Claudia Rowe’s new book Wards of the State is a powerful look at the child welfare system across the country with a focus on Washington State. Her main argument is that the system creates “the foster care to prison pipeline”. She’s not wrong. Her basic premise is that foster care is bad for kids due to the impermanence and lack of stable relationships with adults, something that kids need badly as they grow up.
It’s a compelling read. This isn’t true of most things I wind up reading on the policy side. She weaves the argument around the stories of five or six main actors and what happened to them in their childhood, and how it’s affected them throughout their lifetime.
Underlying the humanity of the story are some deep threads of policy, and she gets them right. Full disclosure – I’m mentioned in this book and while I wouldn’t generally prefer being described as someone with an overactive ego and sharp elbows, she’s probably mostly right about both. I also was responsible for the foster care and juvenile rehabilitation systems during the time Claudia was writing this book.
First, what happens to you as a child affects you deeply for the rest of your life. Kaiser-Permanente did a series of studies in the mid-nineties looking at the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and long-term health outcomes. The TL;DR version: childhood trauma causes you to die younger from all kinds of surprising causes, get arrested more, spend more time in prison, be less likely to graduate from college, etc.
Second, relationships with trusted adults matter, and kids can heal from trauma. Her in-state protagonists Maryanne and Art both peg the childhood trauma scale and have terrible experiences in long-term foster care. Despite chronic understaffing at Echo Glen (the juvenile rehabilitation center where she is incarcerated) Maryanne develops trusting and supportive relationships with counselors. These matter and provide some hope for long-term healing.
The young people in this book experience overwhelming trauma in their birth family, and again in their time in foster care, even if they don’t experience direct abuse. Moving from placement to placement, school to school, caseworker to caseworker is a common experience for kids in foster care for a long time. The author’s argument is that this lack of stability and adult connection creates the conditions that leads to the violence some foster children commit. If we want to reduce youth violence and lives it destroys, we need to make the foster care system both less needed and more humane.
The book isn’t completely a screed against the existence of foster care. Claudia quotes Sixto Cancel (a powerful advocate for youth in foster care) explaining that the grim reality is that many kids won’t ever be able to safely return to their birth families. Sixto’s prescription is to lean in to kinship care – placing children that can’t return home safely with relatives. Washington agrees and has close to 60% of children in out-of-home care placed with relatives. She also talks about the horrific racial history of foster care and its use as a weapon to control families of color. Though this isn’t the core story of Claudia’s book, you can’t talk about foster care without talking about race.
To avoid the long-term trauma Claudia so eloquently describes, most analysts agree that we’re typically better off supporting families upstream than removing their children. As a result of deliberate policy choices and national trends, Washington has seen a dramatic decline in the number of children in foster care over the last decade. We now have half the number of kids in out of home care that we did in 2017.
If you’re at all interested in how we address juvenile violence you should read this book.