In California, since November 2000, when voters passed the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, or Proposition 36. Under Prop. 36, people convicted of drug possession are automatically steered to rehab rather than to jail. They still report to a probation officer, and the stick of incarceration hovers over their heads should they rack up three "treatment failures." But the state has effectively shifted its philosophy for dealing with drug offenders, replacing a harshly punitive response with an offer of recovery.

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From the remarkable opening line, "Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses" is like nothing else yet written about the experience of foster care. Billed as a "real-life 'White Oleander,'" Paula McLain's gentle memoir is at once less and much more than the bestselling novel turned Hollywood melodrama. There's no murder, no suicide -- no role for Michelle Pfeiffer or Renée Zellweger -- no drama, in fact, save that of a life unfolding within, and despite, the terrible void of the child welfare system.

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.

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Carter (not her real name), 38, has been in and out of jail throughout her long career as an addict, mostly for violating her probation. She has come out each time -- homeless, jobless and full of good intentions -- and started using again within a matter of weeks or months. This grim routine has left her children trapped in a grueling cycle themselves: bouncing from one home to another; vacillating between faith and despair as their mother makes and breaks promise after promise; and, as they grow up without her, drifting into depression, delinquency and addictions of their own.

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.

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Marie could only watch and reach out in a futile response. A prisoner in county jail, she was forbidden to have contact with her child. It was another four months before finally, upon her release, Marie was able to touch her daughter.

"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.

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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."

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Gaines, a nurse's assistant, had dated a drug user who was part of a crack ring in Mobile, Ala. Several of his associates testified that she had kept crack at her house and delivered it when told -- allegations she denies. She was convicted in federal court solely on the word of witnesses who received sentence reductions in return for their testimony. Smith was a freshman at Hampton University in Virginia when she too made the mistake of dating a drug dealer. He was found murdered before he could be tried and Smith was held responsible for his activities.

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.

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She had filled her cart with $80 worth of groceries for herself and her 4-year-old son, and was standing in line waiting to pay for them. On impulse, she picked up a Bic lighter and slipped it into her pocket. In a lifetime that had already given her plenty to regret, Harris would come to regret this action more than any she had ever taken. It would trigger a chain of events that, three years later, has left her unlikely ever to see her child again.

It's worth mentioning that Harris, 39, is not simply a shoplifter; she is also a drug offender, with a lengthy history of using and selling methamphetamine. It's a history she says drew to a close within the last few years when, in fits and starts, she managed to get herself into a rehab program, secure permanent housing, stop using drugs and stabilize her life.

But Harris didn't do these things quickly or consistently enough; didn't do them on the timetable handed to her by the court that claimed jurisdiction over her son in the wake of her shoplifting arrest. As a result, like a growing number of women caught in the crushing nexus of the criminal justice and child welfare systems, she has seen her parental rights permanently terminated and her child placed for adoption.

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But Natasha wasn't sure just how hopeful she should feel. Like the four women pardoned by Clinton, her mother -- like tens of thousands of other women -- was sentenced to prison as a drug "conspirator," guilty of little more than having a man in her life who was involved with drugs. Clinton's decision to commute the five sentences received relatively little attention. There was no White House press conference and no press release.

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Susana's dad is an inmate at San Quentin State Prison, serving 21 years to life under California's rigid "three strikes" sentencing law. Caught four years ago with stolen property -- and not for the first time -- he's been determined by the court to be of no further value outside of prison. Unfortunately, he is of vital importance to Susana (not her real name).

There are more than 1.5 million men incarcerated in the United States today. The majority of them are fathers. It's a role that may not have been central to their lives before they were arrested -- most did not live with their children, nor with the mothers of those children. Certainly their status as fathers is barely recognized by prison administrators or advocacy groups. Of the limited number of programs that aim to sustain family bonds during incarceration, the great majority are aimed at female prisoners.

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There are 1.5 million children in this country who have lost a parent to jail or prison. The incarceration fever that caught hold in the 1980s and has yet to break (the United States held a record 2 million people behind bars at last count) has left a generation of children in limbo. Many will spend their childhood in foster homes, with aging grandparents or with other relatives or friends. Often -- very often -- they bounce from one short-term caretaker to another.

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She was 7 and he was 4. They had grown up close. Their mother was an alcoholic and a drug user, their father bedridden with emphysema, so they spent most of their time together, running around the apartment complex where they lived, Christine taking care, leading the way.

"My mom didn't know how to take care of us," Christine, now 22, recalls. "He attached himself to me because I showed him that I cared about him.

"He looked up to me and we always used to do things together. He would follow me around and go places with me, and I'd be watching him. I would always buy him toys and candy and tell him that I loved him. I remember playing with him all the time."

That day Christine was at a neighbor's apartment. She saw a police car drive by, and the next thing she knew, her mother was being arrested and Christine was being driven away in a separate car.

