Claudia Rowe

Wards of the State (eBook, ePUB)

The Long Shadow of American Foster Care

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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 16 years old, she had been arrested for murder. In and out of foster and adoptive homes since age 10, she'd 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 reliable friends, it didn't 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 didn't listen to that argument, but award-winning journalist Claudia Rowe did. Washington state isn't 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 careto- prison pipeline and the searing realities faced by kids who may be sitting in classrooms next to your own children.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Abrams
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. Mai 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781647007485
• Artikelnr.: 72272723

Autorenporträt

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.