The state of welfare: crises and challenges.

• Date: 22 March 2004
• Author: Platt, Tony
• Published date: 22 March 2004
• Author: Platt, Tony

Crises

I WAS TRAINED IN CRIMINOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY AT U.C. BERKELEY IN THE MID-1960s, and started off my career at the University of Chicago in 1966 before becoming a very junior professor at Berkeley in the extraordinary fall semester of 1968. If you are a lefty in his mid-20s who came of age after World War II, as I did, it was a liberating moment to feel, aibeit illusory, a part of an emerging majority, no need to lurk in the shadows anymore. My young adult years were vibrant, hopeful, and fully committed, in part because teaching praxis made sense. But being this high made it difficult to envision the letdown.

Eight years later, in 1976, out of work, with little prospect of a job in California, I was offered a position at Sacramento State University in social work. I am very grateful to Jesse McClure, then Dean, and the faculty for putting their necks on the block and taking a chance on me. After all, I had lost my job at Berkeley in the political purges of the New Left, was informally blacklisted as a troublemaker, and, worse, I wasn't a social worker. During my job interview in Sacramento, one faculty member politely asked if I would be willing to return to school and get my MSW. "I've read The Child Savers," another asked me, "and want to know why somebody so critical of Jane Addams would want to teach in social work?" Meanwhile, the head of the Criminal Justice Department confided in the university president that I was a liability, given my hefty FBI file.

So, as you can imagine, it was a surprise to me--and no doubt to you--when I got the job. I was assigned to teach social work and what was euphemistically called "corrections," which at that time was a special area in our social work program. Ten years later, I was burned out on radical criminology. It became depressing teaching only critique without a visionary alternative. A fall from utopia is rupturing, and always an unexpected event: by the mid-1980s, rehabilitation was passe, law and order ruled, and there was little space for progressive social workers in the growing prison industry and hard-line policies of the Nixon era. My students soured on my cynicism, and so did I.

I shifted to teaching policy, history, and multiculturalism--issues where there was still political space for activism. Even though Bill Clinton had helped to demolish the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and campaigned for the death penalty and the "end of welfare as we have known it," there was a glimmer of hope in Maya Angelou's call at his inauguration to "Lift up your eyes/Upon this day breaking for you./Give birth again/To the dream." (1)

But if you were teaching social work in 1993, the dream quickly became a nightmare. Under Clinton, as we all know, the welfare rolls were gutted by the millions, workfare was reinvigorated with a vengeance, women on welfare became subjected to morality tests not required of the beneficiaries of middle-class entitlements, and out-of-work men--whose unemployment insurance had run out--were in effect told to seek out job training and mental health services in jail. (2)

Bad turned to worse with the Bush presidency. With born-again, fundamentalist, right-wingers as his welfare advisors--Marvin Olasky, John Dilulio, John Ashcroft, and James Towey--the administration has begun to make eligibility even more stringent, increase work requirements, and make it easier to get welfare grants to nonprofit organizations that intermingle human services with religious proselytizing and discriminate against employees on the basis of sexual...