How a Broken Foster Care System Fuels Crime, Homelessness and the Addiction Crisis in Blue Cities

Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care was a National Book Award finalist. Drawing on the life stories of several foster children, author Claudia Rowe, a long-time journalist and now an editorial writer at the Seattle Times, exposes the chilling truth: the nation's foster care system is a "major gear" driving mass homelessness and the incarceration crisis in American cities.  She shares shocking statistics—including studies that found up to 59 percent of youth who grew up in foster care have been incarcerated by age 26—and outlines how the system's structural failures lead to such devastating outcomes. 

Rowe joins us on this episode of BCB to share the story of this broken system through the eyes of the former foster care kids who lived it. As we discuss the profound social implications of this systemic failure, she argues for a fundamental transformation of how the state sees and supports those children in its care, grounded in insights gleaned from modern brain science.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

About Blue City Blues: 

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  
 America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. 
Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?

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Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

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