The Underclass

By Ken Auletta

The acclaimed author and New Yorker columnist delves into the core of American poverty in the early 1980s: “Invaluable.” —The Washington Post

First appearing as a three-part series in the New Yorker, Ken Auletta’s The Underclass provides an enlightening look at the lives of addicts, dropouts, ex-convicts, welfare recipients, and individuals experiencing homelessness.

Auletta’s investigation began with a seemingly simple goal: to find out who exactly makes up the poorest of the poor, and to trace the many paths that took them there. As the author follows 250 hardened members of this “underclass,” he focuses on efforts to help them reconstruct their lives and find a functional place in mainstream society. Through the lives of the men and women he encounters, Auletta discovers the complex truths that have made hard-core poverty in America such an intractable problem.

In a nation where poverty and welfare rolls are declining but the underclass persists, the United States is as conflicted as ever about its responsibilities toward all its people. With his empathy, insight, and expert reportage, Auletta’s The Underclass remains as pertinent as ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781504093576

Ken Auletta

Ken Auletta has written the "Annals of Communications" column and profiles for The New Yorker since 1992. He is the author of eleven books, including Three Blind Mice, Greed and Glory on Wall Street, World War 3.0, and Googled. In naming him America's premier media critic, the Columbia Journalism Review said, "No other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as has Auletta." He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.

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Introduction

In Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, Robert Redford and Paul Newman couldn’t shake a coldly efficient posse that chased them up mountains and across rivers. Who are those guys? an exasperated Butch kept asking Sundance.

This book began with a similar query: Who are those folks lurking beyond the bulging crime, welfare, drugs, and the all-too visible rise in anti-social behavior that frightens citizens, leaving them convinced they are being chased? What effect, I wondered, had the Great Society and other government initiatives of the sixties and seventies had on poverty? And why did anti-social behavior grow as government efforts to relieve poverty also grew? Did white or rural poverty differ much from black, Latino, or urban poverty? Was there a distinct hardcore group—an underclass—tucked among the poor? Was race, or class, at the core of it? I did not know the answers. More crucially for a journalist, I did not know many of the questions.

I began somewhat timorously. As a white journalist, I fretted about the racial freight these questions carried. Was there a proper racial etiquette? Were there code words that prevented people from hearing facts? At first, I gingerly evoked the word underclass, fearful that it might be perceived as somehow racist. I worried: would a focus on welfare, crime, mental illness and pathological behavior present a distorted portrait of American poverty?

I started with simple questions: Was there a distinct underclass? If so, who comprised it? How big was it? What were its characteristics? Why had it multiplied? How did it impact society? And what might citizens do to help the underclass, and to protect themselves?

I learned quickly that among students of poverty there was little disagreement that a fairly distinct black and white underclass did exist; that this underclass was set apart not just by income but by attitudes. The underclass tends to feel excluded from society, rejects many values commonly embraced by society, and is often victimized by its own behavior. Ironically, the underclass and the great majority of Americans held mirror images of each other. Each is paranoid about and sees the other in stereotypes.

I then marched into another thicket: Is the underclass the correct phrase to describe this group of Americans? Two objections were hurled at me. Critics said the phrase left an impression that the problem was intractable. This objection would carry more weight if I used the phrase permanent underclass. Besides, I discounted this objection because this book is an affirmation that individuals can be helped. The second objection was that the phrase sounded, well, cold. Most appellations—derelict, drunk, addict—do sound like cold pronouncements, as does another useful shorthand, robber baron. I came to believe the underclass was a more descriptive phrase than a sixties favorite, the hard-core unemployed. Sixteen years later, I still find that too many critics of the phrase use it as an excuse to ignore the problem and the evidence marshalled here.

What I found to be true when reporting this book remains true today, sixteen years after the book first appeared: The gap between Left and Right is often unbridgeable because each usually starts from a different set of assumptions about human nature. The battle goes back at least to Hobbes, and his belief in the natural badness of man, and to Rousseau, and his belief in the natural goodness of man. The Left, as George Orwell once observed, customarily asks, How can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The Right asks, What is the use of changing the system before you have changed human nature?

I first presented the germ of the idea for apiece—Who are those guys?—to New Yorker editor William Shawn in 1979. In his ever polite, judicious way, Shawn said this was a fine idea, one that merited exploration. Then he offered valuable journalistic advice: unless I came up with a vehicle to tell the story of the underclass, he warned, I risked writing what he called a sociological yak piece. I needed a focus, a narrative.

I turned to poverty experts and asked: What’s the most interesting government or private anti-poverty program for the underclass? A surprising chorus said the most significant work with this group of Americans was being undertaken without fanfare by a Manhattan-based non-profit corporation with a clumsy name: the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, or MDRC. This organization, one discovered, blended several attractive elements. Its efforts were targeted at those hardest to reach—long-term welfare recipients, ex-convicts, ex-addicts, delinquent youths. Its efforts were not restricted to a few cities or one or two racial groups, but encompassed rural as well as urban America, whites as well as minorities. It was run by professional managers and academics, was research-oriented, and seemed more interested in discovering what worked rather than what advanced a particular interest group or ideology. Through the MDRC and its various programs around the country, I could encounter the underclass and those who sought to help them; I could gain access to a treasure trove of national data about what worked, what didn’t, and why. The MDRC held one other allure: It had yet to be discovered by other journalists.

MDRC officials agreed to cooperate. When they did, I began wondering: Would underclass enrollees talk freely to a stranger armed with a pad and pencil? Would black and Latino individuals be candid with a white reporter? These doubts soon faded. Over the course of more than two years I found that people who had never before been interviewed except by social workers or cops were eager to talk about their lives, were eager to be understood.

I decided to concentrate on MDRC’s supported-work program. This effort, which was alive at twenty-one locations across the country, offered supportive counseling and training and a year of employment to poorly educated ex-convicts, ex-addicts, long-term welfare recipients, and delinquent youths—the core of the underclass. At some of the twenty-one locations, these supported workers attended training school for seven of their twelve months in the program. The twenty-six trainees enrolled at the Wildcat Skills Training Center in Manhattan on West 37th Street from December 1979 to June 1980 became a narrative spine for this book. Each trainee worked on a supervised private or government job for five months. Then for the rest of the year they attended school. The students—who were grouped in a class called Basic Typing-27 (BT-27, for short)—were exposed not just to typing and English and math but skills that usually go untaught: how to set an alarm clock, speak on a telephone, dress for work, cash a check, say please or thank you, tell the truth about their pasts, write letters, conduct job interviews.

When the twenty-six trainees received their first pay check, I accompanied them on lunch hour to a bank in Manhattan’s Garment Center. As they walked into the crowded bank with long lines snaking to the tellers, it was stunning to look at the horror on so many white, and even black, customer faces. They saw a grim posse of untamed Afros, a phalanx of blacks and Latinos, none in suits, none obediently getting on a line, none smiling. They were clearly frightened. What they didn’t know, and I would not have known had I not accompanied them, was that the enrollees were also frightened. Many had never been in a bank, except perhaps to rob it. They had never cashed or endorsed a check. They didn’t have identification or know their own Social Security number. Unwilling to deal with frustration or too proud to admit vulnerability, many wanted to quit—flee the bank. I got on line with them and they cashed their checks. For me, it was an epiphany.

From day one, I was introduced as a reporter. I attended school for seven months, my notepad or tape recorder visible. The students of BT-27 were eager to have their real names used, some even pleading to see their names in print for the first time. It was my decision to alter their names and the names of all other students in this book. The convention in journalism is to get everything on the record, names included. I got their lives on the record. But I decided that these individuals, unlike public figures, usually did not fully comprehend the implications of saying something was on the record or not for attribution. Over a period of time, many came to trust me, and spoke of crimes and private matters. Although I took notes, in a way my ear became a form of therapy. One other factor played a role in this decision: Wildcat officials agreed to open their files only on condition that I not use real names. I came to believe that by changing the trainees names (but no other details) I best served the twin and sometimes contradictory interests of privacy and truth.

Unavoidably, since there were few public records of their lives, I became dependent on the words of these students. And since exaggeration observes no class boundaries, a word of caution is necessary. It is possible that Leon Harris of BT-27 was jiving me when he boasted of once earning $1,500 to $3,000 a day as a stickup man and of writing sorry notes to the families of those he shot. Was Michael Mathews really liberated from drugs? Or was he striving to impress me? Did Jean Madison really have eight children by the time she was fourteen, and twenty-nine by age thirty-eight? Like any reporter, in the end I had to rely on my sniffer. Mine told me that these individuals were generally pretty straight, a lot straighter than many politicians and businessmen I interview.

I learned much from the twenty-six members of BT-27 and the roughly two hundred and fifty other members of the underclass I interviewed. I learned that real people often don’t conform to the theories of academics, to the dogmas of the political right or left. I learned that neither right nor left-wing precepts can fully explain what has become, perhaps for the first time in American life, an inter-generational underclass. Listen to the voices in this book. You will hear that the proposed economic elixirs—either the supply side nostrums favored by the right or the Marshall Plans of the left—will not by themselves provide a cure for the underclass. You will hear that a tax break or a suspension of government regulations may not be a sufficient incentive for a private employer to relocate in a ghetto or to hire unskilled or belligerent people. You will hear that a guaranteed job may not overcome hostile attitudes, may not lure a fearful person back into the mainstream of society. You will hear that neither exhortations, nor entitlements, offer a magic pill.

I learned that for most of the nearly thirty six million Americans classified as poor in 1997, poverty is not a permanent state. Like earlier immigrant groups, most of these Americans locate the escalator and climb out of poverty after a generation or two. But about a third of those classed as poor—there can be no precise number—do not assimilate. These I call the underclass. Government may reform welfare and impose national workfare requirements, as it did in August of 1996, and we may see welfare caseloads decline by twenty percent and unemployment plunge to a twenty-eight year low, 5.4 percent, as each did in 1998, but the underclass remains. We know the teen birthrate has dragged in this decade, with the steepest decline among blacks, but we don’t know whether this dip is temporary or real. What happens to the teen birthrate when the economy heads south? A larger lens is required. We do know that America’s teen pregnancy rates are twice the rate of most industrialized nations and steeper than they were just two decades ago. And we know that a vibrant economy creates jobs, but it only skims the top third or so off welfare. While the welfare caseload is fluid, with an estimated two-thirds of those enrolled leaving within two years, the majority of those on welfare—three out of four, according to a 1997 national MDRC study—consists of long-term recipients who will receive welfare for at least five years in their lifetime.

Most poor Americans are white, yet most of the twelve million Americans on welfare are not. In years past, The New York Time’s superb poverty reporter, Jason DeParle, wrote on July 27, 1998, there were more white families on welfare than black. But that is no longer the case. The welfare rolls peaked in 1994. By early 1997, blacks, who comprised thirteen percent of the population, accounted for thirty-seven percent of the welfare caseload, while Hispanics, who totaled eleven percent of the population and are now America’s burgeoning poverty statistic, accounted for twenty-two percent. The majority of these cases are families headed by a lone female, usually a high school dropout lacking job skills and, often, frightened of venturing forth into the outside world. A cycle of poverty is perpetuated, for although only five percent of Americans are supported by welfare, twelve percent of American children are.

For too many, waiting for the welfare check, putting up with indignities, being a victim of the system, is normal. Perhaps thirty percent of those on welfare, writes Dan Bloom in a 135 page 1997 MDRC study—After AFDC: Welfare-To-Work Choices And Challenges for States—are mired in serious depression, or extensive alcohol or drug involvement. In Oregon, DeParle reported in 1997, the welfare caseload was shaved by fifty percent in three years, but now came the hard—and expensive—part. An estimated seventy-five percent of those who remained suffer from mental health problems, drug or alcohol addiction, sexual abuse, and criminal records. They refer to these as drawer people, people whose files stay in the drawer while caseworkers mine the easy cases. The difficulties of reaching those in the drawer are compounded by the politics. There will be less political support for something perceived as a minority problem.

I learned that the underclass, generally, can be grouped into four distinct categories: 1) the passive poor, usually those trapped on welfare; 2) the hostile poor, usually street criminals who terrorize most cities and who are often substance abusers; 3) the hustlers, who rarely commit violent crimes but who, like street criminals, may not be poor because they earn their livelihood off the books; 4) the traumatized, the drunks, drifters, depressed, often homeless miscreants who roam or collapse on city streets.

