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.

Seattle author Claudia Rowe has ideas on how to fix this problem, and she wrote a book about it. 

In Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, Claudia Rowe paints a visceral survival narrative showing exactly where, when, and how the system channels children into locked cells.