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Education

B.A. (History), University of California Santa Cruz, 1983; MSW (Social Welfare), University of California Berkeley, 1987; Ph.D. (Social Welfare), University of California Berkeley, 1990.

Research Interests:

Child and family poverty; child abuse and neglect, foster care, kinship care, and child welfare services; family policy.

Selected Publications:

Berrick, J. D. (2008). Take me home: Protecting America's vulnerable children and families. New York: Oxford University Press.

Berrick, J. D., & Gilbert N. (Eds.) (2008). Raising children: Emerging needs, modern risks, and social responses. New York: Oxford University Press.

Berrick, J. D. (2006). Neighborhood-based foster care: A critical examination of location-based placement criteria. Social Service Review, 80(4), 569-583.

Berrick, J. D., & Fuller, B. (Eds.). (2005). Good parents or good workers? How policy shapes families’ daily lives. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Berrick, J. D., Needell, B., Barth, R. P., & Jonson-Reid, M. (1998). The tender years: Toward developmentally-sensitive child welfare services for very young children. New York: Oxford University Press.

Berrick, J. D. (1995). Faces of poverty: Portraits of women and children on welfare. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jill Duerr Berrick on Child Welfare Reform:

Across the nation, children are in desperate trouble. The child welfare system designed to protect and secure children's safety is ill-prepared for the task. To make matters worse, the clamor for reform heard most urgently in child welfare circles is not likely to affect the well-being of the half-million children for whom Child Protective Services agencies are responsible.

In state after state, children known to child welfare agencies die at the hands of their parents or caregivers, abuse and neglect is investigated by authorities but untreated, large numbers of children are removed from their homes to foster care, and many spend their childhoods separated from their birth families, but never achieve permanency with others. The crisis in foster care is so profound that no state has yet passed their federally mandated Child and Family Service Review; two-thirds of states have seen class-action lawsuits to force their systems to change, and unless dramatic reform occurs quickly, financial penalties will begin to accrue to states, and many more childhoods will be lost to a bureaucracy poorly equipped to manage the complexity of troubled families' lives.

More on Child Welfare Reform....