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 *“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 *

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.