McLain is a small child, the middle of three sisters living with their parents in Fresno, Calif., when her family embarks on what will be their last collective outing. A lyrical account of a trip to the drive-in — “everything was monsters and stars in the Morse-code night” — bleeds into disaster when McLain’s father decides to go back after the movie to rob the ticket window. He is promptly arrested and jailed.

Not long after, McLain’s mother heads out to the movies again, with a boyfriend, and never comes back. The girls’ paternal grandmother holds on to them for a few months, until their father is released and returns to retrieve them, only to hand them over to the state.

McLain enters foster care with a childish optimism she manages to maintain through multiple placements and serial disappointments: “Up ahead somewhere was a family, a mother, a place not to wait, but to stay.”

Instead, she gets the elderly, crotchety Spinozas, who pitch the girls out when their grandson falsely accuses McLain’s sister of stealing change from a jelly jar.

“If there’s anything odder than being introduced to your new family of complete strangers, I don’t know what that might be,” McLain observes. Her next home is a stifling place where the girls are locked out when they go outside to play and the furniture is triple-wrapped in plastic to prevent them from coming into contact with the upholstery. Mrs. Clapp, their foster mother, addresses their bed-wetting by feeding them a “dry dinner” and denying them water until the following day. McLain dreams of fountains and sneaks into the bathroom in the middle of the night to suck bath water from used washrags.

One of the book’s most striking qualities is its conspicuous lack of drama. The most extreme moments — episodes of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of various foster parents — are simply woven into the narrative, dulled by dailiness. When Mr. Clapp begins pulling the 5-year-old McLain into his armchair and forcing her hand into his underwear, it feels less like a startling breach than a stop on a continuum of isolation and confusion.

When, after two years of abuse, McLain tells Mrs. Clapp what her husband has been doing, she is met with silence. The following day, her social worker appears at school to take the sisters to meet their next new family — a childless young couple who lavish their ready-made daughters with gifts and affection, until they tire of the effort and pack them back up again.

As McLain travels from one household to the next, that family “up ahead somewhere” never materializes. She never feels loved, never “real.” Her story unfolds like a grim reversal of “The Velveteen Rabbit,” in which a child, through lack of love, comes to feel less and less human and more and more a toy, a prop in other people’s domestic dramas.

The McLains land finally at the Lindberghs’ rundown country home outside Fresno, where they will stay for the next 10 years. Hilde is a chilly German war bride who does inexplicable things like hiding McLain’s gym shorts under the kitchen sink, and periodically beating her with a broomstick. Bub is a more complex figure. He gives the girls affectionate nicknames, buys them ponies and takes them fishing; he also, as they hit puberty, begins to tickle them “a little too long.” On McLain’s 14th birthday, he takes it upon himself to teach the girl he’s raised from age 8 to “kiss like a woman.”

A poet by training, McLain paints the Lindbergh years in dripping detail — from the Lindberghs themselves, with their “pie-plate faces, fingers like Vienna sausages, shoulders biscuity and broad and stooped,” to the “toast-colored grasshoppers sticking to the toast-colored grass” in the fierce heat of a central California summer — evoking the sounds and sights of the house and family that, for better or worse, came the closest of any to feeling they might be hers.

If the description sometimes feels overly lavish, the extravagance serves a function: It is a constant reminder that childhood in foster care is a lived experience, not merely a collection of outcomes and ills. The most striking passages are those that don’t deal directly with the fact of foster care — the pages in which McLain climbs trees with her sisters; fishes for crawdads in a drainage ditch; observes her older sister’s puberty and wants her own “more than world peace” — the days and hours in which, despite everything, she grows up and into herself.

Foster youth often speak of not having had a childhood. If McLain has managed to secure one in the margins of other people’s families, it may well be because, atypically, she had her sisters with her all the way through. Faced with the challenge of finding homes that will take sibling groups, many social services departments resort to splitting them, scattering siblings to separate foster or adoptive homes. Children who have lost their parents go on to lose each other — the only family they had left.

This was not McLain’s experience. “Sometimes I felt like we were all the same person, one nerve, one want,” she writes of Penny and Teresa, the sisters who were her only constant. Other times, the sisters feel so estranged that they must sneak looks at hidden diaries to learn each other’s secrets. Adolescence tests their bond as each retreats into her own room to blast Bryan Adams or Duran Duran on a boombox, or disappears with a boyfriend who is the new center of the universe. It doesn’t matter. Together, they manage to envision a future beyond that prescribed for them as wards of the state, to feel “the pure good weight of our possible selves, of everything we could and surely would make happen.”

When they age out of foster care they move in together and weather the crises of early adulthood. “We hugged like people who had saved each other,” McLain recalls, after Teresa crashes her car and McLain finds her stumbling, bloodied, down the side of the road, “which was true. Had always been true.”

