Told through the stories of eight former foster youth, a jolting exploration of a broken system from an award-winning journalist
By the time Maryanne was 19 years old, she was on trial for murder. After having been in and out of the foster homes for nearly a decade, she was trafficked, assaulted, and ultimately pointed a gun at her assailant—and pulled the trigger. She fled, but with no family and no real friends, it didn’t take long for the police to catch up with her. However, in court, the defense blamed not the traffickers, nor Maryanne, but the state itself––or rather, the foster care system, which turns the state into the parent of hundreds of thousands of children. The state of Washington didn’t listen, but Claudia Rowe did.
Wards of the State by journalist and author Rowe widens an eye-opening case from a true-crime lens to an exploration of the foster-care-to-prison pipeline. The system is broken––hundreds of thousands of children every year leave America’s $30 billion dollar foster care system and enter its prisons, where in some cases, 75 percent of inmates are former foster kids. Through the stories of eight former foster kids, Rowe illustrates exactly where, when, and how the system is failing the children that it parents. With accounts from psychologists to advocates to court room judges to the former foster children themselves, Wards of the State paves a road to reform by pulling back the curtain on the heartbreaking realities faced by children in a system that fails its most vulnerable youth.
Praise
"In Wards of the State, Rowe achieves something truly remarkable—she educates and captivates in equal measure. Through vivid storytelling intertwined with incisive policy analysis, she exposes foster care as the overlooked battlefield of our war on poverty, its systemic failures often dismissed as background noise. With compassion and unflinching prose, Rowe brings to life a system less designed than inherited by happenstance, offering readers an unvarnished view into the lives shaped by its dysfunction. Refusing to excuse the system’s flaws, she invites us to witness the forces behind outcomes that too often seem tragically inevitable. Written with the pace and tension of a gripping crime drama, Wards of the State keeps readers riveted, wondering at every turn: What happens next?"
—David Ambroz, author of A Place Called Home
“An eloquent and compelling call for change."
—Booklist
A powerful indictment of a child welfare system seemingly designed to “pump out” adults “ill-equipped” to flourish.
—Publishers Weekly
"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 Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge t
“An immersive, devastating look at foster children’s lives and a systemic pipeline to homelessness and prison.”
—Seattle Times
"Claudia Rowe's Wards of the State takes the reader on a wrenching yet somehow uplifting journey through the failed landscape of the government's foster care system––wrenching in the mountain of shattered lives she describes, uplifting in the victories of those who battled through it. A moving work of first-rate journalism."
—Graham Rayman, coauthor of Rikers: An Oral History
"Investigative reporter Claudia Rowe's important new book provides a shocking view of the void into which we cast foster children in America. These powerful portraits and dramatic scenes of the lives of foster children she has come to know reverberate with outrage, pain, and fear that readers will also feel. And yet these riveting tales, artfully woven together, provide intense, invaluable, and surprisingly hopeful insights on how to fig this broken system."
—Lise Olsen, author of The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys
