The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  This is welfare. This is a transaction that has become as hurtful and as hateful as any business done on any drug corner in the city. The process itself leaves each side in utter contempt of the other—givers and takers trapped in their respective roles, unable to create or accomplish anything that lasts much beyond the first of every month.

  We know this, of course. We’ve known it for years now; all the arguments against the welfare state are fixed in our minds. Work has been depreciated; helplessness has become a way of life. Government handout has helped to make the underclass permanent and the middle-class permanently angry. And all of these truths serve to justify the rage, reluctance, and general disgust of anyone who calls himself a taxpayer.

  For those willing to defend the status quo, there are the anecdotal references to lives salvaged by welfare—case histories of young mothers who used the check money wisely, who saved, went to school, and, ultimately, were able to lift themselves up into the working world. These stories are true; they testify to the best intentions of the programs.

  But down on Fayette Street, the alternate truth—the predominant truth—is the maelstrom of check day, with all that government money going to the touts and slingers in a three-or four-or five-day rush. Come the first of the month, much of what the government offers to feed and clothe and shelter its poor goes for vials and gel caps and glassine bags, so that the first week of every month is more than enough to carry a dealer. After the tenth, a slinger could close up shop for the rest of the month and still have more than enough to carry him to check day next. Come the fourth week of any month, there’s little cash on the street; it’s time for any sensible retailer to take his vacation. Because first of the next month, he’ll be back on the street in sixteen-hour shifts.

  Check day’s effect on open-air markets like Mount and Fayette makes clear the economic role of the welfare dollar in the drug culture. To stand on a drug corner and watch mothers and fathers running their Independence Cards up to the bank machines, then racing the cash back to the corners until a third, or a half, or, in some cases, all of the monthly allotment is gone—to see that is to despair of any program in which the government matches desperation with raw dollars. The cash money goes first—the AFDC dollars, the SSI checks, the DALP money—but at the end of the week, the food stamps are being traded for eighty or sixty or fifty cents on the dollar. Regardless of all the noble intent and charitable purpose, the games will be run and the corners will be fed. Far beyond Fayette Street, others can debate welfare reform, or workfare, or job training, but on check day none of it means a thing to people who are scraping and hustling in an altogether different nation. The corners are no longer part of our economy, our culture; the welfare dollar might reasonably be considered as something akin to foreign aid. And be honest here: When we drop a few billion on our favorite Third World dictators, we pretty much expect most of it to be hoarded and stolen and squandered. In the dark corner of our hearts, we regard this as international bribe money, sensing that its purpose is merely to convince smaller countries to do a little more of our bidding. So why, for the sake of argument, should we expect any better result from the dollars sent down to Fayette Street?

  Welfare is a bribe—and a fairly good one at that. For more than two decades it’s been a bribe and only a bribe, stripped of the higher ideals that once accompanied the payoff. Those ideals called for a process by which poor and damaged citizens could be rescued and made whole, but such a process has proven more costly and problematic than anyone initially imagined. So the nation has retreated from that commitment, using check day as a rear guard. The pretense of salvaging human beings has been gradually reduced to a string of elemental transactions: Take this. Shut up. Stay put until next month when there will be more of the same.

  The incredible thing is that such a small investment can purchase so much silence and apathy. On Fayette Street a mother and child will see $280 and another $120 in food stamps each month. A second child might bring $60 more. A Maryland state DALP loan once meant as little as $157 a month to a disabled adult; after the entire program was eliminated from the budget, it meant nothing. As for SSI—that’s the motherlode of $450 a month for those lucky enough to be declared totally disabled by the Social Security Administration. But getting onto the rolls isn’t so easy anymore. In fact, they’re denying almost everybody outright, limiting access to those willing to appeal and then appeal again.

  It’s reasonable to factor in the primary health care provided to women and children by Medicaid, or the food-and-formula vouchers given to poor mothers through the WIC program. There is also the financial aid provided to those willing and able to try their luck in some community college courses. But all told, what we’re spending on the poor constitutes a thin share of what the government spends in total—less than three percent of federal and state spending overall. In the grand scheme of government, all of it added up and compounded with interest is hardly worth complaining about, yet incredibly, we are forever complaining. Absurd as such an expectation is, the belief that all of our handouts will at some point produce viable citizens remains with us; when nothing of the sort comes to pass, we are furious.

  But what we get for our money is not inconsequential. It’s true that, for some, check day brings only the briefest respite from the twenty-four, seven struggle to stay aboard the chemical rollercoaster. Unbridled by constraints imposed by children, or a future, or the barest necessities, there are fiends who will snatch up the check and have it spent before the sun rises on the fourth day of any given month. Fortunately there are also many others who have learned to stretch and squeeze every penny, to somehow keep a rough-and-tumble balance between addiction and responsibility. For the best of them, the government money can last two, maybe three weeks.