McLain’s graceful and deceptively simple memoir is also unprecedented. A few works of reportage — Jennifer Toth’s “Orphans of the Living,” Nina Bernstein’s beautifully reported “The Lost Children of Wilder” — have attempted to depict the foster care experience through the eyes of those who lived it, but none come close to the immediacy and authenticity of McLain’s interior angle. The best-known and biggest-selling first-person account of the foster care experience — Dave Pelzer’s “The Lost Boy” — is so broadly drawn as to be almost cartoonish, peopled with villains and saviors and a much-oppressed protagonist hellbent on “beating the odds.”

Critics of the victimized tone endemic to many recent memoirs will find much to admire here, as will those who mistrust heartwarming stories of scrappy youth overcoming adversity. McLain presents only a sketch of her life after foster care — in which she garners three degrees, including an MFA in poetry; marries, has a child and divorces; and moves to Wisconsin to be near her older sister — but it’s enough to make clear that she sees her childhood neither as something that permanently marred her prospects nor as something over which she valiantly triumphed. She simply lived it, and that is how she tells it.

In November 2000, California voters decided it was time for Tracy Carter, and drug users like her, to try something different. With 61 percent of the vote, they passed Proposition 36, a measure that sends most nonviolent drug offenders into treatment rather than to jail. Two years later, similar initiatives are on the ballot in Ohio and the District of Columbia; several more states have implemented or are working on legislative fixes to tough drug laws; and more than 70 percent of Americans are telling pollsters they’d like to see the government ease up on addicts.

This new climate may be based in pragmatism as much as in compassion. The number of drug offenders in state and federal prisons has increased more than tenfold over the past decade, from 40,000 to nearly 500,000. Incarcerating them costs five billion dollars a year. With a faltering economy draining government coffers — and the war on terrorism competing for dollars formerly reserved for the war on drugs — the price tag for being the world’s largest jailer is starting to look a little steep.

A national shift from incarceration to treatment has the potential to save much more than dollars. More than 8 million of America’s 75 million children have a parent or parents addicted to drugs or alcohol. Parental drug addiction fuels the foster care system; it feeds the juvenile justice system. It affects welfare caseloads, school performance and child health. And parental addiction is self-perpetuating: Up to 70 percent of the children of addicts become addicted to drugs themselves.

Might drug treatment slow the staggering growth in the nation’s foster care system, which has more than doubled in the past 15 years, to over half a million children? Child welfare workers think so. In a 1997 survey by the Child Welfare League, child welfare workers estimated that 67 percent of the parents they dealt with needed treatment, but only 31 percent got it. According to researchers at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA), parental substance abuse is implicated in seven of 10 cases of child abuse and neglect, and is responsible for $10 billion of the $14 billion spent nationally each year on child welfare costs. Nationwide, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, 5 million Americans need drug treatment but only 2 million receive it.

Might treatment stem the tide of juvenile incarceration, which has left 125,000 adolescents behind bars at last count — many of whom have experienced parental drug addiction and incarceration? Might it aid those hardest cases that stymie welfare reformers — the families that lose their benefits to time limits before they manage to find another means of support, many of whom are thought to have drug problems?

If these are questions we are only just beginning to ask; the children of drug-addicted parents are well ahead of us.

In 1999, in researching a report on foster care, I interviewed and surveyed in writing more than 150 current and former foster youth in California and New York. When I asked the question, “What might have kept your family together?” one answer came up over and over: Help with a parent’s drug problem.

“My father was into drugs instead of me,” one teenager wrote. “That’s why I’m in the system.”

“If there wasn’t drugs,” wrote another, “I probably would not know what a system is.”

Our response to these children has to date lacked imagination: We incarcerate addicted parents and place their children in foster care, or leave them to fend for themselves. CASA researchers spent three years scrutinizing state budgets in an effort to figure out the dollar cost of this approach. In 1998, they determined, the states spent $81.3 billion dealing with drug abuse and its consequences, but of each dollar spent, only 4 cents went to prevention and treatment. This imbalance, they found, had a particularly powerful impact on the young: The states spent $5.3 billion addressing cases of child abuse and neglect, 79 percent of which could be traced to parental drug or alcohol abuse.

But as the nation tentatively embarks on a new way of doing things, early indications are promising. In California, the Department of Corrections has reported a 20 percent drop in the number of drug offenders in its custody since Proposition 36 was implemented, and a 10 percent drop in women inmates overall. As the measure is fully implemented, the state Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates, it will save between $100 and $150 million each year in prison costs.

When parents do get treatment, the federal Center for Substance Abuse Treatment has found, kids come home and taxpayers save even more money. In a Florida pilot program, for example, 180 women treated in a single residential program regained custody of 580 children who had previously been in the care of the state.

Charles (not his real name), 18, grew up in Northern California under the old drug enforcement regime. He spent his childhood and adolescence in a series of foster homes and juvenile halls while his crack-addicted mother cycled in and out of jail and prison. When Charles was 16, his mother put herself in rehab. Today, she works at a church and has her own two-bedroom apartment. She hasn’t used drugs in two years.

