Jacobson, commissioner of probation. ATD places kids in a small school like setting during the day and offers them schooling, individual and group therapy, and field trips. If a child does not show up one day, a social worker will try to find him. But rather than sending him upstate to prison, the judge orders him into Family Ties, the most remarkable offshoot of family preservation yet. Run out of the city's Department of Juvenile Justice, Family Ties gives convicted juvenile delinquents and their families eight weeks of the usual litany: cognitive restructuring, behavioral modification, anger management, and rational emotive therapy.
Then the Family Ties worker recommends a sentence usually probation to the judge. If the original idea of family preservation—that six to eight weeks of intensive counseling and material aid could cure child abuse and neglect—seems fanciful at best, the claim that short term therapy can overcome the odd years of lack of socialization that produces juvenile delinquency seems preposterous.
From this point, Johnnie's future is hazy. He may go straight, finish school, and stay out of trouble. But if he doesn't if he ends up homeless or on drugs or HIV-positive or in and out of prison the city will have social services for him at every stage. M any social programs treat as short term crises what are in fact unsustainable ways of life. The city's huge "homelessness prevention" efforts are typical.
Consider a family living in an apartment that costs nearly twice as much as its welfare housing grant. The rent is far in arrears and the landlord is threatening eviction. The mother's social worker advises a trip to the Homeless Prevention Unit in her local welfare office. The obvious thing to do would be to talk to the mother about finding a cheaper apartment.
But the city's welfare agencies seldom do the obvious. After paying the back rent to forestall eviction, the homelessness-prevention worker decides to go for the gold: a "Jiggetts" supplement. Named after a lawsuit filed by homeless advocates, Jiggetts supplements pay the difference between a client's monthly welfare shelter allowance and her actual rent forever.
Brokers and landlords frequently game the system, striking agreements to rent welfare clients apartments well beyond their means, and to forgo a few months' rent, with the understanding that the client will apply for a Jiggetts grant once she faces eviction. The Jiggetts program exudes misguided beneficence.
While the average rent in New York City is, in fact, well above the welfare shelter grant, Jiggetts money anchors indigents to a locale they can't afford, instead of leaving them to migrate to places with lower costs of living or better job prospects, as the poor have traditionally done.
Further, tenants often face eviction because of personal irresponsibility, such as a drug habit that consumes the rent money. Propping them up only abets their underlying problem. I f homelessness prevention fails, more social services beckon. Thanks to court cases that gave the homeless the unconditional right to emergency shelter on demand, the city now operates the nation's largest, most expensive shelter system.
Homeless families, as distinct from homeless single individuals, get the most elaborate services. Visit, for example, the Westside Intergenerational Residence, a clean, orderly family shelter in an apartment building on Manhattan's staid West End Avenue. The shelter assigns each resident, almost always a single mother with one child, a social worker and a preventive services worker, who provide entitlement advocacy, counseling, referrals, and parenting-skills training.
The residence requires enrollment in an educational program though self esteem and parenting-skills classes will sometimes suffice and it provides two on-site day-care programs for its mothers. According to administrators, the residence's GED program uses an " unconventional" approach to teaching, emphasizing such activities as journal writing, along with academic subjects.
And if a mother's attendance record is spotty, her social workers, instead of asking her to change, will create a less structured and less demanding program for her. The residence has an informal program to help its mothers write to their political representatives in support of welfare, Medicaid, and child care.
The residence's program isn't unique: students in a city high school for teen mothers recently traveled to Washington, at taxpayer expense, to lobby against welfare cuts. Such a program sends precisely the wrong message to homeless mothers: that more government spending can rebuild their lives. What that spending can do, of course, is preserve the jobs of the social service workers who assist their clients' lobbying efforts.
T he social service imperative not to make moral judgments has a corollary: a social worker's job is to shield clients from the consequences of self- destructive behavior. This philosophy ends up normalizing bad behavior, nowhere more than in the city's response to teen pregnancy. The Board of Education has five high schools for pregnant and "parenting" teens, which supplement the regular curriculum with parenting classes.
Its purpose is to increase the chances that a teen mother will graduate from school by removing the burden of travel to an off-site day care center. The LYFE program epitomizes the way social services can feed the very problems they're supposed to cure.
The program responds to the argument of necessity: ignoring the baby won't make it go away, so now we have to make the best of a bad situation.
This argument is a powerful one. It motivates program after program intended to sop up the mess caused by socially destructive behavior. But the inevitable result is to legitimate that behavior. Day care centers in schools cannot avoid sending the pernicious message that society not only tolerates but expects teens to have babies.
By removing the pain from very bad decisions, such programs simply enable further bad behavior. The LYFE program goes out of its way to insulate teens from the consequences of bearing illegitimate children. Teen mothers don't even have to visit the day care center to feed their babies during the lunch period. This is "compassion" gone mad. The last thing a child needs is a parent who acts like an adolescent.
Yet with an unfailing instinct for doing the wrong thing, the social service establishment has made preserving adolescence a goal of the statewide Teenage Services Act for teen mothers on welfare.
Director Harriet Nieves explains the TASA philosophy: "We try to give them support so that they can have some of the immaturity and giddiness of being a teen, yet still say to them: 'You have a child.
T he numbers shrew how dismally the whole social service effort has flopped. In , 15 percent of poor households in the city were single parent families; in , 25 percent. The dependency rate in the city—defined as the percentage of the total population receiving means-tested public assistance, medical assistance, or Supplemental Security Income—is 19 percent.
In Brooklyn it is 22 percent, in Manhattan close to 30 percent, and in the Bronx 30 percent. The city's vast array of "preventive" services hasn't prevented much. Despite widespread sex education and pregnancy-prevention programs, teen birthrates rose 15 percent between and Drug-abuse prevention programs notwithstanding, 62 percent of preschool children in foster care in were at risk of serious health problems because of prenatal drug exposure, more than double the rate in And countless violence prevention initiatives haven't made inner-city life more civil.
The cost of all this is mind boggling. New York City spends over one fifth of all local social service dollars in the nation. Profoundly undemocratic, New York's social service industry consumes billions of tax dollars but is largely unaccountable to taxpayers. No one even knows exactly how much, in total, government spends on social services in New York City. All existing estimates are incomplete, since they don't include the vast social service operations tucked away in a host of city agencies, from the Board of Education to the Health Department to the Parks Department.
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