Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care

Summary

TOLD THROUGH THE STORIES OF SIX FORMER FOSTER YOUTH, A JOLTING EXPLORATION OF A BROKEN SYSTEM FROM AN AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST

By the time Maryanne was eighteen years old, she was on trial for murder. In and out of foster homes since the fourth grade, she had been trafficked and assaulted, and as a runaway on the streets, she finally pointed a gun at a man and pulled the trigger. She fled, but with no family and few real friends, it didn’t take long for the police to catch up with her.

In court, Maryanne’s defense blamed the foster care system itself. While the state of Washington brushed off that argument, journalist Claudia Rowe decided to look closer.

Wards of the State widens the lens on an eye-opening case that began as a true-crime inquiry and grew into a propulsive exploration of the foster-care-to-prison pipeline. Overseeing nearly half a million children, at a cost of $30 billion a year, the US foster system channels far more kids into locked cells than college classrooms. By conservative estimates, at least 20 percent of state prison inmates are former foster youth, and in some lockups more than half the inmates were raised by the state. Following six foster kids through the courtrooms, group homes, detention halls, and adoption fairs that framed their lives over four decades, Rowe illustrates exactly where, when, and how the system twists children into crime statistics. With perspectives from the psychologists, judges, advocates, and foster parents who witnessed their struggle for survival, Wards of the State pulls back the curtain on a child welfare system that has become an integral part of America’s mass incarceration complex.

“When foster kids get in trouble with the law, why do we hold them responsible but not the state that raised them? In this brilliant, moving, and enraging book, Claudia Rowe calls child welfare to account for the homelessness and prison time that are often the next, and sometimes final, step for foster kids who age out of the system. If you wonder why prisons and shelters are full, this story is a large part of the answer.”—Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help