There are also enormous hidden costs in our race to incarcerate, costs hidden because they are charged to the ghetto. Keeping half of the young black men in Washington under the supervision of the criminal justice system has devastating consequences. For those actually incarcerated, of course, employment is impossible. One must give up any job one had to go to jail. Most of those on probation or parole are legally allowed to work, but when a criminal record is added to low educational attainment and limited job experience, work proves even harder to come by. Licensing requirements prohibit the formerly incarcerated from some forms of work. Joseph’s House, where I work, cares for homeless men with AIDS. A year ago, the City Council passed a law prohibiting any facility like ours from hiring most people with criminal records—even
after
they have served their time. For such men who, under the best of circumstances, would have difficulty finding work, the criminal justice system adds but one more impediment to any attempt to climb out of poverty. Soon, they just give up looking. In the jargon of sociologists, they are no longer “attached to the labor force,” and so, in a final irony, they are not even counted among the unemployed, effectively lowering the real unemployment rate. If those incarcerated were counted, the overall unemployment rate for black men would increase by about two-thirds. Many states, in a further gesture of exclusion, prohibit felons from voting, temporarily or permanently. Anyone with a felony conviction for a drug offense is now prohibited from receiving a federal loan for education, making college an even more unrealistic dream.
The imprisonment of some violent offenders, of course, provides benefits to the ghetto community in reduced crime, for it must be remembered that poor-on-poor crime is far more common and far more devastating than poor-on-rich crime. But the benefits of imprisonment for less serious crimes, especially low-level drug selling or possession, are far less clear. Imprisonment also deprives children of fathers, women of husbands and partners, and the community of human resources that could provide positive benefits, including the supervision of young people and other elements of informal social control. As more young people grow up having parents and siblings and friends who are incarcerated, jail time comes to be seen as a normal aspect of the life experience, and the deterrent effect of prison is diminished.
The impact on the ghetto community of this vast increase in the incarceration of African Americans has been devastating.
WORKING—AND POOR
A major change in the face of American poverty over the last generation has involved the loss of the sorts of jobs on which less-skilled workers might have once supported themselves and their families. Between 1963 and 2000, the inflation-adjusted average wage of college-educated men has gone from $38,310 to $53,457, a gain of 37 percent. During that same period, the average wage of men who dropped out of high school has
fallen
from $24,717 to $18,953 (despite a booming economy from 1993-2000), a loss of more than 23 percent, and barely enough to raise a family of four to the official poverty line.
37
The wages of low-skilled women are roughly half those of low-skilled men, although because they were so very poorly paid a generation ago, women’s wages have actually risen since 1963. In 2000, for example, the average wage of women who dropped out of high school was $9,996, barely enough to raise a single person—to say nothing of a family—out of poverty.
38
In the same years, non-wage compensation—primarily health insurance and retirement benefits—has declined for all but the highest-paid employees. The less skilled have been especially hard hit. Few of the jobs available to people with little formal education and limited work skills provide benefits, only increasing the desperation of the situation that the statistics on wages already reveal.
Because of the globalization of the economy, there seems to be a decreased demand for less-skilled workers across the country. Workers in the United States now compete directly with workers in underdeveloped countries, and corporations have too often chosen to move less-skilled jobs out of the country. As a result of decreased demand, wages have declined just as the technological skills required by many companies have risen, leaving the ill-educated, technologically untrained poor behind.
The major policy implication of this profound erosion of wages and compensation among less-skilled workers is that we can no longer count on an expanding economy or even near-f employment to bring people out of poverty. During the 1960s, strong economic growth meant a dramatic fall in poverty as the unemployed went back to work and real wages rose. During the 1980s and 1990s, with similarly strong economic growth, the drop in poverty was minimal. Full-time work no longer guarantees escape from poverty, as the recent results of Welfare Reform have so amply demonstrated. The implications of this fact have not yet registered in government policy.
Three
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
“GHETTO-RELATED BEHAVIORS” AS CAUSES OF POVERTY
Poor people can make poor choices and those choices can aggravate poverty. Living in a highly individualistic culture, most of us tend to blame those individual choices when looking for the cause of someone’s poverty. These people still stuck in poverty came from the same social background as
that
one who escaped, we think, so why
shouldn’t
I blame them for not making it out? It’s easy to slide over not only the structural causes of poverty, but also the important ways in which they interact with and often influence individual choices.
Many residents of ghetto neighborhoods continue to work steadily at whatever jobs are available, despite the almost intolerable pressures of their environment. Often they somehow maintain high aspirations and substantial initiative under conditions that should make either unlikely and under which untold numbers of middle-class, affluent people would quickly falter. Most poor people are not addicted to alcohol or other substances; they do not engage in criminal behavior or traffic in drugs. Despite our society’s myths, most of the urban poor are
not
on welfare. They take good care of themselves, their families, and their property. They subscribe to the very values that so many of the rest of us believe are essential: hard work, self-reliance, sacrifice, and respect for others. They are simply poor.
