Bøger af Claudia Rowe

Told through the stories of eight former foster youth, a jolting exploration of a broken system from an award-winning journalistBy the time Maryanne was 19 years old, she was on trial for murder. After having been in and out of the foster homes for nearly a decade, she was trafficked, assaulted, and ultimately pointed a gun at her assailant-and pulled the trigger. She fled, but with no family and no real friends, it didn't take long for the police to catch up with her. However, in court, the defense blamed not the traffickers, nor Maryanne, but the state itself-or rather, the foster care system, which turns the state into the parent of hundreds of thousands of children. The state of Washington didn't listen, but Claudia Rowe did. Wards of the State by journalist and author Claudia Rowe widens an eye-opening case from a true-crime lens to an exploration of the foster care-to-prison pipeline. The system is broken--hundreds of thousands of children every year leave America's $30 billion dollar foster care system and enter its prisons, where in some cases, 75 percent of inmates are former foster kids. Through the stories of eight former foster kids, Rowe illustrates exactly where, when, and how the system is failing the children that it parents. With accounts from psychologists to advocates to court room judges to the former foster children themselves, Wards of the State paves a road to reform by pulling back the curtain on the heartbreaking realities faced by children in a system that fails its most vulnerable youth.

Poughkeepsie, New York, 1998.Eight women had gone missing over the past two years and few were looking for them. The police had a lead?Kendall Francois, a large, awkward African American man that detectives had largely written off because he didn't fit the familiar serial killer stereotypes. One evening, Francois shook the region to its core by confessing to a prosecutor that he had eight bodies stored in his home. The town became consumed with a desire to understand how this man could have committed such brazen crimes. Claudia Rowe, a young reporter living in Poughkeepsie, wanted to understand too, with a desperation that stunned her. Over nearly five years and through a series of letters, phone calls, and visits that consumed her life, Rowe engaged with a killer in a dizzying conversation about cruelty, compassion, and control. A search for the origins of the darkest parts of human nature, a beautifully written tale of a reporter's relationship with her subject, a coming-of-age story that forces a deep reckoning with ourselves, a sociological dissection of class, race and crime, The Spider and the Fly is a multifaceted reading experience that will chill you to the bone.