“It feels good,” says Charles. “That little piece that’s lost — it’s filled the gap there. At first I used to think my mom would be dead, but now I know she’s going to see my kids. She’ll see me graduate from high school, go on to college. I used to pray at night for a new mommy and daddy. Now I’m getting my mama back.”

Does large-scale treatment work as an approach to drug addiction? We don’t know, because we’ve never tried it. But as the casualties of our decades-long war on drugs continue to fill not only our nation’s prisons but its foster homes, group homes and juvenile halls, there’s plenty of evidence that the alternative has failed the children it was meant to serve.

Despite years of disappointment and betrayal, children of addicts will likely tell you they are willing to give their parents another chance. Three decades into a failed war on drugs, voters may finally be ready to do the same.

“It was awful,” she says. “I’ve always had her with me, ever since she was born, and then all of a sudden she was snatched away from me. I know I felt bad, so she must have felt even worse, because she didn’t understand. She must have thought I didn’t want her anymore.”

If sweeping changes in prison visitation rules proposed by the California Department of Corrections (CDC) become law, Marie’s experience is likely to be repeated in state prisons across the state, where prisoners with drug-related convictions will be barred for the first year of their terms from contact visits with anyone, including their children. Often a rule of incarceration in county jails, a ban on contact visits in state prisons, where inmates serve much longer sentences, is rare. And, according to research, it is potentially harmful to inmates and their children.

Decades of research, including at least one study commissioned by the CDC, have concluded that prison inmates do better when they get visits with the ones they love. In terms of both rehabilitation and development, incarcerated parents and their children benefit from time together: The adults are less likely to return to prison; the children do better with emotional adjustment, behavior, even with I.Q. scores.

And the younger the child, the more crucial the contact. “Touch is basic to the nurturing process,” says Dr. Barbara Howard, associate professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and co-director of the Center for Promotion of Child Development Through Primary Care, in Annapolis, Md. “A baby looking through a plate of glass at his incarcerated mother would really be looking at his reflection in the window, not making a connection with the parent at all.”

But a baby looking at himself in a glass partition cannot smuggle drugs to his parents, say California prison officials, who maintain that visitation is a point of transfer for drugs from outside. Under this rationale bonding, regardless of its therapeutic qualities, is an indulgence that prisons can ill afford. In fact, additional changes proposed by the CDC include a rule that would limit kisses between inmates and visitors to five seconds or less, and another that would prohibit fathers in prison from holding children older than 7 on their lap at any time, a step that officials say is aimed at preventing potential molestation.

The new revisions explicitly define visitation as a privilege, not a right, a change that some inmate relatives and advocates claim is meant to unfairly punish inmates rather than strike a blow against drug smuggling. In the process, they say, children may suffer the most.

“It’s beyond insulting,” said Chris Jackson at a March hearing on the proposed changes. She testified that her husband is serving a life sentence at Folsom State Prison on a third-strike burglary conviction. “It’s inhumane. It just punishes the families.”

Adds Donna Wilmott, family advocacy coordinator at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children in San Francisco and herself a former prisoner: “These new regulations criminalize family members, saying that if you care about somebody in prison, you’re suspect. Communication and association are human rights, not privileges.

“The right to a mother’s touch,” she adds, “is beyond fundamental — it’s primal.”

Even President George W. Bush stood up recently for the rights of the children of prisoners, rallying his “armies of compassion” to “help to heal broken families once prisoners are released,” and mentor a group he called, in an address to the NAACP, “the forgotten children [who] should not be punished for the sins of their fathers.” His 2003 budget, he told the audience, includes $25 million for the Mentoring Children of Prisoners Initiative.

The California crackdown on contact visits comes at a time when state prisoners are being held mainly in remote rural areas, and visitation already has dropped off dramatically nationwide due to the inability of inmate relatives to get to their loved ones behind bars. According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, 60 percent of parents in state prison nationwide report being held over 100 miles from home.

In 1978, according to a study by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, only 8 percent of women prisoners had not received a visit from their children. By 1999, when the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducted its own major survey, 54 percent of mothers in state prisons — nearly all of which allow contact visits, reported never having had a visit from their children.

About 200,000 children currently have a parent in a California state prison. It is difficult to determine how old these children are and where they are living; police, courts and prisons are not required to ask those they arrest, sentence and detain about the status of their children. But nationwide, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 58 percent of the 1.5 million children of incarcerated parents are younger than 10 years old. A survey of visitors to three California state facilities found that 55 percent of visiting children were 6 or younger, and 34 percent were 3 or younger.

It is for the very young that touching, being held and listening to a mother’s voice are crucially important to development. “If you’re talking about children under a year of age, your main means of communication is touch,” says Barbara Howard of Johns Hopkins. “Yes, we encourage people to talk to babies and read to babies, but babies don’t really understand what you’re saying. They respond to eye contact and the rhythm of your voice.”

