Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care
About this book
Claudia Rowe follows lives shaped by removal from family, repeated placements, group homes, schools, courts, and treatment systems. Each institution addresses one immediate crisis while passing the child to the next authority.
The reporting connects individual histories to the foster-care-to-prison pipeline without treating the outcome as automatic. Judges, advocates, psychologists, caregivers, and former foster youth describe choices made under scarce time and weak continuity.
Files often record behavior while losing the loss or survival strategy behind it. Once a young person is classified as difficult, every later response can appear to confirm the label.
Wards of the State is narrative nonfiction about American foster care. It argues for reform through sustained case histories rather than presenting one program as a universal cure.
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Introduction
The question why hovers over every piece of writing I’ve ever done. Dissecting a person’s motivation, especially for acts that appear incomprehensible, drew me into journalism and has powered my work for decades. Why had that man done this horrible thing? Why was this girl that way? What was in their heads? How did they understand themselves? These mysteries were rolling around the back of my mind on a February morning as I watched a pale nineteen-year-old escorted into a Seattle courtroom to be sentenced for murder.
Shortly before that snowy day in 2019, I’d been writing newspaper stories about kids who kept getting suspended from school. “Behavior is a language,” a teacher had told me. Now her remark echoed. This girl in front of me had shot a young man in the head at sixteen years old—what was she trying to say? The handful of stories I’d read about the case portrayed her as utterly without conscience.
I’d written innumerable pieces about kids in trouble with the law and a few about kids who’d killed. But never in thirty years as a reporter had I heard a defense argument like the one this legal team was attempting to make. The girl’s crime, they said, should be blamed on foster care.
America’s child welfare system was part of my beat back in the early 2000s, when more than half a million kids in this country were being raised by strangers paid to house and feed them. But I had not thought much about the effects of this upbringing on a child’s mindset, day-to-day. Conventional wisdom held that any behavior problems displayed by young people in foster care were the result of whatever family traumas had put them on the state’s radar to begin with. Foster care was the net that had saved them. It existed in my mind as a sort of hazy parable about selfless people willing to provide for babies who needed stable homes until they were adopted. Foster care was not something newspapers monitored rigorously, like electoral politics or violent crime. We wrote about it only rarely, as an aberration, when horrific things happened to very young children. Once they were rescued, or buried, the story was over.
But ongoing, behind the curtain of confidentiality that shrouds foster care, kids endured more quotidian harms. The lawyers representing the teenage defendant sitting a few feet from me described her as the product of a failed child welfare system, the outcome of a government bureaucracy so poorly matched to the needs of its clients that thousands leave it in worse shape than when they are taken in. And our taxes pay for this, to the tune of $31.4 billion a year. In that sense, her legal team suggested, the teen facing decades in prison had been failed by all of us.
Though people often think of foster care as a short-term way station for babies born to drug-addicted parents, the fact is that about 40 percent of children under state guardianship are adolescents. These older foster youth, the ones least likely to be adopted, tend to attract far less attention. Before February 2019, that was true for me too.
I had, however, spent a great deal of time looking at juvenile crime. As I examined the case of this waifish teenager and thought back to so many others, I wondered at the enormous number who overlapped with the child welfare system. In 2021, while I was researching this book, two kids who’d fled a group home in Florida spent thirty-five minutes in a shoot-out with police. They’d broken into a neighbor’s house, discovered his cache of guns, and as the officers closed in, began blasting. The fourteen-year-old girl ringleader was sentenced to twenty years. A few weeks earlier, a boy from the same group home had been convicted of manslaughter.
This was the same year that much of America read about sixteenyear-old Ma’Khia Bryant, a foster child shot to death by police in front of the home in Columbus, Ohio, where she’d been living with her younger sister. A cheerful girl with no prior record, Ma’Khia had been swinging a knife at two of the home’s former residents, defending herself after days of their harassment. If she hadn’t been gunned down, Ma’Khia surely would have been arrested. A study of nearly one thousand foster youth in the Midwest found that half left the system with criminal records, and more than 30 percent were imprisoned for violent crime within a year of leaving state care. At least 20 percent of prison inmates nationally are believed to be former foster children.
