This American Life

Prisoner of the Heart

adminn — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:53:00 -0400

Twenty-one years ago, Daisy Benson brought a gun to an argument. She says she didn’t mean to shoot, and that may be true, but you bring a gun to an argument, a lot can go wrong. Daisy was convicted of murder, given 15 to life, and sent away to prison, hundreds of miles from home, a small, poor town in Northern California. Seven years later, her family saved up enough to visit. That’s when her daughter Robbin -- at the time, she was in her 20s -- hatched a plan that sounded so crazy, when Daisy first told me about it, I thought, this can't be true. But then I tracked Robbin down. And they both remember it starting exactly the same way...

Listen to the radio segment using the player above, or download it as an MP3 file at the bottom of this page.

Mr. Successful

adminn — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 01:52:00 -0400

Anyone who's ever been to a wedding knows not everybody can stand up in front of a roomful of people and just talk. Anthony Pico discovered by accident, at 15, that he has a gift for doing that. He's 18 now, and he's become so well known as a public speaker on the subject of foster care, which he knows well, he was appointed to a blue ribbon commission aiming to reform the largest foster care system in the country, the one in California, Anthony's home state. In addition, Anthony still speaks to judges and legislators all over the state, and the country, sometimes every week. But it's gotten complicated...

Listen to the radio segment using the player above, or download it as an MP3 file at the bottom of this page.

Related Legislation

There's a new bill in Congress that would make 21 the new 18 for kids in foster care, give them a few extra years of housing and support if they need it. A small number of states, and isolated counties, have tried this on their own. They've found that, while foster care is a deeply flawed system, if kids are still in the system at 18, a few extra years seems to get more of them out of their sticky teenage years and into stable adult lives. Read more about the bill here: http://boxer.senate.gov/news/releases/record.cfm?id=275098

Just One Thing Missing

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 03:48:00 -0400

Martha doesn't like to talk about her future anymore. She'd wanted to go to med school, become an OB-gyn. And she's exactly the kind of kid everyone roots for. She grew up in a poor, mostly immigrant neighborhood in East Los Angeles, where most people didn't graduate from high school, and nobody talked about college. But Martha got into UCLA. She couldn't believe it: UCLA.

She majored in chemistry, threw herself into six-hour lab sessions, ran a volunteer organization on campus. But the fact is, she can't become a doctor. She can't work at all in the United States, not legally anyway. She’s an undocumented immigrant; her mother brought her here from Mexico when she was nine. So now she’s a waitress, earning minimum wage, working off the books, and it may be the best job she can hope to get.

A bill called the Dream Act would offer conditional citizenship to those few kids, like Martha, who grow up in the United States and make it to college, or the military. If they get a degree, or finish their service, they become full citizens. Since it was proposed in 2001, the Dream Act has gathered powerful supporters from both the left and the right. But it keeps getting bogged down in immigration politics.

This piece aired as part of the April 7, 2007, edition of "This American Life." It is a radio follow-up to "The Invisibles," an award-winning article about the sad, inspiring, surreal lives of undocumented students at UCLA, and the bipartisan push in Congress to accept these kids -- raised as Americans from a young age -- as citizens.

Listen to the radio segment using the player above, or download it as an MP3 file at the bottom of this page.