Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen
Page 16
27 Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2000, 28th edition (Bureau of Justice Statistics), Table 6.1. The Sourcebook can be found at www.albany.edu/sourcebook.
28 International comparisons taken from The Sentencing Project tables found at www.sentencingproject.org/news/usno1.pdf.
29 Currie, Crime and Punishment in America, p. 13.
30 Lotke, Hobbling a Generation.
31 Currie, Crime and Punishment in America, p. 13.
32 Glenda Cooper, “Drug Cases, Sentences Up Sharply Since 1984,” Washington Post, August 20, 2001.
33 Currie, Crime and Punishment in America, p. 77.
34 William Finnegan, Cold New World (New York: Random House, 1999), p. xx.
35 Jonathan P. Caulkins et al., Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentences: Throwing Away the Key or the Taxpayers’ Money? (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1997), pp. xvii-xviii.
36 Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2000, Table 1-1.
37 U.S. Census: Historical CPS Income Tables: Median Income by Educational Attainment, Tables P-16 and P-17. These tables can be found at www.census.gov/income/ftp/histinc/people/p16.lst and www.census.gov/income/ftp/histinc/people/p17.lst.
38 Ibid.
CHAPTER THREE
1 William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 55. On the choice to engage in ghetto-related behaviors, Wilson writes, “This is not to argue that individuals and groups lack the freedom to make their own choices, engage in certain conduct, and develop certain styles and orientations, but it is to say that these decisions and actions occur within a context of constraints and opportunities that are drastically different from those present in middle-class society.”
2 Ibid., p. 92.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 89.
5 Rebecca Blank, It Takes a Nation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 33.
6 Wilson, When Work Disappears, pp. 87-88.
7 “The State of America’s Children,” p. 50.
8 Gina Adams and Monica Rohacek, “Child Care and Welfare Reform,” in Welfare Reform: The Next Act, edited by Alan Weil and Kenneth Finegold (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 2002), p. 122.
9 Ibid., p 46.
10 Blank, It Takes a Nation, p. 44.
11 Ibid.
12 Some states and the District of Columbia are experimenting with “earned income disregards,” allowing single mothers to keep more of such extra income.
13 Blank, It Takes a Nation, p. 45.
14 William Julius Wilson explores this phenomenon, which he calls the “male marriageable-pool index,” in The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). See especially pp. 83-106.
15 Blank, It Takes a Nation, p. 40.
16 Since no baby should be labeled illegitimate, the term’s virtual disappearance from our language should be considered progress.
17 Health, United States, 2001 (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 2001), Table 9, p. 139. This table can be found at www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/hus/tables/2001/01hus009.pdf.
18 Rate calculated by author from data in Census Bureau report Educational Attainment in the United States, March 2000, Table 5a, available at www.census.gov/population/socdemo/education/p20-536/tab05a.txt.
19 Ibid.
20 Geoffrey Canada, Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
21 Currie, Crime and Punishment in America, p. 58.
22 “HIV/AIDS Among African Americans,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. This fact sheet can be found at www.cdc.gov/hiv/pubs/facts/afam.htm.
23 For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 1998 edition of its publication, Trends in the HIV/AIDS Epidemic, points out that “[t]he data suggest that three interrelated issues play a role [in the epidemic]—the continued health disparities between economic classes, our nation’s inability to successfully deal with substance abuse, and the intersection between substance abuse and the epidemic of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.” p. 8.
24 When groups of people—especially children—mix freely, differences in accent and dialect diminish. Black English Vernacular differs substantially from Standard English, indicating a high degree of segregation and isolation.
25 Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, p. 168.
CHAPTER FOUR
1 Historian Michael B. Katz writes, “Welfare has also been deployed to regulate labor markets by manipulating work incentives. In practice, this has meant goading working-class men and women to labor hard for low wages by frightening them with the prospect of a subhuman and stigmatized descent into the ranks of paupers.” In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. xi.
2 Gretchen Rowe, “State TANF Policies as of 1999,” Table II.A.3 (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 2000), p. 74. Also available at newfederalism.urban.org/pdf/Wrd.pdf.