But why? Would these kids have been incarcerated if they’d never become wards of the state? Or was there something about the system itself that pushed children toward these ends?
The more I probed this question, the more pressing it became. Consider the numbers. About four hundred thousand kids in the U.S. today are growing up with the state as their legal guardian. Every year, upon turning eighteen, about twenty thousand of them “age out,” many moving straight into homelessness. Yet, because they have been minors up to that point, their lives and the system shaping them remain largely shielded from public scrutiny—to protect children’s privacy, the government says. It also renders them invisible. No obvious indicator identifies the child you see wandering the streets as someone removed from their parents in a police car. Nor that this child may have cycled through the homes of multiple strangers after that. Nor that they may not live in a home at all, but an institution where dinner arrives on a cafeteria tray.
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Growing up this way has consequences. Research shows that foster youth suffer post-traumatic stress at nearly twice the rate of Iraq War veterans. The same nine-year study of foster care “alumni” from the Midwest that noted their frequency of incarceration also found that nearly half dropped out of high school. By their mid-twenties, more than half were living in poverty. Despite truly inspiring stories of individuals who surmount those odds, the pattern shows up in every locale, and it has for decades. In 2019, the National Academies of Sciences affirmed that the experience of foster care causes neurological damage to children’s brains.
The questions became impossible to ignore. Was foster care creating kids we should fear? When the public assumes responsibility for a child, who is to blame if the child fails? Who answers for the system’s results? At present, no federal law makes states liable for crimes committed by a foster kid on the run—that is, while a ward of the state but missing from their assigned placement. The converse is also true: No edict holds states responsible for anything that happens to foster children when they are “missing from care.” The only people held accountable, it seems, are the kids.
For all of these reasons—from its abysmal outcomes, to the lack of accountability for them, to the fact that this system serves poor children almost exclusively—foster care is in the midst of a historic reassessment. Some experts advocate for its total abolition, insisting nearly all problems that lead to the removal of children from their families can be better addressed by connecting parents with mental health counseling, substance abuse treatment, or housing, and allowing them to keep their kids. On the other side are those who point out that this response, almost by definition, will leave some children in jeopardy. In the middle sits a tangle of more than 800 state- and county-run child welfare agencies staffed with low-paid, overburdened caseworkers whipsawed every decade or so by new legislation demanding a more aggressive approach in one direction or the other.
The backdrop for this debate is a brutal history of family separation in America, from auctions of enslaved people to Indian boarding schools to desperate immigrants at the border. On this point, there can be no dispute: The U.S. has repeatedly used the threat of child removal as a tool to control the disenfranchised. Legions of middle class and affluent kids grow up in homes convulsed with addiction, abuse, and neglect. But their families rarely face that risk.
The more I scrutinized the intersection between foster care and the criminal justice system, the clearer it became that there are specific experiences common to foster kids who end up in locked cells. Almost always, they are teenagers who have run from their foster parents or adoptive families. After some time on the street, they inevitably get hungry enough to shoplift or trade sex for shelter, which usually leads to a booking in juvenile detention. Now saddled with a criminal record, they are deemed “unadoptable.” Any child not taken into a permanent family by thirteen is likely to land in a group home, where fights are common and police summoned routinely, which leads to more bookings. Upon turning eighteen—or in some cases twenty-one—all foster youth neither adopted nor reunited with their families “age out” and are cut from the government system that has paid for their shelter, food, and clothing, to be cast abruptly into the world with minimal education and no money.
I began to wonder if foster care wasn’t a crucible hidden in plain sight. I began to ask whether its failures might be an under-acknowledged factor driving mass homelessness, drug addiction, and property crimes, a major gear powering America’s incarceration complex, pumping out kids so ill-equipped to function as adults that locked cells became the most logical outcome.
To test these ideas, I interviewed dozens of current and former foster youth. Most had spent at least a few nights homeless, hungry, or behind bars. How did they view their lives, their choices? How did they feel about the foster parents who had reared them and the government workers overseeing those placements? In the thousands of pages of research I read on foster care, its clients, the kids, appeared only as onesentence pull-quotes, if at all. Mostly, they were numbers. I wanted to understand the experience through their eyes: What did it feel like to be a kid on the run? Did they think anything could have led them to a different place? Exactly how had their broken adoptions, group homes, and aging out connected them with crime? And since these patterns were widely known—at least to those working in the system—was anyone, anywhere, doing something about them?
