Charting a course: meeting the challenge of permanency planning for children with incarcerated mothers.

Case workers involved in permanency planning for children whose mothers are incarcerated must assess the family's strengths, the mother's capacity to assume parental responsibilities, and the integrity of the parent-child relationship; and address concerns regarding the short- and long-term effects of the children's socioemotional dislocation and the merits of their retaining a relationship with their mothers. At the same time, correctional policies and practices delineate the nature and extent of contacts with the mother and the mother's access to rehabilitative programs. Agency guidelines, practice tools, and advocacy initiatives must be developed to help practitioners meet these challenges. An initial review of the Adoption and Safe Families Act suggests the need for close monitoring of the impact of its mandates to shorten the time for moving children toward permanency and its weakening of the expectation for "reasonable efforts" to be made to reunify families.