3 Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: “The resilient distinction between social insurance and public assistance reflects the long-standing suspicion of…welfare. There remains…a lurking assumption that many of those who ask for help neither need nor deserve it. By contrast, social insurance is acceptable because, so it is believed, it is earned. With their own wages, workers contribute to funds—supplemented by their employers—that will support them in periods of unemployment or in old age. Even though they may take out far more than they contribute, they can argue that they have paid their way. Equally important, social insurance is popular because its benefits cross class lines. Almost everybody is eligible for social security retirement benefits.” p. 246
4 Ibid. The “bifurcation of welfare into social insurance and public assistance trapped the architects of…Johnson’s Great Society who wanted to wage war on poverty. For it ruled out any serious attempt to redistribute wealth, guarantee incomes, or tamper with the structure of American capitalism.… Unwilling to explain poverty as an inescapable consequence of American political economy, they had two alternatives. One was to place the blame squarely on individuals and to redefine poverty as evidence of moral or intellectual incompetence. The other was to see it as the result of artificial and unjustifiable barriers…inimical to the open and competitive structure of American life. In practice, explanations drifted between both poles.” pp. 259, 263.
5 U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Poverty Tables, Table 2, available at www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/histpov/hstpov2.html.
6 Although partially federally funded, Medicaid is a locally administered program. Not enough funds have been appropriated to cover all who are poor, so each state decides how to allocate those funds. The District of Columbia, for example, gives benefits only to those poor who are completely disabled or the parents of small children.
7 Crime rates are higher among late adolescents and early adults, so the Baby Boomer bulge would normally have led to higher crime rates.
8 Wilson, When Work Disappears, p. 49.
9 In one notorious example, the Administration actually tried to declare ketchup a vegetable so that program requirements for a certain number of vegetable servings in the diets of school children could be partially met by the ketchup provided. Fortunately, public reaction short-circuited the attempt.
10 Cushing Dolbeare, Changing Priorities: The Federal Budget and Housing Assistance, 1976-2006 (Washington, D.C.: National Low-Income Housing Coalition, 2001), Table 4. This table is available at www.nlihc.org/pubs/appendixbtable4.htm.
11 Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).
12 Barbara Vobejda and Judith Havemann, “Welfare Clients Already Work Off the Books,” Washington Post, November 3, 1997.
13 AFDC, of course, was not available to adults without children, and most states had, by this time, eliminated general assistance to these people, too.
14 Social Security Administration, Welfare Reform SSI Childh
ood Disability Factsheet 1997.
15 Tommy Thompson, “A Considered Opinion: Welfare’s Next Step,” in The Brookings Report on Welfare 19:3(Summer 2001): 2.
16 Wisconsin Works (W-2) Program, Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau Audit Summary, April 2001, available at www.legis.state.wi.us/lab/Reports/01-7tear.htm.
17 Zoë Neuberger, States are Already Cutting Child Care and TANF-Funded Programs, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, May 16, 2002. This report can be found at www.cbpp.org/5-16-02wel.htm.
18 Urban Institute, Single-Parent Earnings Monitor, July 2001, available at www.urban.org/pdfs/SPEM_1.pdf.
19 Pamela Loprest, “Making the Transition from Welfare to Work,” in Welfare Reform: The Next Act, edited by Alan Weil and Kenneth Finegold (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 2002), p. 20.
20 Dan Bloom and Don Winstead, Sanctions and Welfare Reform, Brookings Policy Brief #12, January 2002, p. 3, available at www.brookings.edu/wrb/publications/pb/pb12.pdf.
21 Pamela Loprest and Sheila Zedlewski, “Current and Former Welfare Recipients: How Do They Differ?,” Discussion Paper 99-17 (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 1999), Table 2.
22 Andres Cherlin et al., “Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study,” in Johns Hopkins University Policy Brief 01-1, p. 5.
23 Jocelyn Guyer et al., “Millions of Mothers Lack Health Insurance Coverage,” Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, D.C.: 2001, available at www.cbpp.org/5-10-01health.pdf.
24 Sheila Zedlewski and Amelia Gruber, “Former Welfare Families and the Food Stamp Program: The Exodus Continues,” Urban Institute Policy Paper B-33 (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 2001), Figure 2. This article is available at www.urban.org.