While I believe these categories are a useful shorthand, beware that real people don’t always fit neat generalizations. It is true, for example, that the underclass is drawn disproportionately from single-parent homes and from welfare-dependent families. But it is also true that some members of the underclass were raised in two-parent households where welfare was a stranger. I came to believe in what Oscar Lewis identified as a culture of poverty. But among the underclass I also witnessed such supposedly middle class values as patriotism, frugality, devotion to the Good Lord, loyalty to friends and extended family. I learned that some members of the underclass were so set in their ways, so hostile to organized society and its values, that they were beyond help. Yet for others a helping hand would lift them up and out. It didn’t take long to learn that too many poverty experts—including many of the seventy-five or so I consulted when I first wrote this book—generalize about people they don’t know.

Often, there is a political or ideological reason for these generalizations. Conservatives usually explain poverty by assigning the blame to individuals, thus rebutting the case for more taxes and more government intervention. Liberals usually blame society, thus strengthening the case for government action. The chasm between the two camps has narrowed some in recent years. Democrat Bill Clinton, after all, was first elected in 1992 after promising—much as Ronald Reagan had—to end welfare as we know it. Democrats, as well as Republicans, voted to radically transform welfare from a you’re-entitled to a you’re-responsible program. Some liberals now subscribe to traditional conservative notions about the importance of standards and instilling a work ethic, as some conservatives now recognize that government must provide day care and other government subsidies. Fewer liberals just insist on new entitlements, and fewer conservatives settle for simple exhortations. The two sometimes come together behind the concept of tough love, a belief that the too loving Nanny State, as N.Y.U.’s Lawrence M. Mead has described it, need be replaced by a sterner Daddy State. This, as Paul Starobin acutely observed in The Daddy State, in the March 28, 1998 National Journal, has become a new middle ground in American politics.

This leads to still another lesson: what we think about the underclass hinges, at least in part, on feelings as well as facts. In truth, there are ample facts to support most contentions. You may think the MDRC’s five-year national supported-work experiment was a failure because two-thirds of the 10,000 enrollees didn’t complete the program. With this fact you may then claim that little can be done for the underclass, and that government’s proper role is to concentrate on controlling rather than transforming behavior. Or you may think supported-work was a success because even though the underclass is so difficult to reach, nevertheless one-third of those who enrolled still managed to enter the world of work. With these facts you can claim there are solutions, reasons not to lose hope and surrender to despair. This is Roshomon, because some will see a seventy percent failure rate, and others a thirty percent success rate.

Whichever you see, it is undeniable that underclass woes are resistant to easy fixes. To induce Americans to support programs targeting the underclass may require a new common definition of success. In school, we think success is at least a grade of 65 percent or a C. Few programs aimed at the underclass achieve better than a D average. Few public figures have the courage to tell voters they must accept a lesser definition of success for public monies expended on behalf of the underclass. The political mountain to climb becomes taller now that a majority of those on welfare are no longer white. Such a goal is unattainable unless public officials—especially the President—use their platforms as a bully pulpit.

When this book was first published in 1982, I was certain a new Democrat or even a new Republican could better address these underclass issues. I was certain the traditional left and right were clueless. Sixteen years later, I still hold this belief, though I’m now uncertain whether we most need a new Democrat like Bill Clinton or Al Gore to educate their party about how bad attitudes harm the poor and how it is wrong to excuse aberrant behavior, or whether we really need a new Republican like Colin Powell or Jack Kemp to educate their brethren about those who need a helping hand to overcome paralyzing psychological fright, of how government must be a partner in this endeavor.