Denise Johnston, M.D., director of the Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents in Pasadena, Calif., conducted a study of county jail visiting environments at 57 facilities and found that, when viewed from a child’s perspective, they were hostile and confusing.

“There are things people normally don’t think about,” says Johnston, a pediatrician. “Cement floors, concrete walls, a steel counter in front of the window, plastic or metal chairs — that seems so irrelevant, but in fact for small children, the amount of the surface of their body that comes into contact with this cold environment is huge compared to adults. There can also be aural distortions, and they often can’t hold the phone correctly because they’re little.”

Johnston recalls one young girl who was so confused by visiting her mother through glass that when her mother called the next day, the girl asked her, “Are you dead, Mommy?”

When her mother reminded her that she had just visited the day before, the child replied, “It’s like TV in there — I’m not sure it’s really you.”

Researchers David Fanshel and E.B. Shinn, authors of the 1978 book “Children in Foster Care,” found that children who regularly visit with parents from whom they are separated show better emotional adjustment, higher I.Q. scores and more improvement in behavior than those who do not. A 1972 study of California prisoners — still the most frequently cited in the field — found that inmates who had regular, ongoing visits were six times less likely to reenter prison during their first year out than those who had no visitors.

These findings, wrote researchers Norman Holt and Donald Miller in “Explorations in Inmate-Family Relations,” a 1972 report from the research division of the California Department of Corrections, suggest that “it might be well to view the inmate’s family as the prime treatment agent and family contacts as a major correctional technique.”

Additional studies, including one conducted by the New York state Department of Correctional Services in the early 1980s, found that family visits improved offender behavior — in prison and after release. A 1985 study by the Massachusetts Department of Corrections concluded that corrections programs that worked to support social bonds, including those to family, decreased recidivism.

Nonetheless, under the proposed regulations for California prisons, contact visits will be denied to all drug offenders, with the exception of those convicted of simple possession. Those convicted of other crimes, including murder, will still be eligible for such visits. The rationale for singling out this population, as spelled out in the CDC’s notice of proposed regulations, is that contact visits may provide drug offenders with a means of “continuing their enterprise.”

The presumption that contact visits facilitate drug smuggling, says CDC spokesperson Russ Heimerich, is based on experience. Of 800 documented drug-related incidents in state prisons last year, he says, 150 involved visitors, accounting for more than half the total amount of drugs coming in. (The rest, he says, enter via packages, mail and “miscellaneous”). While the CDC does not keep track of how many such incidents involve children, he says there is plenty of “anecdotal evidence” of visitors using children to ferry drugs inside — even going so far as to hide drugs in a soiled diaper.

Although drug offenders are not the only ones who receive drugs from visitors, adds Heimerich, “We clamp down as tightly as possible especially on those who are drug offenders because it gives them a way to clean up.”

The CDC figures on contraband come from incident reports rather than a systematic statewide study. But a recent report to the Florida Legislature by the Justice Council Committee on Corrections — which did conduct a statewide study — contained an illuminating finding: While 46 percent of corrections officers surveyed believed that most contraband came from visitors, only 2.5 percent of contraband incidents statewide in fiscal year 1997-1998 were actually attributable to visitors.

“Security measures which are overzealously applied, resulting in only a small improvement in institutional safety and which extract a huge toll in disenfranchising families,” the Florida committee concluded, “must be revisited and reevaluated.”

About 43 percent of women prisoners in California state facilities are drug offenders. The majority of these are single mothers, most of whom are expected to resume caring for their children at the end of their sentences. Withholding contact for a year is likely to make that difficult and crucial reunion even more challenging.

Once an incarcerated parent is released, notes Dr. Howard, “if they don’t have a good relationship with the child, then their ability to take care of the child and have the child be responsive to them will be much diminished. If there were no bodily contact at all, I would expect no relationship at all with young children.”

Alissa went just three months without touching her children, but undoing the damage took much longer. She was in the county jail at the time for credit fraud. The thought of her small boys sitting in plastic chairs shoulder to shoulder with other visitors, gaping at her through the glass, was too much for her — and, she feared, for them — to bear, so, like quite a few other mothers in county jail, she chose to forgo visits altogether.

“Every time I want to hug you,” 6-year-old Dion told his mother when she called home, “I have to go to your picture.”

When Alissa was transferred to a state facility where she could see her children in person, she couldn’t wait to hold them. But the reunion was not as she had imagined it. “When they came the first time it was so sad,” she recalls. “They just looked, and they smiled, but they were afraid to come touch me. I grabbed them and I held them for a long time, and they were really cheesy. They were stiff, like I was a stranger.”

Donna Wilmott’s daughter was 4 years old when Wilmott went to prison for two years on conspiracy charges related to her involvement with the Puerto Rican independence movement. Wilmott spent her first weeks behind bars in solitary confinement. During that time she was permitted only window visits. Her husband came twice a week, but Wilmott asked him not to bring their daughter.