The people whose stories populate Wards of the State helped me to answer those questions. They ranged in age from eighteen to fifty-six when I began this project, representing more than four decades of American foster care and every region of the country. One had recently been sleeping on the New York City subways. Another was serving a life sentence in Washington state. A third was selling blood plasma to keep her cell phone service on in Houston. Others have become influential successes, ascending to positions in the justice system or navigating the halls of power in Washington, DC. Connected by a web of foster parents, social workers, judges, lawyers, activists, and state officials, each is a complex character with a survival story to tell. But every one of them carries a ghost inside. All believe foster care permanently twisted the trajectory of their lives.
Together, they form a portrait of a population that exists mostly below our radar, until it explodes into view.
CHAPTER 1
Under Question
SEATTLE, 2016
The gunfire cracked sharp and bright as a camera flash. But as she stumbled down the hill with High Price’s gun in her hand, Maryanne didn’t see anyone peering out from an apartment window. The street where she ran, past the back of the Holly Park development, was still so new it had no sidewalk, and the road was slick with February frost. Maryanne wore no coat, just a pink hoodie zipped tight around her narrow torso. She wouldn’t notice the cold until much later. She could feel her feet thudding on the crumbly pavement but heard no sound. She tripped, pitched forward, kept running.
It worried her the way the gunshot kept ringing in her head, keening so high she couldn’t hear the cars hissing past on the thoroughfare below. Maybe the blast had blown out her eardrums. A prickly panic clawed up her arms at the memory of High Price’s head. It lolled backward and to the right when she shot him, blood draining straight down onto an orange t-shirt in the car’s rear footwell. Not a drop on his tracksuit. Everything about that guy looked clean. No food wrappers or cigarette butts in his black Jaguar. Maryanne could hardly believe it when he’d let her drive it the night before. She was only six weeks past her sixteenth birthday. She’d barely ever held a gun, but High Price had let her play with his. He let her put the pistol in her purse and pose with it, snapping selfies. She loved the way the black metal looked next to her white skin, and she’d puckered up, kissing the air as she mugged for her phone. It was exciting—she couldn’t deny it. And she got a ton of likes for those pictures on Facebook.
They’d had fun driving around. He was younger than a lot of guys she’d been with, just twenty-one. But he was obviously doing well, with his Jag and his gun and that stack of C-notes in his lap. He’d been so nice at first, asking about her life and all the places she slept. He said he knew how weird things could get. Maybe he really did know. He’d grown up in some war camp in Africa, and he told her his real name, Emmanuel Gondo, which sure sounded African. He said his father had died over there.
So Maryanne told him about all the foster families, and the bedbugs in her sister’s apartment building, and the Friends of Youth shelter, and running from the cops. She told him about sleeping on buses and riding down the interstate to Oregon hidden in the trunk of a Cadillac. She even told him about the Atkinses and how they’d un-adopted her, dumped her back into the pool of unwanted kids like a Christmas puppy grown too big to be cute. Later, she wondered why she’d told him all that stuff. She never talked much about the Atkinses to other people.
Maryanne had been resigned to what was coming when High Price pulled into a clearing at the top of the hill and started touching her thighs. Such a fucking bore. Men were so predictable, the way they’d act all nice before making their stupid moves—grabbing at you, sitting in the bathroom while you were trying to take a shower, reaching over without asking when you were just trying to get warm. A bubble of panic rose in her stomach as High Price stroked her legs. But, really, what could she say? She didn’t even know where she was, only that from the hill where they’d parked you could see past the city to the suburbs and all the way out to the snowy peaks of the Cascade Mountains fifty miles east. Was that where the Atkinses had taken her snowboarding?
Maryanne had lived all over western Washington. She knew every bus route and transit station inside and around Seattle. But she’d never seen this elbow-shaped patch of dirt where High Price had parked behind a clump of bramble and trees. There weren’t many streets like it now that every sidewalk was clogged with scaffolding and construction cranes. You’d memorize a corner, try to find it a month later, and wander in circles looking at the plywood frames of a dozen new Lego-block houses.