As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton co-chaired the welfare reform efforts of the National Governors’ Association. Not long after The Underclass was published, he invited me to preside over an unusual session at their annual meeting in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Five welfare recipients were invited, and Clinton wondered whether I might like to ask them questions, with the fifty governors and the press as the audience. I accepted what turned out to be an enthralling two hours, as these women shared their lives—and their welfare frustrations—with the governors. Clinton and his colleagues sat around a large horseshoe-shaped table, and when it came their turn to ask questions they retreated to reading from staff supplied memos. Except Clinton (and his Republican co-Chair, Mike Castle of Delaware), who dazzled everyone by transforming the anecdotes Jessica and Elizabeth and the other women shared into policy questions. He had listened, and drew them out as if they were the experts, which of course they were. To witness this performance was to be awed by the people skills, the compassion, the intelligence, Clinton would later reveal to the nation.

Yet by 1998 I fret that Clinton has squandered his moral authority to use the White House as a bully pulpit. How does Clinton take to the pulpit to proclaim that Americans must recognize the pathologies of the underclass, must not define deviancy down, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once memorably wrote, when he admits to lying about his own sexual pathologies?

To write about the underclass is to weave through a minefield. To induce combatants to listen, it is helpful if they respect your honesty. I wanted readers to hear the two hundred and fifty or so underclass voices in this book, so I tried to get out of the way, while still steering the narrative. I strove not to portentously prick the nation’s conscience, as the Left is wont to, nor to adopt the American cheerleader pose of the Right. I consider myself neither a liberal, a conservative, or a moderate. Not because I am truly neutral, or agnostic, but because I don’t fit in a box. But every writer, as Orwell also noted, … has a ‘message,’ whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it.

My own bias is that the supported-work program was a success, and that governments should support efforts like it. I believe in a radical re-definition of what constitutes success for the underclass. I harbor a liberal’s faith in the carrot and a conservative’s faith in the stick. I embrace the same hybrid views today as when parts of this book were first published as a three-part series in The New Yorker in 1981. Triage can be a term of realism, whether in a hospital emergency room or with some members of the underclass who kill for sport and must be segregated from society. I would deploy limited resources towards first assisting those with the best chance of survival, particularly the young. While I don’t believe in pink pills and panaceas, I do believe in making concerted efforts to assist the underclass. I believe some members of the underclass are victims of forces beyond their control, but I also believe that if you empower people to declare themselves helpless they will often act like victims. I came to believe members of the underclass could not succeed without practicing self-help, but I also believe they usually need a helping hand.

When this book appeared, many of the MDRC’s experiments were starved for funds and forced to close. The federal supported-work program lost its federal funding on December 31, 1981, the end of the first full year of the Reagan administration. MDRC was compelled to sever nearly half its staff, and in early 1982 executives there warned that without federal support they might be compelled to seal their doors. There was grand irony in this, for the Reagan administration would deprive itself of the kind of low-cost, community-based, research-oriented programs their press releases extolled. While these programs were little known, they probably represented the most productive efforts ever undertaken to reach the underclass and help lift them into the mainstream and the world of work. But the MDRC was supple, and as more poverty efforts devolved in the Reagan and Bush administration to the states and to public-private partnerships, this organization became a vital source of research for the states.

Today, the MDRC remains at the forefront of efforts to assist and study the underclass. They have branched out to study educational reform, to organize conferences where state officials swap strategies and results, to offer briefings to state and local officials, to provide technical assistance to numerous states and localities. They have undertaken a major evaluation of the 1996 welfare reform legislation, seeking over the next several years to determine whether workfare works. The goal, reads MDRC’s 1997 annual report, is to answer two fundamental questions: How does the welfare system actually change in terms of what recipients experience? What differences do these changes make for people on public assistance, their families, and their communities?

There are abundant mysteries surrounding the underclass. Workfare hasn’t been the disaster many liberals screeched that it would be, yet as Senator Moynihan has said, the jury will be out until at least 2002, the year those on welfare for five consecutive years lose their welfare checks. And even then, though we will know the numbers of those who have exited welfare we won’t know how many will become, over time, self-sufficient. We know that welfare has been shrinking since 1994, two years before Congress passed and President Clinton signed a dramatic new welfare initiative. We know other industrial nations have reduced their welfare caseloads in efforts to reduce both government spending and dependency. They are seduced—as are we in America—by a desire to rely on the efficiencies of a market economy. But the underclass usually defies most efficiency measures. Nor do we know what happens to the welfare rolls when the national economy no longer surges. Or what happens to the children. Or what mix of services—child care, transportation subsidies, counseling—is pivotal to the underclass. Or which of the various state workfare strategies will prove fruitful.