“I was desperate to see her,” Wilmott says, “but I didn’t want to put her through that. If you put a glass barrier between a child and a parent, it’s crazy-making for the children. They feel they can’t get to the person they love — there’s this wall between them that they don’t understand. It’s almost like putting the parent in a box. The message children get is ‘Your mother is so bad you can’t touch her. She’s dangerous.’”

Should the new regulations be enacted, says Wilmott, many women prisoners will likely decide to forgo visits altogether. “Most women I’ve interviewed in the security housing units (high-security prison wings where contact visits are not allowed) said, ‘No, I don’t want my child to see me in here. I can’t do visits like this.’ If drug offenders lose contact visits, I can guarantee there will be people who will just defer the visits. It’s too painful.”

Wilmott was fortunate enough to be transferred to a federal prison that had a special area set up for mother-child visits, with a patio, swings and a carpeted room with books and toys. “A lot of times my daughter would just sit curled up on my lap the whole time,” Wilmott recalls. “It was very reassuring to her, and I think it was one of the reasons she did so well while I was incarcerated. The frequency of our visits, the physical contact and the more relaxed setting really made a difference.”

The debate over prisoners’ rights — which ones they must relinquish as a means of punishment and which ones they retain — is a perennial one. But the issue of which rights, if any, children should retain once their parents are sent to prison is rarely discussed with an eye to law or policy. That children will suffer for their parents’ crimes is virtually inevitable. The question is whether the system that exists to punish the parent should be modified to reduce — or exaggerate — the effect on the child.

“Kids want that motherly touch,” says Dorothy Gaines, who spent six years in federal prison on drug conspiracy charges before President Clinton commuted her sentence last year. “They already feel that you’re distant from them, and when they can’t touch you, it’s not good for them mentally.”

Like Donna Wilmott, Gaines started out in a facility that did not allow contact visits but was ultimately transferred to one that did. “My son wanted to be selfish,” she recalls. “He wanted to get the most hugs, sit on my lap the longest. I remember one visit when my kids set their watches back, thinking that would give them more time to visit.”

According to the CDC’s Russ Heimerich, the department is now considering public comment on the proposed changes and may make revisions before finalizing new regulations. “We’re weighing the benefits of contact with children against the benefits of keeping drug offenders off drugs,” he says.

Dr. Howard suggests that the needs of the prisons, their prisoners and the prisoners’ children could be managed without the suspension of contact visits between parents and young children. “If you’re worried about babies smuggling drugs in, take the diaper off,” she proposes. “Hand the baby to the parent naked and provide a diaper on the inside. Get over it.”

And now there is Treva Throneberry, a woman who spent her 20s traveling from town to town, skipping from identity to identity, always posing as a high school student, until finally, after more than a decade, she was found out and prosecuted for defrauding the state. According to writer Emily White, who profiled Throneberry in the New York Times Magazine, the perennially young scam artist was mysterious and insistent, “fixated on 18 as some kind of Rubicon she could not cross; she didn’t believe in her own existence after that threshold.”

White mentions, without much reflection, that Throneberry grew up in foster care. It could be a meaningless detail, a fact that fails to explain her pathological shifts in identity, her constant lying and deceit. But Throneberry’s many years as a ward of the state might also be the key to her behavior, a significant motivation for her “con.” In fact, in the context of a lifetime in foster care, Throneberry’s tireless charade might be about as mysterious as the ruse of a mother who, in order to claim welfare benefits for her kids, says she’s jobless when she’s actually working at the local McDonald’s.

Like all foster kids, Throneberry knew that at 18 she would be cut off from the system that had constituted her only legal parent. She had, like a lot of her peers, acquired skills she found to be necessary to stay off the street, get fed and get into school. In the same way that it would be ridiculous to suggest that a struggling mother commits welfare fraud because she derives pleasure from impersonating an unemployed person, it may be missing the point to assume that Throneberry was avoiding 18 for perverse thrills and disposable income.

Not many foster kids would engage in or even approve of the kind of lying and manipulation that Throneberry sustained for more than a decade, but more than a few would understand.

“I’ve had to live a life by myself where the only thing I’ve had is my respect and my facade, what I put out in front, whether or not it was me,” says 15-year-old Dee, a veteran of 22 foster and group-home placements in three years. “I’m a victim of not being able to be myself, because being myself might not get me what I need. I’m a victim of learned manipulation, instilled by the system. I’m a victim of not being able to be real sometimes.”

Young adults who faced their 18th birthdays in foster homes or group homes often describe “emancipation” as a frightening event that brings overwhelming anxiety and profound loneliness. Some spend the night of their 18th birthday on the street. Others feel they have no choice but to return to the same parents who abused or neglected them. A smaller number of the estimated 20,000 18-year-olds emancipated each year manage to go on to college, or a job and an apartment, but often find themselves with no family or friends to provide moral support.