By then, she and High Price had been cruising for hours but the sky was still velvet dark. She kept asking him to take her back to Montrell’s house—didn’t he care that she had a boyfriend?—but he kept refusing. She’d asked him to leave the heat on while they were talking—she was always so cold—but he’d snapped it off, keeping on in his smooth, steady voice about wanting to help her, saying he had a friend she could stay with who would pay her just to hang out. ’Trell talked like that all the time, telling her she could make racks, with her pretty blue eyes and long brown hair. She always told him to fuck off. But High Price made it sound like a legitimate business plan. Maryanne gazed straight ahead, making her eyes blur as he pulled her pants down and shoved himself inside, until the street lights in the distance turned to smears of color. But then he changed, talking shit like she was a bitch, a ho, and she could feel her cold panic turn to hot rage. Afterward, she stared at the red condom he’d used. It lay crumpled in the dirt where he’d tossed it like a candy wrapper. Her stomach roiled. Fuck that guy.
***
Two months later, Maryanne plopped onto a swivel chair in a seventhfloor interview room at Seattle Police Department headquarters.
“What the fuck am I here for?” she said.
She was still bleary-eyed, rousted from sleep by a squadron of marshals who’d barged into Montrell’s bedroom, guns drawn. “Maryanne Atkins! Maryanne Atkins!” they’d screamed. She and ’Trell stumbled to their feet. They’d fallen into bed only two hours before, and now his stuffy apartment was crowded with men in bulletproof vests, shouting her name. “Get on the fucking ground or we will kill you! Get on the fucking ground!” From the floor, she noticed a few of them were wearing cowboy boots. Then she heard another name. “Gondo! Emmanuel Gondo!” Maryanne couldn’t figure out what they were talking about—it could have been so many things—until they yanked her upright, cuffed her hands behind her back, and marched her past the mirror in ’Trell’s room, where she caught a glimpse of her face. It had been seven weeks since the night on Holly Street Hill, and she’d been jumpy every time ’Trell brought her downtown. Once, she’d even seen High Price’s friend staring at her from across the street. She skittered around a corner and hid behind a car. ’Trell kept telling her to shut up and forget about it, which she’d halfway managed to do.
But now she was sitting in a small, airless room at police headquarters with a camera pointed at her face and a lady detective asking stupid questions, like did she want a glass of water.
“No,” said Maryanne.
For nearly an hour they left her alone, spinning back and forth in her swivel chair, making half-circles in space. She leaned forward, put her head down on the desk, and choked out a few desultory sobs. The next minute she sat up, stared into the mirror lining the wall next to the detective’s desk, and began smoothing her eyebrows. She hiked up the hem of her sweatshirt, picked some skin from her bellybutton, then flopped back down onto the swivel chair. She tested its wheels, pushing off the wall to give herself a four-foot ride across the floor. “Wheee!” She whispered, swinging her arms. “Wheee!” She spun one way, then the other. “It’s so boring!” she cried, flinging her head down onto the desk.
Seconds trudged by. Maryanne turned her gaze toward the video camera bolted above the door and with the repetitive rhythm of a cat, set about grooming herself—chewing her cuticles, inspecting them, chewing again. She leaned backward, stretched, and spat out a piece of fingernail. From a room on the other side of the wall, she heard the rumble of voices. The words were muffled, but Maryanne could tell from their cadence that one of them was ’Trell.
“Babe?” she called out. “Is that my boyfriend? I want my boyfriend! Oh my god, let me fix my hair.”
Maryanne clawed at the tangled topknot on her head. “What the fuck am I here for? This is crazy. I don’t want to go to jail. I want my boyfriend! Oh my god, it’s so boring in here. I can’t be in this room!”
Then, an idea.
“Excuse me,” Maryanne said, addressing herself to the camera above the door. “I have to go pee. Hello? Somebody? I gotta go pee.”
Silence for two minutes. Three minutes. Five.
“I will pee on this fucking floor,” Maryanne called out cheerfully.
