Street Spirit December 2005

To Punish the Poor

By Janny Castillo

“The welfare system in the United States is increasingly casting a broad net that gathers poor families into the criminal system.” Opening words in the Women of Color Resource Center, Working Paper Series entitled To Punish the Poor: Criminalizing Trends in the Welfare System by Kaaryn Gustafson.

Kaaryn Gustafson described the government’s systematic successful attempts of criminalizing poor women of color using the welfare system. “Women on welfare have long been penalized for the sins of being poor, for declining (for whatever reasons) to join male-headed households through civil marriage, and for bearing children outside marriage.” -Kaaryn Gustafson. The criminalization occurs in layers. Black and Hispanic women take up more than 70% of the families currently on welfare. This has a ripple effect as policy that negatively affects welfare recipients has a negative impact on poor women of color.

Trying to Make Ends Meet

The grant amount per family is ridiculously lower than the poverty level set by the United States. The 2005 Federal Health and Human Services Poverty Guidelines for a family of three is $16,090. The Alameda County cash grant amount for a family of three is approximately $723 a month which totals to $8,676 a year.  Supplementing the grant by part time work only leads to cuts in the amount. Working single mothers often can’t find affordable childcare so extra money that employment creates disappears in child care and transportation costs. Making ends meet becomes an illusion replaced by being able to survive on a daily basis. Welfare mothers have to make difficult decisions that some pay heavily for.

Cracking down on welfare fraud is a priority for counties across the states. Women in Alameda County are prosecuted, heavily fined and thrown in jail.

Debra, is a single mother who raised two boys on welfare. Every day was a struggle to pay the rent and take care of transportation, food and medical costs. She places tremendous value on education; for over 10 years she volunteered almost daily in her children’s school. Hundreds of youth in three Oakland schools respect, adore her and call her mom. She understands the hardships that confront Oakland’s youth and she is quick to wrap her arms around kids who are hurting and angry. She encourages and helps them choose the path away from drugs and violence that are prevalent in their communities.

About 9 years ago; the county welfare department called and told her she needed to speak to an investigator. She was interrogated for over an hour. “He talked to me like I was a criminal. He told me that I had not reported the income on an $8 an hour part time job I had for two months. He said I owed the county thousands of dollars. I told him I thought I had reported it, that it was a misunderstanding that I was just trying to make ends meet.”

The investigator told Debra she needed to go to the police department to get fingerprinted. He also told her she would be allowed to go home. “When I went to the Oakland jail; I was booked and sent to court. The judge told me they were going to make an example of me by sending me to jail.” She was kept for four days. At that time, Debra had thyroid disease and was on medication, her physical health began to deteriorate. She had to stand in line for hours to get her medication. With her, were fifteen other women also jailed for welfare fraud.  “I felt like I couldn’t breathe in there, I was a lot sicker when I got out.”

The nightmare had just begun. She walked out of jail a felon. Finding and keeping work became increasingly difficult. Before the arrest, the only thing on her record was a speeding ticket. At one point, she was given the position of Parent Liaison at Fremont High School. She had an office and a true desire to bring parents, teachers and students together. The dreams and the job disappeared the day the principal found out about the felony. She was asked to leave immediately. Debra tried to explain her situation to district officials but no one listened to her. She was devastated and humiliated. “I was so hurt; I never set me foot in that school again.”

After that, her health continued to worsen; over a period of 5 years; she had her thyroid removed and three knee surgeries. Now, she is in chronic pain and too ill to work.  Despite the family’s hardships and the way the system has treated her, she is glad that her sons are doing well. Her oldest son lives in Las Vegas, working and going to college. He takes care of his brother during Debra’s recuperation from her surgeries. She still works with youth as much as she can and is not bitter about her experience. “The past is the past. I am grateful for my health and my children.” Debra considers every day a blessing.

The Welfare System is Morally Unfit

The paper also speaks of the Welfare Department implementing and enforcing morality standards that give social workers the right to enter recipient’s homes to look for evidence of men living on the premises.  Welfare offices in the South had midnight raids to enforce “man-in-the-house” rules. Often times if workers found men in the homes, aid payments were suspended and the households were deemed morally unfit and therefore unsuitable for assistance. (To Punish the Poor, page 4)An underlying disastrous effect to this was the impact “man-in-the-house” rules had on intact families. If the father was going through hard times and couldn’t find work, it became clear that his family could survive better without him. “The underlying goals of the rules, however, were to police and punish the sexuality of single mothers, to close off the indirect access to government support of able-bodies men, to winnow the welfare rolls, and to reinforce the idea that families receiving aid were entitled to no more than near-desperate living standards.” (To Punish the Poor, page 4)

Requirements for continued assistance are often unwarranted, cruel and make no sense. Here’s a true story: A young mother, living in a transitional house, 8 months pregnant with her second baby was told she had to go to job interviews to fulfill her TANEF responsibilities. She, of course was turned down repeatedly and considered it a waste of time but she did it to keep her grant, her only source of income. She said TANEF insisted that she dress properly for interviews but offered no assistance with clothing. “They got me all stressed trying to find a job; it could have put me in labor.”

Giving Birth to Criminals

The paragraph which is scariest of all is the one that labels the children born to welfare women as criminals: “..These stereotypes hold not only that black women are to blame for failing to socialize their children and run their communities properly, but also that they are to blame for giving birth to the young men, and increasingly the young women, who often wind up in the criminal justice system. According to these views low income women of color embody and breed criminality.” (To Punish the Poor, page 3)

The welfare system is at fault not the users of the system. With several more months of research, this reporter could have documented hundreds of stories of welfare children who are valid, productive, healthy citizens. I can give you four examples in my children. We were on welfare for over 10 years, and today my oldest daughter, who is not on welfare; is working full time raising her own daughter, my oldest son after receiving an Outward Bound scholarship was chosen to speak at their annual fundraiser in front of 250 donors; my second son maintains a 3.5 grade point average at Berkeley High School Academic Choice program and my 12 year old is a happy, middle-school student who made all-star this year.

Logic would demand that extreme poverty, lack of opportunity, an inadequate public educational system and an absence of hope is what pushes our communities’ children into a life of crime. It’s the mothers, like Debra that make the difference. They move courageously and painfully through these obstacles; pulling their children through to higher heights, free from extreme poverty and dead ends.

The Women of Color Resource Center was founded in 1990. Its members are committed to organizing and educating women of color across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, class, sexual orientation, physical ability and age. If you like a copy of the paper, please call 510 444-2700. Their website is www.coloredgirls.org.

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