“Once you turn 18, it’s like, bam, an explosion,” said one young woman, who wound up living in a friend’s car upon hitting the age of maturity. “People look at you different, like you’re supposed to be a adult, but you’re a kid.”

By posing as a teenager and a runaway, Throneberry was eligible for foster care in each city she chose, thereby gaining access to a home, food on the table and, if she was lucky, someone to tell her “goodnight” before she went to bed. In this context, she looks less like a con artist, and more like a desperate social services Scheherazade, spinning stories to prolong her care. But Throneberry was an emancipated foster child and her behavior amounted to an illegal scam. She was convicted of defrauding the public school and foster care systems of $19,400, and sentenced to three years in a state prison.

Imagine if Throneberry’s actions were duplicated by a young woman with parents. Imagine if that young woman couldn’t make it on her own after high school and ended up moving back home. Then imagine if her parents kicked her out — without so much as a bag lunch — and had her arrested for bilking them for the cost of her care. Most of us would describe that as cruelty. Is it less than cruel when the teenager is a ward of the state?

“I’ve lived in about 10 places since I left the group home. You don’t have any family, no blood family or anything like that, and they just open the door and kick you out,” said Angel, a 22-year-old with a 6-month-old daughter who was wearing out her welcome on friends’ couches, still trying to figure out where to go next, when we met.

The rejection is compounded by what the foster teens understand about their seeming abandonment. However emancipation might be framed — as a graduation, privilege or liberation — there is no concealing from foster teens the real reason for their newfound independence: The money has dried up. “Once I hit that hour of being an adult,” explained one recently emancipated group home resident, “they can’t use me anymore.”

“There’s no reason to put us in the system just to put us out in the street,” said Ida, who at 24 was opening up her own one-bedroom apartment to a constantly shifting array of recently emancipated foster youth. “You get put in the system because of abuse or neglect or rape. Then at 18 you have to go back to the same parents who beat or raped you, because you’re desperate.”

“We don’t have anybody to lean on,” she added. “If the state is supposed to be your parent, normally parents don’t leave you alone at 18.”

Ida offered an analysis that makes Throneberry’s affinity for the regimented, predictable life of high school look perfectly reasonable. “When we’re in the system,” she explains, “we’re trained — what to do, how to do it, what time to do it. Then we’re put out at 18 with no one telling us anything. After emancipation you don’t know what to do. You run out of friends once you run out of money. Getting a job is hard because you’re labeled.

“When you first enter the system,” Ida continues, “every new group home is a gang. You finally get used to them, then you have to learn how to play the staff to get what you need. By the time you turn 18, all you know is to hustle the system. Boys normally go from the system of care to the system of the military or the system of prison. If you’re a girl, you get pregnant to get welfare.”

Some needs — housing, medical care, training in “life skills” — are addressed by the Foster Care Independence Act, which became federal law at the end of 1999. The five-year initiative, paid for with $700 million in federal funds, is meant to boost state Independent Living Programs, which offer training in skills like balancing a checkbook or looking for an apartment and a job. It also allows (but doesn’t require) the states to pay for living expenses for some emancipated foster youth, and to extend Medicaid coverage until age 21 — but to date, these benefits have reached only a fraction of those who need them.

But when asked what they most lacked when they turned 18, emancipated foster kids talk about wanting relationships, about feeling and being alone. Having grown up without family — and often without any stable, permanent relationship in its place — they are painfully aware of the need to be self-reliant. What they long for is someone they can count on.

“It’s not about needing someone to secure me and be there every step of the way,” Angel said, “but just to give me that motivation — ‘You can do it’ — which we never had. To this very day I need that. But it’s hard to find people like that.”

When Throneberry was arrested — having graduated, yet again, from high school and finally exhausted her extended adolescence — she was living in a shelter. But she hadn’t skipped town this time. She had enrolled in college, and actually seemed to be considering acting her age. White speculates that, had Throneberry not been arrested at that point, she might finally have managed to “cross the border into adulthood … and face her fear that she could not exist past 18.”

In fact, the explanation for Throneberry’s relative stability may be less complex: She may simply have been in better shape to run her own life at 30 than she had been at 18. It is a development that many parents consider a fact of life. But there is no room in the foster care system for a gradual transition to adulthood, even though this may be more necessary for foster kids than for children with parents at home.

“I had no identity until I was 25,” said one system veteran who attributes her thwarted development to her successful accommodation to institutional life. “I basically got it through other people. I didn’t think for myself. I didn’t project any goals for myself. I let someone else do it for me. And now I find myself at the age of 30 trying to find out what I really want. Everything seems fresh, because I’m still in a learning stage as a group home kid right now.”

At 21, Phu was a foster-care success story. He had graduated from high school and gone on to San Jose State University, where he worked 20 hours a week to support himself and studied deep into the night to keep up with the rigorous requirements of the engineering department.