Immediately, a male officer popped his head inside the door and let her out.
When she returned, Detective Dana Duffy was seated at the modular gray desk to read Maryanne her rights. Anything she said could be used against her in court, the detective explained, and she was entitled to a lawyer. Maryanne could stop answering questions at any time—did she understand all that?
“Mmm-hmmm,” Maryanne said.
“Do you know why you’re here?” the detective asked.
“Because I’m in foster care?” Maryanne buried her chin in the neck of ’Trell’s gray hoodie. She was glad to be wearing something that smelled of him. “I don’t know. They always make me go to court.”
“That’s not why we’re here.” Detective Duffy’s voice was calm, though not warm.
“Okay.”
“We’re here to talk about an incident that happened back in February—ring any bells? Remember Gondo, Emmanuel Gondo? Someone you used to call High Price?”
Maryanne blew her nose on her sleeve.
“Yeah, I know him. That was my friend.”
Duffy continued, matter-of-fact as a high school guidance counselor. She led Maryanne through the night in Gondo’s car, the two of them driving for hours, first with his brother and friends, then alone. She asked about Gondo’s gun, and Maryanne shook her head. No, she’d never touched one in her life. Duffy asked about sex. Gondo had wanted to, tried to, Maryanne said, but she’d refused. He kicked her out of his car for that, so she took the bus back to ’Trell’s house.
“Okay. Did you shoot him?” Duffy asked.
“No! I’ve never—I don’t know how to shoot a gun!” But Maryanne did realize, quite clearly, what was happening. “I need my lawyer,” she said.
Detective Duffy kept probing. She told Maryanne that they’d seen her Facebook posts, the pictures with her and Gondo’s gun. She pulled a photo printout from the stack of papers on her desk and placed it near Maryanne. It showed her in close-up, puckering her lips into a kissy face and pointing a handgun at the camera.
“You’re trying to say that I did this?” Maryanne squealed. “Are you guys trying to say I did this to him?”
“Yeah,” said Duffy softly.
“No! I would never do that. If my life depended on it, I wouldn’t know how to shoot a gun!”
“Just tell us why this happened,” the detective said. “Did you ever have sex with High Price?”
“I don’t see why that even matters.”
“So he never made you have sex with him or anything?” Maryanne shook her head, no. “Okay, well, that’s good,” said Duffy, rising to leave.
“I don’t wanna be blamed for this.”
“Well, you need to keep talking then.”
Maryanne did. She repeated the story about High Price kicking her out of his car, whimpering a bit with her narration.
“Tears aren’t gonna help.”
“I’m not even capable of doing that! I’m not even that kind of person!”
“We’ll let a jury decide,” said Duffy, stepping out of the room.
Alone in the quiet, Maryanne screamed. “’Trell? Montrelllll! Please, somebody, I need my lawyer!” She was pacing now, wailing. “Somebody help me! I wanna kill myself!”
“Maryanne,” said Duffy, opening the door. She spoke stiffly, as if trying to control her temper around an obstreperous child. “You need to be quiet. Sit down and gather yourself.”
“Sorry. I’ve never been in this situation.”
“Well, I should hope not. Is there anything else you want to tell us?”
“No. I think you just figured it all out.”
Alone again, Maryanne shrieked. She walked straight toward the two-way mirror, collapsed down onto the swivel chair again, and began muttering to herself. “I’m such a good person. Why does this stuff have to happen? It has to be God telling me to go back to school. I’m gonna go back to school, God, okay? I promise. As long as you keep me away from jail, I’ll stay in school for my whole life.”
She stood up, holding her crotch, and knocked on the locked door. “Excuse me, if somebody’s listening, I have to go to the bathroom. Oh, my gosh, I gotta take a shit. I’m about to go to the bathroom on the floor, okay? How about that? I got napkins and everything and I don’t care.” She caught a glimpse of herself in the two-way mirror. “What’s going on with my face, though? I got a pimple! And I got a mustache!” She pulled at her cheeks, stretching them, peering at her pores. “I need my mommy. What is my mom gonna think when they put me in jail? If I really didn’t do it, then I can’t get in trouble, so I don’t care.”
