Parenting & Family Quote by Charles Foster Bass

Bass’s sentence reads like a committee hearing distilled into a warning label: foster youth don’t just “age out,” they fall off a cliff. The intent is pragmatic and political at once. He’s building a case for intervention by stacking outcomes in a grim rhythm - homelessness, early parenthood, crime, poverty - then twisting the knife with a final detail that complicates the usual moral narrative: they’re not only associated with crime, they’re “frequent targets” of it. That last clause is doing heavy rhetorical work, reframing foster alumni less as public threats and more as people the public has already failed and continues to endanger.

The subtext is an indictment of the transition-to-independence myth that policy loves: the idea that at 18 you can simply flip from institutional oversight to self-sufficiency. Bass is pointing to the structural trapdoor - unstable housing, thin family networks, untreated trauma, spotty education - without naming it explicitly. The list format mimics the way bureaucracies categorize lives into risk factors, which is part of the point: the state can quantify the fallout even as it often underfunds the prevention.

Contextually, this is the language of mid- to late-20th-century American social policy debates, when “personal responsibility” rhetoric was ascendant and lawmakers had to justify care in terms of measurable public cost. By including victimization, Bass signals a more humane frame: support isn’t charity, it’s basic protection. The quote is less a portrait of foster youth than of the policy vacuum waiting for them on the other side of childhood.