"I was so small," says Christine. "I just thought, OK, my mother's getting arrested. She's gonna come back and I'll probably live with my aunt and uncle until my mother gets well.

"But I never did come back."

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The little boy's bio reads like a personals ad but functions more like the prelude to an arranged marriage, since Dustin himself was not involved in its composition. Dustin is one of 1,400 foster children currently listed online in FACES of Adoption, a database maintained by the National Adoption Center (NAC) in Philadelphia and Children Awaiting Parents in Rochester, N.Y. Thirty-seven states run their own "photolisting" sites as well, and the federal government will soon be taking bids for a comprehensive national site. The Clinton administration
has pledged to double the number of adoptions out of foster care by 2002 and
has proclaimed the Internet central to its strategy.

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Officially, Newt's vision never even made it to the drawing board. But as the two-year limits imposed by welfare reform begin to kick in, throwing a number of already struggling families deeper into poverty, a troubling possibility arises: Some families who lose their welfare benefits may also lose their children.

While it is too early to measure definitively, there are some unsettling early signs. In Wisconsin -- which embarked on welfare reform early and avidly -- 5 percent of former welfare recipients, or one in 20, reported being forced to abandon their children. In San Diego County, foster care placements doubled after the new welfare law took effect. When researchers interviewed San Diego families who had become homeless after losing their benefits, 18 percent said their children subsequently went into foster care.

Nationwide, the number of children in foster care is rising, even in a period of overall economic prosperity -- to 520,000 at last count, 20,000 more than a year before.

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Monday night President Clinton copped to a lie that is the reverse of the standard one. As a rule, the guy says he did something with the girl or she did something to him that, in fact, she did not do. He does this to enhance his reputation at the expense of hers. But now the biggest man on campus has admitted that for the last seven months he had flipped the script: "Let's do it and say we didn't."

Either way, the lesson is the same: Sex between a man and a woman may take two in private, but once it gets into the public arena, he's the one who gets to define it -- and to define her. Should this lead to a scandal, the first thing to go is her "credibility," her right to be the one who says what happened, what it meant. "I never had sex with that woman." There was even speculation that she had imagined the whole thing; reporters dug up childhood friends and high school yearbooks in an effort to assess her sanity.

Knowing this, who could begrudge Monica her unwashed dress, both souvenir and proof? Or her scanning TV screens for the blue and gold tie, a signal that it did mean something? It's all she's got now, besides a reputation that will dog her all her days.

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"Is it OK to call at this hour?" asks a young, female voice I've never heard before. It's a counselor from the group home where L. has
been for the past two weeks. She's calling to let me know that L. is
"AWOL," the term used by group home staff to describe a resident who
leaves without permission.

I've known L. for two years, since she was 14, when she wandered
into the youth newspaper I edit and sat down at a computer. Abandoned by
her mother, L. had lived with her great-grandmother until she was 11, when
the state took charge of her
care. After more than 20 foster and group-home placements in three years,
L. had, by the time I met her, decided she was better off on her own, and
was staying with one friend after another -- part of the uncounted, indoor
homeless. When an argument with her stepfather -- back in town briefly
along with her mother -- turned violent, L. found herself swept back into the
system, sent to juvenile hall and then to this group home.

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The new film "187" -- about a dedicated high school science teacher
pushed over the edge by the unrelenting viciousness of his students -- warns
not so much of individual youthful villains (although it has its share of
those) as of a looming, inchoate mass of adolescent evil. Again and again,
the camera hovers over teeming masses of faceless, hooded teens, utterly
indistinguishable as they lumber menacingly towards us.

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But these promising statistics aren't enough to slow the powerful
cultural momentum toward creating a new class of untouchables: our
children. I'm not talking about "negative stereotypes" -- we've been
portraying teenagers as dumb brutes ever since John Hughes passed the torch
to Larry Clark. The morality tale currently in vogue is a warning to
adults who might still harbor illusions about "reaching" these wayward
youth: Don't get too close. If they don't slit your throat, they'll steal
your soul, and turn you into one of them.

The new film "187" -- about a dedicated high school science teacher
pushed over the edge by the unrelenting viciousness of his students -- warns
not so much of individual youthful villains (although it has its share of
those) as of a looming, inchoate mass of adolescent evil. Again and again,
the camera hovers over teeming masses of faceless, hooded teens, utterly
indistinguishable as they lumber menacingly towards us.

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Subtitled "A Year in the Violent World of Girl Gangsters," "8 Ball Chicks" falls within the booming genre of the inner-city travelogue: rental-car journeys into and out of American ghettos. The format has some intrinsic problems -- do we really believe that poor Americans inhabit an entirely separate "world"? -- but, at its best, lets us hear voices excluded from most mainstream accounts of urban life. And with violent crime rates multiplying for adolescent females even as they fall for males, Sikes has picked an important topic at the right moment.

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