She walked a few paces and turned to address the mirror again.
“They need to catch real criminals instead of little girls. Look at me!” she sobbed, unzipping her hoodie. “Look at me! How is this possible—I’m a fucking girl!”
She returned to grooming herself, removed her sneaker and bit off a toenail. Finally, with nothing more to pick at, Maryanne began to sing in a high, bluesy voice, as if crooning to a baby. “I suck,” she whispered, cutting herself off. “I suck.”
She tapped on the locked door once more. An affable detective poked his head inside, called her kiddo, asked what she needed.
“This shouldn’t even be legal to happen.”
“It is legal,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
At 5:23 P.M., after Maryanne had been in the police station well over three hours, the detective asked, “So, did you want to talk to a lawyer?”
***
Maryanne never left confinement again. After she had spoken by phone to a public defender, Detective Duffy returned and told Maryanne to put her hands behind her back for handcuffing. “Like you’re praying,” the detective said.
For the next few weeks, sixteen-year-old Maryanne sat in a jail cell, charged as an adult with first-degree murder. The Regional Justice Center held minors in a separate wing, and Maryanne, as one of only two girls there, was locked in solitary. For her protection, the guards said. For twenty-three hours a day, she sat on a cot, back against the concrete wall. More than once, she caught an eye blinking at her beneath the curtain pulled across the window of her unit. She had no books for distraction, no natural light. She told her lawyer that she wanted to kill herself.
During her first week, two visitors showed up: Maryanne’s father, who looked like he was nodding off; and Tasha Smith, Maryanne’s last foster parent. Talking to Tasha, she was wild-eyed. With her father, impatient. But on the phone to her mother, Maryanne betrayed herself again and again.
“I guess they’re talking about the guy who died—his phone is missing,” Maryanne said during their first conversation. She’d tracked news reports obsessively in the weeks before her arrest. “Obviously, I can’t be the last person who was with him.”
“Yeah, they said his wallet and his phone and gun,” her mother answered in a dreamy voice. She was calling from a bathroom. What a drag that Maryanne had got herself locked up, her mom said. She’d been hoping they could catch a movie.
“Mom!” shrieked Maryanne. “I’m about to miss my summer—maybe next summer too! I don’t know how many summers I’m gonna miss!”
She berated herself for posting pictures of Gondo’s gun on Facebook. She confessed to “freaking out” on the guards when they told her she’d be in jail for two weeks before an arraignment. “That’s so far from now—it’s not fair!” she wailed. Then her voice turned soft, almost pleading. “Think you can come to my court date?”
Maryanne’s mother said she would try. They’d get everything straightened out. Since Maryanne wasn’t the person who’d shot Gondo, there was no need to worry, and surely her lawyers would be able to get the case moved down to juvenile court.
Maryanne sniffled.
“If it comes down to it, if it comes to the point where they really try to charge me with Murder 1, I’m going to have to, like, make up a good story—”
“No,” her mom broke in sharply. “You can’t make up anything. You need to be honest with them.”
“But I don’t want to be charged like twenty years or more for Murder 1! I need to make it shorter!”
“Honey, if you didn’t do it, then you’re going to be fine.”
“I really want to get out of here,” said Maryanne, starting to sob.
“I know it’s hard, but it’s going to be sunny for months and you have your whole life ahead of you—”
“I don’t have my whole life ahead of me, Mom! If they give me twenty years, I’m not going to have no life, no more!”
“Why would you even worry about that?” said Maryanne’s mother, who had spent time in prison and knew the call was being recorded.
“I’m worried about that ’cause it’s possible!” shrieked Maryanne. “If I didn’t have a Facebook, I wouldn’t be in here!”
“Well, yeah. I told you the first time you did that,” her mother chided. “But I don’t get why you’re so worried. You don’t have any reason to be worried if you didn’t do it.”
“I’m only sixteen—they don’t get it! I want to have a whole life! I don’t want to be in jail for years!”
“They do get it,” said her mother.
The following day, Maryanne asked her mom to print pictures of Montrell off Facebook and send them to her as a keepsake. She asked about sentencing ranges for first-degree murder, as her mother Googled for answers.