His freshman year, Phu slept in his car over Christmas vacation because the dorms were closed and he had nowhere else to go. By his junior year, he was living in an off-campus apartment and driving himself relentlessly, dreaming of his schoolwork during the few hours of sleep he allowed himself each night.

“If I don’t study enough, I don’t learn enough, and I’m gonna be nothing,” he explained. “Maybe if I have a family, if I have my parents, that pressure would be less. You feel like in case something happens, you call your parents to rely on. But for me, if I don’t take care of everything by myself, then who’s gonna take care of me? Here, I do everything by myself. I feel like I’m a family, but only one person — a family to myself.”

Jennifer, 24, a classmate and friend of Phu’s, also was doing well, but she struggled with the powerful stigma that many foster youth say they carry well into adulthood.

“The image people have of former foster youth is that we’re going to become welfare dependents and rip off the state for all this money,” she said. “I’d hear people who didn’t know I was in the system talking about, ‘Oh, those kids in group homes — they’re just gonna grow up and get welfare, and they’re going to be taking my taxpayer money, sitting on their butts eating potato chips and soda.’ I had been told all my life, ‘You’re just going to take, take, take.’ That really hurt me, so I decided no matter what I do, I’m going to be working. And that’s exactly what I did my whole way through college.

“But it’s not as clear-cut as just, ‘Pick yourself up by the bootstraps and move on,’” Jennifer continued, “when you don’t have the supports to do that. People don’t understand that because they think everybody has a family.”

In their panicked competency and subsequent achievements, Jennifer and Phu represent the minority of emancipated kids. A major study in 1991 by Westat Inc., a Maryland-based social services research group, of children raised by the state found that within two and a half to four years of emancipation, 46 percent had not completed high school, 51 percent were unemployed, 25 percent had been homeless for at least one night and 40 percent had been on public assistance or incarcerated.

“There is a lot of emphasis in the system on ‘independent living skills,’ making these kids independent,” observes Joan Merdinger of the College of Social Work at San Jose State University, who has conducted research on emancipated foster youth. “And yet is that a good idea at that age? It sounds so harsh to me as a parent. You want your kids eventually to be independent — of course that’s the goal. But it seems for youth in foster care, the driving force is to make them independent, and part of that is so they’re not in the system.”

In practice, foster kids cease to belong to anyone once they leave the system. But the truth is that the half-million young people under the jurisdiction of the foster care system are by definition — by legal decree — ours. If it were possible for us to accept that, maybe it would be impossible for us to abandon our children at the stroke of 18, ignoring their needs or level of maturity.

If Treva Throneberry were part of our family, it is difficult to imagine that our response to her “scam” would be to put her in prison. But, if Treva Throneberry were part of our family, she might not have been afraid to grow up.

Both women received brutally long mandatory sentences: 24 years for Smith and 20 for Gaines. And both — like more than 50,000 other mothers in state and federal prisons — left behind children who were devastated by their absence.

A few months after the two women met, Gaines was moved to a facility in Florida. On Dec. 22, 2000, President Clinton gave both women executive clemency. While prisoners serving long sentences on similar charges number in the tens of thousands, Smith and Gaines both had lawyers who had relentlessly pushed their cases through the appeals process, and both had received media attention focusing on the injustice of their sentences. They went home the same day — Smith to her parents and her 6-year-old son, and Gaines to her three children and three grandchildren. Smith returned to college. Gaines is looking for work.

The two reconnected soon after their release and began traveling the country speaking against mandatory sentencing and drug conspiracy laws. On a recent stop in San Francisco sponsored by Legal Services for Prisoners with Children and several other organizations, they sat together in the atrium lobby of the Embassy Suites Hotel in South San Francisco.

A slight woman in gray sweats, white Nikes and silver hoop earrings, her hair pulled off her face in a hairband, the 29-year-old Smith still looked like the college freshman she was when she was arrested. In a purple shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, her hair carefully arranged in a braided bun, Gaines also looked younger than her 43 years.

As Smith’s son Armani — a wiry, energetic boy in T-shirt and shorts — raced through the lobby under the supervision of Smith’s parents, who were traveling with her, the two women spoke about their cases, their families and reconnecting with their kids.

How old were your children when you were sentenced?

Gaines: My son, Philip, was 9 years old and my daughters, Chara and Natasha, were 11 and 19. The day I was sentenced I remember them saying, “235 months.” I heard Philip screaming. As the marshals escorted me out, he caught on to the judge’s leg and said, “My father died when I was 2 years old and my mama’s all I got. Don’t take her away.” The marshals had to pry him off the judge. One marshal was crying. She was saying, “I can’t deal with this.”

I called Philip when I got to Danbury and said, “Don’t be so upset about the 20 years that I got, because I see people here that’s got life.” He said, “Ma, that’s life if you’re children. I’m doing life with you.”

Smith: I turned myself in at seven months pregnant. My son Armani was born in Suffolk, Va., in a hospital near the county jail. I thought if I pled guilty I would be allowed to go home to have my son, but that’s not what happened. Directly after Armani was born, two U.S. marshals came in the room and shackled me to the bed.