25 Jocelyn Guyer, “Health Care after Welfare: An Update of Findings from State-Level Leaver Studies,” Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, D.C.: 2000, available at www.cbpp.org/8-16-00wel.htm.
26 “The State of America’s Children,” p. 46.
27 Adams and Rohacek, “Child Care and Welfare Reform,” in Welfare Reform, edited by Weil and Finegold, p 122.
28 Adams and Rohacek, “Child Care and Welfare Reform,” in Welfare Reform, edited by Weil and Finegold, p. xxi.
29 While the actual formula is very complex, the basic process is that Social Security produces an average, indexed (adjusting for inflation over the lifetime of the recipient) monthly income over thirty-five years of work. Currently, a retiree will receive as his or her Social Security benefit 90 percent of the first $561 of that average, indexed, monthly income, 32 percent of the amount between $561 and $3,381, and 15 percent of the amount more than $3,381.
CHAPTER FIVE
1 All dollar amounts are approximations based on actual figures in Finnish marks; they fluctuate, of course, according to the exchange rate.
2 A single mother with one child would, therefore, receive $265 a month for that child ($100 basic payment, $125 from the child’s father, and $40 single-parent compensation. For two children, she would be paid $535 a month in family support payments alone.
3 A single mother with one child under the age of three and another between three and seven would, therefore, receive $660 a month for staying home and taking care of the children. Adding family support to home-child care support, she would receive government support of $1,220 a month.
4 Finland follows the international standard for computing the poverty line at half the median income. United States poverty levels would generally be higher if we used this standard.
5 Buying work tools, additional childcare needs, moving expenses, or funeral expenses are examples of special needs.
6 If an unemployed person refuses an appropriate job offer, for example, this support can be reduced by 20 percent for several months. If that person refuses another job in the same time period, the support can be reduced 40 percent. The reductions last only several months, however, at which point the person is given another chance.
CHAPTER SIX
1 David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, The National Health Program Chartbook, Physicians for a National Health Program, Chicago, 1992, p. 145. In each of nine local and national polls, more than 60 percent favored tax-financed health insurance. See USA Today/Harris Poll, USA Today, November 23, 1998, and Al Hunt, “NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 1998.
2 Physicians for a National Health Program has proposed a plan very similar to McDermott’s bill. The details of such a plan can be obtained from PNHP at 332 South Michigan, Suite 500, Chicago, IL 60604, or from their Web site at www.pnhp.org.
3 When large corporations decide for their own reasons (such as corporate mergers) to lay off tens of thousands of workers, those lost jobs are considered an unfortunate but necessary price of higher efficiency in business, and few within the corporate world argue against the logic of the lost jobs. That is the way, we are told, the economy evolves to become stronger. A much better case can be made that the evolution to universal health insurance would strengthen our nation considerably.
4 Since President Bill Clinton’s unsuccessful attempt to reform health care at the beginning of his first term (which because of intense political opposition did not include a single-payer plan among the alternatives), the issue has gradually disappeared from the political radar screen.
5 Al Hunt, “NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 1998.
6 According to Ida Hellender at Physicians for a National Health Program, these are the most recent general polls.
7 Poverty Rate Hits Lowest Level Since 1979 as Unemployment Reaches a 30-Year Low, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, D.C., 2000, available at www.cbpp.org/9-26-00pov.htm.
8 Cushing Dolbeare, Changing Priorities: The Federal Budget and Housing Assistance, 1976-2006 (Washington, D.C.: National Low-Income Housing Coalition, 2001), p. 9, available at www.nlihc.org/pubs/changingpriorities.pdf.
9 Robert Greenstein and Isaac Shapiro, New Research Findings on the Effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit, a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities study: “A series of studies…[has] consistently found that the EITC has substantial positive effects in inducing single parents to go to work. One of the most important of these studies finds that the proportion of single mothers who are in the labor force rose sharply between 1984 and 1996 and that the EITC expansions instituted during this period are responsible for more than half of this increase.” The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is located at 820 First St. NE, Suite 510, Washington, D.C. 20002. Its Web site is www.cbpp.org, from which the entire report (along with much other useful information) can be downloaded.
Copyright © 2002 by David Hilfiker
Foreword copyright © 2002 Marian Wright Edelman
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