Hot Sale Wards of the State

The Long Shadow of American Foster Care

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 assailantand pulled the trigger. She fled, but with no family and no real friends, it didnt take long for the police to catch up with her. However, in court, the defense blamed not the traffickers, nor Maryanne, but the state itselfor rather, the foster care system, which turns the state into the parent of hundreds of thousands of children. The state of Washington didnt 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 pip