Criminalizing Poverty

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)