same boat. I haven’t let go of my trauma, of my childhood.”

Hansberry tried to meet every requirement to regain custody of her child. She took parenting classes and drug tests and attended scheduled visits. Her file contains effusive letters from her case manager at a program called YVLifeSet, describing her diligence and personal growth.

YEAH Philly, a nonprofit organization that provides advocacy and support for youth in West and Southwest Philadelphia, hired a lawyer to represent her in Family Court.

Meanwhile, Mason negotiated a spot in the district attorney’s emerging adult diversion program for the stolen car case.

But Hansberry’s situation was precarious. She was now broke and homeless.

Because she was not yet 21, she was still eligible to seek DHS services. But, she said, “I want freedom. I’m over it: all the caseworkers, all the court dates, all the meetings. It’s all I dealt with since I was a kid.”

Her situation was typical.

According to DHS budget documents, 250 to 300 young people age out of the child-welfare system each year in Philadelphia. Fewer than half have a source of income or permanent housing. Among girls, studies estimate that nearly half of former foster youth have had at least one pregnancy by age 19.

A handful of programs in the city have been able to intercede — providing housing and wraparound support such as job counseling, therapy, and education assistance for young people who might otherwise be trapped in juvenile detention or a shelter.

Sharon McGinley, who runs the nonprofit Eddie’s House, said her organization has been able to assist some teens who have such complex cases. They have thrived, and been connected with school, jobs, housing, and other services. But Eddie’s House has a wait list of about 50 people at any given time.

Hansberry wound up couch-surfing while working a patchwork of gig jobs, from home health care to warehouse inventory, that offered unreliable shifts.

She wanted her diploma, but it felt like an unaffordable luxury. “It was either go to work and get a place to stay — or go to school and be on the street.”

Being homeless also made her vulnerable. Last fall, her wallet was stolen. A few months before that, someone stole her SNAP benefits, she thinks using a credit card skimmer. While trying to straighten it out, she said, she made repeated visits to an office where she waited for hours, only to be told that the office was closing for the day, or that the computers were down.

Despite Hansberry’s efforts to get on her feet, DHS opposed returning her daughter to her care.

Hansberry felt overwhelmed, exhausted, and beaten down. She eventually, reluctantly agreed to terminate her parental rights and give up her daughter. “I feel like they were just going to take my rights away if I didn’t give them up,” she said, “and if I had another baby they would do the same.”

“I feel like they were just going to take my rights away if I didn’t give them up, and if I had another baby they would do the same.”

Recently, after years of being homeless, she got her first piece of good news in a while: She was off the wait list for housing run by Project HOME, in a beautifully renovated historic building a few blocks off Rittenhouse Square.

On her move-in day, she rang the doorbell impatiently and stood below the stone archway, waiting for someone to let her in, then listened to the long list of rules and signed a small mountain of paperwork. YEAH Philly was subsidizing her monthly rent, so she had to pay only $194.

The room was small and spare, but she felt hopeful as she took in the crisp white walls, kitchenette, and private en suite bathroom.

“It’s my own little space,” she said.

At the same time, she wished her daughter was with her. She didn’t even have a photo to put up. A DHS worker had promised to send some, she said, but never did.

“I have my good days. I have my bad days. My crying days. My depressed days,” she said. “I just make it through.”

Her view, across an air shaft to a brick wall, was not exactly inspiring.

Yet, for the first time in months, she had breathing room to think about what’s next — perhaps her GED, and then training as a medical assistant. No matter what, Hansberry said, she wants to stay out of trouble.

“I’m scared of jail now,” she said. “I don’t ever want to go back.”

This article was supported in part by funding from the Stoneleigh Foundation, a philanthropic organization seeking to improve the life outcomes of young people. Inquirer articles are created independently of donor support.