Criminalizing Poverty
Published July 16, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Or so it can feel when interacting with case workers to apply for public assistance.
Barbara Ehrenreich has another whopper editorial this past week about the real safety net in the United States: poor Americans and their friends and families, often poor themselves, taking care of one another. I am pretty easily outraged when I read the news, but rarely do I feel weepy after I read something. This op-ed just makes me feel like crying. If you're de facto treated like a criminal in order to apply for cash assistance, would you show up at the welfare office or maybe just turn to your mom, neighbor or best friend? No surprise, then, that welfare reform has effectively stopped 60% of eligible Americans from collecting the temporary cash assistance to which they're entitled.
Consider the following:
Nationally, according to Kaaryn Gustafson, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut Law School, “applying for welfare is a lot like being booked by the police.” There may be a mug shot, fingerprinting and long interrogations as to one’s children’s paternity. The ostensible goal is to prevent welfare fraud, but the psychological impact is to turn poverty itself into a kind of crime.
compared to this:
In her classic study of an African-American community in the late ’60s, the anthropologist Carol Stack found rich networks of reciprocal giving and support, and when I worked at low-wage jobs in the 1990s, I was amazed by the generosity of my co-workers, who offered me food, help with my work and even once a place to stay. Such informal networks — and random acts of kindness — put the official welfare state, with its relentless suspicions and grudging outlays, to shame.
I wonder if we might reconsider our vaunted notions of self-sufficiency for the more realistic "collective sufficiency" that keeps low-income communities knit together despite our best efforts to "deconcentrate" and disperse them out of sight and out of mind.
I highly recommend reading the article to the end, to discover the potential silver lining of this family's particular case, one that surely would leave our conservative foes hopping mad. But hey, welfare-to-work and self-sufficiency and bootstraps and all that, right? Heh. Those pesky community organizers!
(Photo by Tom T)
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Comments (6)
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Author
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Leigh is a PhD candidate in urban planning at MIT, and a consultant on U.S. Gulf Coast recovery. She sits on the Board of the Allston-Brighton Community Development Corporation in Boston, and has worked with non-profits, foundations and local governments on policies and programs aimed at reducing urban poverty and inequality.
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That piece mentions the many details that both policy wonks and anti-welfare types both like to gloss over, ignore or flat out pretend don't REALLY exist. For example, that it's possible to reach a point where doing the right things doesn't help, where there really isn't an easy and quick way to get a job, where one no longer has available and willing to help family and friends, etc. - or even the more basic that people need help for reasons beyond fraud and laziness.
One thing not mentioned was the growing pressure to require mandatory drug tests of aid recipients. That (if passed as many suggest) would literally require those of us who receive any type of aid to repeatedly prove via both planned and unplanned tests that we don't do drugs to remain eligible. What happened to the Constitution? I don't recall anywhere in all my education (which includes a Political Science major with classes in Constitutional Law) or all the reading I've done since, where being poor automatically removed one's Constitutional rights. To the contrary, I can think of examples where states have lost cases for trying to violate peoples' rights simply for being poor - such as during the Great Depression when California tried to have an income minimum for entry to the state and the rule was struck down by the Supreme Court.
Maybe it IS time to bring the US to the appropriate UN agency for violating the human rights of its poor or at the very least to do something like specifically name poverty as a civil rights category. This crapola we do to the poor has GOT to stop. We've got to quit harming our poor. Then we have to come up with a set of truly functional and helpful assistance programs and a "war on poverty" that fights poverty itself, rather than waging a war on those who suffer poverty.
Posted by Danetta Amschler on 07/16/2009 @ 01:28PM PT
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My biggest concern is why is this such a big story when this has been happening for so long in this nation, as if the 80's never existed. Yes, as a nation the economy has brought attention towards concerns that we as a society should have brought forth when times were a lil more stable and would allow the proper attention to being brought towards the problem. Now, everyone is scrammbling to make sense out of an issue that seems to gain strength with every moun.
Posted by Aaron Shaw on 07/16/2009 @ 09:52PM PT
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That's a good point. Sort of reminds me of the old saying about how "first they came for the ___ but I didn't care because I wasn't one of them, then they came or this next group and I still didn't care because I wasn't part of that group either..." Well funny (in the odd sense) how all of a sudden how everyone suddenly gives a rat's rear about how dysfunctional our nation's "safety net" and "assistance programs" are along with how penalizing a lot of the related processes are just because it's happening to THEM now. Thing is, they SHOULD have cared in the first place because this has ALWAYS been something that at least COULD have happened to them or at least to their family or close friends at any time - because poverty don't recognize ethnicity, last names, zip codes, level of education, levels of experience, etc. Poverty is something that can, at least theoretically, strike anyone at any time, which means that it's in EVERYONE'S best interest to have a FUNCTIONAL safety net of WORKING assistance programs that don't presume everyone who needs help is there because they're lazy and trying to commit fraud like Reagan's stereotypical "welfare queen".
Posted by Danetta Amschler on 07/16/2009 @ 10:58PM PT
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See it did not affect the upper middle class. They judged scorned and felt becuse they had their piece of the pie(the whole pie that poverty, homelessness exsisted because of choice. I just wonder now that they are experiencing what alot of us have been experiencing for years how they feel. The concerns were based in greed and many CEO's even today still giving themselves millions of dollars raises. This is a wake up call to put people human rights first over consumerism.
Posted by Mary Ann Thompson on 07/17/2009 @ 10:51AM PT
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If the poor ask for a hand out, 2009 laws are as mean in 3-17 states as MEAN the 1950's mean laws against the poor and homeless. In Ca and FL. people setting down can be charged with a misdemeanor, the ticket written illegibly so the person can not read when to be at court. Notice the "Mean" in the middle of the the crimmal word.
We need a compassionate economy. Such have been called for in the 1930's That workers are paid enough to cover the rent and other basic's were called for by the gathering of Bishops in 1933. Franklin Roosevelt called for what amounts to a decent wage, or a livable wage. This is not a new idea.
Pay the workers the amount of their bills before slicing off profits, was the cry of the Bishops. Because Housing is essential in order to grow as a human being, it Is a God Given Right, a Economical Human Right.
"The pursuit of happinest" mentioned in the US Conistition means, the safety of a home where families and individuals can reach their full potential. We must demand this.
We must also demand that welfare is fairly applied not the arbitary whims of officials, whom the media protects.
Posted by jan Lightfootlane on 07/21/2009 @ 06:33AM PT
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In America, it's OK to give trillions of dollars to excessively greedy large corporations and Wall Street thieves who don't really need it (CORPORATE WELFARE), but it's not OK to give poor people who find themselves in a bad financial situation through no fault of their own a relative pittance that can't buy them bootstraps by which they can pull themselves up. This defies logic and illustrates how the rich and politically privileged manipulate public opinion generating hatred and bigotry against the poor, the homeless, and the disenfranchised in this country.
Louis D. Brandeis said, "You can accurately measured the degree of civilization of a society by the way it treats its weakest members." The crime of poverty says unflattering volumes about America.
Posted by Jeffrey Hill on 07/29/2009 @ 12:26PM PT
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