  In the aggregate, the best ideas and efforts of the welfare state—AFDC, SSI, DALP, Medicaid—buy us eight, or ten, or twelve days before the damned of the cities have to turn again to capers and hustles and crimes. For a third of the month, the predatory instinct is diverted by money that tumbles from bank machines and check-cashing places. There’s less need to rip and run, less interest in pulling car stereos from dashboards or tearing copper piping from rowhouse basements. For that interval, in fact, the bribery accomplishes what all the police and prisons never can: The corners are fed, the corner regulars preoccupied with the money at hand. There’s still crime, of course—all that money can’t go up to the corner without everyone trying to cheat everyone else—so that on check day, the drug-related assaults and drug-related robberies reach their peak. But in general the government dole assures that most of the dirt stays where we want it to stay, and that a taxpayer’s life in any neighborhood adjacent to Fayette Street is nearly manageable. Ten days are bought and paid for until the checks are spent and the money is siphoned out, and then it’s every man for himself in the search for a blast. But on balance, we have no right to expect more. You get what you pay for in this world, and in the matter of buy-off dollars, we’ve made only the first installment.

  Even so, we’re getting our money’s worth. If we spent any less, it would be throwaway money—not enough for even the pretense of a plan. The money would be on the corners and gone in a few days, and the difference would be made up in the crime rate, with places like West Baltimore reaping a whirlwind of armed robberies and property crimes. But spend any more and you still wouldn’t get more than ten or twelve days out of a monthly check. Among a population accustomed to being shortchanged, diminishing returns would likely take hold. After all, the players manage to get to the end of every month with even less money; a few more dollars would mean nothing but a few more vials.

  On Fayette Street, this is what the government pays for—this and nothing more. After the last thirty years’ experience, it is frankly astonishing that we can still pretend that this response to poverty deserves anything other than cynicism and contempt. Yet to do anything more —anything beyond the bribe itself—remains unthinkable to the nation as a w
hole.

  We’ve spent a respectable treasure in our cities—billions in AFDC checks and food stamps, billions more in HUD vouchers and block development grants—and almost all of it has gone no further than sustaining the urban poor in their nightmare. Apart from the buyoff money, we have rebuilt and restored the housing stock time and again—not because gilding the ghetto solves anything, but because we understand bricks and mortar, and because even on Fayette Street, the grant money allows contractors and subcontractors to grab a little profit. But what might constitute an actual process—the systematic reintegration of the inner city into the nation’s economic fabric—was either stillborn or never conceived. More than bricks and mortar and welfare checks, such an effort would imply a continuing commitment to making places like Fayette Street a legitimate part of the American landscape. It would demand prolonged energy and will and a connectedness between classes and races that no longer exists and may never have existed. It would require, too, the expenditure of billions more than we have ever dreamed of giving to our urban poor. If we want to toss $320 a month at Fran Boyd and her children, or $157 at Curt Davis, we can do it without too much pain. Similarly, we can pay a nonprofit housing corporation forty or fifty thousand dollars to rehab the Dew Drop Inn and be gratified by the tangible, if decidedly temporary, evidence of change.

  But to take a Fran Boyd or a Curt Davis across the chasm, to restore them to the mainstream of the American experience—this is Herculean. To create a process that begins to break down the corner dialectic, to offer a viable and practical argument against the drug economy, would mark a new national beginning. Never mind the years of man hours and piles of money that such an effort demands; the process would have to begin with a national consensus that no longer seems possible. It would require that pure, unbridled capitalism be regarded not as the equivalent of social policy, but as a powerful economic system in need of humane constraint.

  Instead, the debate over welfare reform has been carefully circumscribed to a matter of dollars and cents. There are those willing to acknowledge that restoring the underclass to participation in the nation’s social and economic framework would be an incredible undertaking. But these voices are no longer even a part of the political debate; now, the national discourse, as evidenced by recent welfare reform legislation and the wholesale reduction of the national welfare rolls is centered on the mere act of cutting the handout, or creating welfare-to-work requirements without any awareness of just how unemployable the men and women of Fayette Street have become. The safety net, or the lack of a safety net, for the underclass is now the only issue. Weighted as it is with thirty long years of frustration, the idea that government might have any role in restoring and rehabilitating its poorest citizens has been deconstructed. The poor themselves are now the problem, and, therefore, the argument about reforming the welfare state can be narrowly confined to issues of penalty. It boils down to this:

  We gave you the money.

  You didn’t do shit with it.

  We’re taking the money away.

  It’s come down to blaming the DeAndre McCulloughs and Richard Carters of the world for being born on Fayette Street, for being raised within the new culture of the corner, for failing to see beyond the boundaries of their world, for making ordinary and disastrous choices that were never really choices at all. We blame them for surviving despite themselves, for creating the corners and then taking the corner logic to its inevitable extreme. We’re furious at the drugging and terrified by the shooting and unnerved at the notion that unless something is done, it won’t be contained, that this horror show will creep beyond the rotting cores of cities. We have lost patience with the idea of our own culpability, with the corruptive message that accompanies the bribe. For three decades, we bought them off with the small coinage of charity at the beginning of every month, telling them they were not necessary, that their nation could do without them. Now, with that lesson of helplessness learned and learned well, we feel entitled to say that we can no longer afford the coins.

