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Wards of the State
The Long Shadow of American Foster Care
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Told through the stories of eight former foster youth, a jolting exploration of a broken system from an award-winning journalist
Through the stories of eight former foster kids, Claudia Rowe illustrates exactly where, when, and how the system is failing the children that it parents. With accounts from psychologists to advocates to 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.
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 and 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.
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 Claudia 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, Claudia Rowe illustrates exactly where, when, and how the system is failing the children that it parents. With accounts from psychologists to advocates to 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.
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 and 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.
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 Claudia 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.
Praise for Wards of the State
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 to Help
About the Author
Claudia Rowe has been writing about the hallways where kids and government clash for 25 years. Her reporting on racially skewed school discipline for The Seattle Times helped to change education laws in Washington State, and her coverage of Latino youth gangs was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Claudia has also written for the New York Times and Mother Jones. She was recently hired as a columnist focused on foster care, juvenile justice, and public education at the online news site Crosscut, where her work is seen by nearly 1 million viewers a month. She received the Washington State Book Award for her true crime memoir The Spider and the Fly, and published the successful Amazon Original Story Time Out in 2018.
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