At the same time, there is no denying that one finds in the ghetto disturbingly high rates of unemployment and welfare dependence, addiction and lack of motivation, drug trafficking and other criminal activity. These behaviors seem to be so self-reinforcing that observers have talked of a ghetto “underclass,” a group of people whose behavior is virtually incorrigible. The implication is that neither they nor their children have any hope of escaping poverty. It is tempting to look at their behaviors, shrug, and mutter to ourselves, “Well, no wonder they’re poor!”
But where do these “ghetto-related behaviors” (as sociologist William Julius Wilson has called them) come from? They are hardly inherent in the black condition, as the first century after Emancipation showed, for during those hundred years of hardship, they were no more prevalent in black communities than elsewhere. (Even single-parenthood, always higher among African Americans than European Americans, was only at 17 percent in 1950, less than the current rate of single-parenthood among whites.) Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, however, forces beyond the control of individual African Americans led to high rates of joblessness, loss of social organization in the community, a collapse of public education and medical care in the ghetto, and little abatement of discrimination and racism. In this context, ghetto-related behaviors can be seen as understandable responses, some of which may in certain areas be evolving into cultural patterns.
1
These responses perpetuate and aggravate the poverty of the urban poor in a vicious cycle that currently shows few signs of abating.
SINGLE-PARENTHOOD: FAMILIES ON HALF A POVERTY INCOME
An increasing proportion of poor people (especially children) live in households headed by a single woman. Single-parenthood is profoundly associated with poverty. While less than 10 percent of married-couple families live below the poverty line, more than two-thirds of families headed by never-married women (of any race or ethnicity) are poor.
2
Fully half of all families headed by a mother of any race or ethnicity who has never been married have incomes of less than $10,000,
3
an astonishing statistic.
The rate of single parenthood among inner-city black families has grown alarmingly in the last forty years. In Chicago’s ghetto areas, for instance, more than five out of six parents aged between 18 and 44 are single.
4
Nationally, more than two-thirds of African Americans’ babies are now born to single mothers.
5
Women head over half of all black families, and half of them have never been married.
6
We are witnessing the “feminization of poverty.”
Single parenthood clearly contributes to poverty. Most obviously, single parenthood means that there is only one breadwinner in the family, and she must care for the children, as well as work. Despite gains in the last several decades, jobs traditionally held by women still pay less than jobs usually held by men. Furthermore, single parenthood among African-American women (but
not
among white women) is associated with lower levels of education, which means even poorer-paying jobs.
For the single parent, childcare becomes an overwhelming issue. Although costs vary greatly depending upon quality of care, the Children’s Defense Fund reports that the average cost for a one-year-old in an urban day-care center is over $5,750 per year in almost two-thirds of the cities surveyed.
7
Families with incomes below the poverty line who paid for childcare spend 23 percent of their income doing so; even such families that get help paying for childcare from relatives or subsidies spend an average of 21 percent of their earnings.
8
(Under welfare reform, families with incomes below and just above the poverty level are supposed to receive government assistance, but nationally only about one in eight eligible children receive such help.)
9
Even with the best childcare, of course, working parents are vulnerable to childhood emergencies that require them to miss work, and poor single mothers cannot afford the best childcare. These mothers become “less reliable” employees, making getting and holding a job yet more problematic.
What about the other parent? Meaningful financial child support is highly unlikely. Less than half of poor single mothers have ever received a child support award in court, and the figure falls to less than a fourth for never-married mothers.
10
Furthermore, only about half of poor single mothers who do get a court award ever see a single payment. Of those few who do receive support, average payment is less than $2,000 per year for all children.
11
For mothers receiving cash public assistance under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), the cash assistance program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1996, there is a strong incentive not to report whatever minimal income may be given by the child’s father. While rules now vary from state to state, most states have stuck with the previous rule from AFDC: after the first fifty dollars a month, any money reported is subtracted from the public assistance check.
12
There is considerable evidence that many single fathers in the ghetto do not disappear from their children’s lives and may take an active part in some aspects of childrearing, but on the basis of in-depth interviews it appears that the amount of money that fathers offer “under the table” is small indeed, averaging thirty dollars per month.
13
Why is the rate of single-parenthood so high among poor, inner-city African Americans? There is debate about this question and no clear consensus. Although there are some possible factors specific to the black ghetto, society-wide forces have certainly played a major role in this development. In fact, the steadily increasing proportion of births to single mothers (especially to teen mothers), often cited in the media and usually imagined to be largely a black phenomenon, turns out to be largely due to a striking increase of births to single
white
women. From 1980 to 1992, for example, the proportion of births outside of marriage increased among whites by 94 percent, among blacks by only 9 percent.
Social mores have changed considerably. There is now far less stigma attached to having children outside of marriage than there was fifty years ago. Throughout society, social pressures to marry and stay married have decreased dramatically, and divorce rates have soared. Men have felt freer to leave their families.
The extraordinary stresses of ghetto life only multiply the impact of these society-wide factors. Marriage is difficult enough without the problems associated with being poor in America today, so the rate of divorce among the poor is especially high.