  That the debate over welfare reform is couched in better language than this is testimony only to the subtlety of politics. It’s one thing to recognize the chasm between Fayette Street and the rest of the social order, to anticipate just how much time, effort, and money will be required to dismantle the culture of the corner and return those trapped there to the mainstream. It’s quite another to tell people who have been systematically stripped of discipline, purpose, and meaning that they have eighteen months, or two years, or even three years to get up off their asses and find a job.

  It won’t work. And when it doesn’t work, there will be even more cause to lose patience, to blame them, to cut more and more from the monthly checks. Soon, the ten or twelve days bought and paid for will be eight, or six, or four. For some, there will be no days at all. And God help us then—particularly those of us living in general proximity to a rust-belt American city. Because the corners are still going to be there and the corner rule dictates that no one will miss his blast because check day is late or gone. Whatever else falls through the cracks, the blast money will still have to be there every day, because blast money is the stuff of desperation and identity. The rational forces of economic theory don’t apply.

  The corners now constitute a world apart, a rock-hard subculture formed in the crucible of lost America. Fayette Street and places like it are no longer accidents of race, or geography, or poverty. By generations, they have become all of those things and more, so that simple, seemingly reasoned changes in government policy or economic priority no longer achieve the intended result—or, in many cases, any result at all. Fayette Street is an ecosystem as complex as any in the natural world, as distinct and separate from the middle-class experience as can be imagined. Just as no right-thinking environmentalist would think of applying the ecology of a mountain stream to a tidewater marsh, so, too, should no politician or ideologue believe that what works elsewhere can or should work in the drug culture.

  Mess with check day and we mess with the food chain; mess with the food chain and the consequences are necessarily profound. From on high, the intent is to end the dole and turn people toward work on the argument that those offered less will squander less. But from the inside, welfare reform doesn’t address itself to the essence of the drug corner. Cut the flow of government dollars, and the capers and dope-fiend moves will become more desperate; the corner violence will intensify and the assault rate will jump and the bleeders will begin washing up at the emergency rooms in waves. And more hustles mean more lockups, which means more cops, judges, lawyers, jail guards, and probation officers. More prisons, too—that’s the ultimate in societal cost, to the tune of an additional thirty thousand dollars or more annually to take hold of a solitary shoplifter or half-dead tout. Ultimately, we’ll feel gratified by demanding more for our dollars, denying the coinage of welfare even as we’re compelled to spend billions more on everything from Medicaid to foster care to boot camps.

  The point is practical, not moral: For the money we throw down the welfare hole, we don’t get miracles; in fact, we get pretty much what a backhanded bribe warrants. But if we tempt ourselves into believing that we’ve done more than we have and deserve more for our trouble, then we will surely find a way to get even less.

  End welfare, or curtail it, or replace it with some crude carrot-and-stick approximation of workfare and the result is unpredictable. What passes for welfare reform will surely provoke some people to lift themselves up and escape the dole. But for the rest, it will likely solve nothing, and make the cities less livable than they already are. When the money dries up on Fayette Street, the corners will reach out and take their share from the next neighborhood over, and the next after that, until a problem that once seemed distant becomes a collision of worlds.

  When things get worse—and they will—we’re likely to tally our losses and assess the damage done and conclude—as we always conclude—that the fault isn’t ours. We’ll continue to justify o
ur limited commitment, to assure ourselves that we did everything we could for these people and somehow they managed to fail us.

  The choice then will be the choice now, just as it was the choice twenty years ago. We can commit to the people of Fayette Street—to the notion that they are our own and that their future is our future—or we can throw the problem back on them, arguing about smaller carrots and bigger sticks. Then as now, we’ll make the worst choice, almost by habit.

  Unless and until we have a change of heart, we should stop complaining. And come the first of the month, we should pay the bribe. To do less is to compound the tragedy; to do more—well, that road is the one never taken because we are moral pretenders to a war on poverty. We have been pretenders for three decades now, ever since the Vietnam War swallowed whole the ideals of the Great Society. To do more than tender the bribe would require empathy, charity, and connectedness, and in thirty years we have summoned up nothing close.

  Empathy demands that we recognize ourselves in the faces at Mount and Fayette, that we ackowledge the addictive impulse as something more than simple lawlessness, that we begin to see the corner as the last refuge of the truly disowned. Charity asks that we no longer begrudge the treasure already lost. And connectedness admits that between their world and ours, the distance, in human terms at least, is never as great as we make it seem.

  Getting near the basement pay phone was no small feat. Getting on it was damned near impossible. But getting a call back was almost beyond imagination. Fran had given the phone number to DeAndre days ago, telling him when to call, trying for that one-hour window each day when she didn’t have meetings or counseling sessions. For three days she’d waited on that call. And for three days, nothing.