Your Lot and Parcel
Your Lot and Parcel
The Most Promising Reform to Foster Care
By the time Maryanne was 16 years old, she had been arrested for murder. In and out of foster and adoptive homes since age 10, she had run away, been trafficked and assaulted, and finally pointed a gun at the latest man to take her into his car. She pulled the trigger and fled. But with no family to turn to and few dependable friends, it did not take long for the police to catch up with her.
In court, the defense blamed neither traffickers, nor Maryanne, but Washington state itself—or rather, its foster care system, which parents thousands of children every year. The courts did not listen to that argument, but the award-winning journalist Claudia Rowe did.
Washington state is not alone, of course. Each year, hundreds of thousands of children grow up in America’s $30 billion foster care system, only to leave and enter its prisons, where a quarter of all inmates are former foster youth.
Weaving Maryanne’s story with those of five other foster kids across the country—including an 18-year-old sleeping on the New York City subways; a gangbanger-turned graduate student; and a foster child who is now a policy advisor to the White House—Rowe paints a visceral survival narrative showing exactly where, when, and how the system channels children into locked cells. Balanced with accounts from psychologists, advocates, judges, and foster parents, Wards of the State paves a road to reform by pulling back the curtain on our country’s longstanding foster care-to-prison pipeline and the searing realities faced by kids who may be sitting in classrooms next to your own children.
She is the author of "Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care."