I spent two days with Armani in the hospital. Then he went home with my parents and I went back to jail. I hadn’t been sentenced yet and I still thought I was gonna go home. At my sentencing hearing, the judge sentenced me to 24 years.

How did your children handle your incarceration?

Smith: Usually during visitation, when it was time to go, Armani would hug me extra hard, but it wouldn’t be that difficult to get him to leave. But there was one time when he just started screaming and crying. He said he wanted to stay with me and he didn’t care where it was. That really broke me down. After that visit I went and laid down and I was going spastic mentally, thinking, How am I gonna get out of this so I can get home and end this misery for him?

Gaines: When Philip would come to see me he would cry and break down. The visits were hard for me, because the adjustment after they left was just terrible. The last year, my son refused to come and see me in prison. He said he couldn’t accept it anymore. The night I was on my way home from prison, I called and he said, “Listen, Ma, I don’t ever want to talk to you on the phone no more. I’ll see you when you get here.”

Dorothy, your daughter Natasha took care of your younger children when you were in prison. What was that like for her?

Gaines: Natasha is smart. She was a straight A student and she was already in college. She had to come out of college and leave her education alone after I went to prison. That bothers me a lot. She went through a lot while I was incarcerated, but she held together and I’m grateful for that. Now she is enrolled in school again. She wants to go on to law school.

How did you learn you had been given executive clemency?

Gaines: That Friday morning I was so depressed, the devil was sinking into me. I called my son to see how his behavior was. He was down because it was coming up Christmas and I was telling him, “Don’t give up yet. The day is not over. You never know what can happen today.” The call waiting buzzed and he answered the other call. It was a lawyer calling to see if he had seen Clinton’s press conference. Then the phone buzzed again. It was my appeal lawyer calling to ask if we had seen the press conference. I said, “Philip, let me get off this phone so I can call my attorney.” I finally reached him, and he said “Dorothy, go pack. You and Kemba are released today.” I dropped the phone and said, “I’m going home! I’m going home!”

Smith: That day I had a visit from my attorney. When I came out of the visiting room, there were a whole bunch of women coming up and congratulating me, telling me I was going home. They had heard a list of clemencies on CSpan and my name was on it. I called home and my parents already knew. My mom was hysterical. I could hear Armani saying “Let me talk to Mommy!” I told him that I would try to make it home that night.

I was happy that I was going home, but it was also very sad and solemn. I had developed good friendships, and I knew that my friends wanted to come home too. Their kids are waiting too.

You each spent more than six years in prison. What has it been like to reconnect with your kids after that kind of separation?

Smith: Armani is an excellent child. My parents did an excellent job with him. As far as our relationship and me being home, I think it was more of a shock for me than for him. For him it was just like, “OK, Mommy, you’re home. Now you do everything.” It was hard for me, and I’m still trying to grasp everything. You have to have a lot of patience. When I got out, Christmas was there and I was trying to put toys together before he got up, and I was thinking, I don’t know what I’m doing.

Gaines: Before I went to prison, I had Philip in Boy Scouts, Little League, football, all that stuff. When I left, all that ceased. He was an A student when I left. Now he’s 16 years old in the eighth grade. He totally lost it when I went to prison. He tried to commit suicide three times. He tried to commit suicide when I got home because he said he just couldn’t believe it. He would walk up and touch me to know I was really there. He’d say, “Mom, you don’t realize, you can’t just walk back into our life and have everything be OK. You’ve been gone for six years.”

Why do you think he tried to kill himself even after you returned?

Gaines: I don’t know if it was too overwhelming for him, or to try to get more attention. I just don’t know. You lose everything by going to prison, that’s another problem. I can’t get public housing because I have a drug record, so there are eight of us living in a house with one bathroom.

I know he’s happy that I’m home, but he lost everything between 9 years old and 16 years old. Those are hard years for boys.

What has it been like day to day since you got out?

Smith: Day to day it’s been me understanding what my full responsibilities are, especially living in a house with my parents when they’d been doing everything. It’s been about understanding that I need to get up at a reasonable time so I can get dressed, get Armani dressed, set out breakfast for him, make sure he has his book bag and his homework straight and take him to school. Then I go to work and go to school, then pick him up and come home and help him with his homework. Then I give him a bath and put him to bed and finish my own homework.

I give my mom a lot of credit. I would call home and she would tell me how she was tired. And I’m like, “Tired from what?” But now I perfectly understand.

Gaines: My kids, both Chara and Philip, had flunked. Philip had got to where he didn’t want to go to school. So I went down to the school and said, “I’m Dorothy Gaines. I’m here to put my kids back in school because I want them to have an education.” When I put them back in school I could see a change in my kids right there.

My son had his pants hanging down and wanted to wear this afro. I said, “The hair is coming off and the pants are coming up.” They knew then that Mama’s back in town.