To judge how workfare impacts the underclass requires, as Richard P. Nathan, former Chairman of the MDRC board has written, management information systems to measure performance, a sophisticated tool few governments have. By devolving welfare policy to states and localities, the federal government has made it possible for one thousand flowers to bloom, wrote MDRC President Judith M. Gueron, in a 1997 monograph, Learning About Welfare Reform: Lessons from State-Based Evaluations. But having a thousand flowers bloom does not mean that you will learn whether they bloom well. In the new climate, there is less money for research, states can decide not to evaluate potentially important innovations, and policymaking is likely to be much more political. The stakes are high for the states because under the new law they will bear the full financial risk of welfare changes.

Politics is an important word, because it gets at values. We don’t know what political goals Americans will endorse—to maximize those who get off welfare, or those on welfare who work? Is the primary measure of success the number on welfare, the number of those who become self-sufficient, the number of children helped, or the total cost? Is welfare dependency defined as anyone who receives a subsidy for a long period, even if they are working and most of their income is non-subsidized? Is success measured by how many children are off welfare, or how many live in homes with a decent income? What is a decent income? It is now national policy to say that in return for welfare recipients must accept certain work obligations, but what—if any—support obligations do governments have? These varied goals are often in conflict, writes Dan Bloom in his analysis of welfare reform. Unfortunately, it is no easy task to reconcile these goals. For example, because parents and children are linked, supporting children sometimes means supporting their non-working parents—but one that may conflict with the goal of reducing dependency…. Research cannot answer these questions, they must be hashed out in the political process. But research can provide information on the probable effects of specific policy approaches and the likelihood that they will meet the intended goals.

I had a vague sense when I began reporting this book back in mid-1979, that the underclass might be among the most momentous stories in America. That vague sense has hardened into a conviction. For to study the underclass is to understand more clearly the epidemic of violent crime that still, despite pronounced declines, sweeps America. The underclass helps explain why welfare rose even while poverty and unemployment declined; why conditions grew worse for some Americans even though government spending grew; why many government programs failed. The underclass helps answer Who are those guys? responsible for so many school dropouts, for so much arson and vandalism and drugs and hostile, anti-social behavior and sexual abuse and an insecurity so debilitating that many individuals, as we will see with someone like BT-27’s Willy Joe, operate on only one cylinder and say, as Willy did, I just feel crushed. To study the underclass is to better understand what went wrong—and right—with the Great Society, to better sort out age-old questions of race versus class, whether to affix blame to society or to the individual—or to both.

Finally, I learned that America is rarely in a mood to pay attention to Cassandras. The economy is strong, the Asian miracle and Japan’s X-factor and the Socialist dream and the Iron Curtain have faded as menaces. America is the world’s sole superpower, its economic and political system is envied around the world. America is in a deeply self-satisfied, even smug, mood. There are times—the early sixties, for example—when Dwight MacDonald could write about Michael Harrington’s The Other America and prick the conscience of a President and the nation. Those images of poverty-stricken Americans—like those fashioned by Charles Dickens in England—were portraits of vulnerable, sympathetic individuals who lacked only income. But the underclass lacks more. Many are not sympathetic. Some are beyond help. Solutions won’t be found in Marches on Washington for massive jobs programs. None of the vexing problems confronting America at the start of a new century—not nuclear proliferation, not the AIDS epidemic, not virulent nationalism, not Arab versus Jew, not terrorism—is any more resistant to a quick fix than is the underclass.

It is true: in the past sixteen years the underclass peril has receded. The birthrate has declined among black as well as white Americans. More teenagers are saying no to sex, or using contraceptives, because fewer are having babies. The police have successfully targeted career criminals and collared the crime rate (partly by tripling the number of prison cells). The welfare caseload has plunged, since 1994, by twenty percent. Community Development Corporations have blossomed in communities throughout America, rebuilding slums like the South Bronx, providing affordable housing and crucial one-on-one services. Nevertheless, the number of female-headed families, which is the closest thing we have to a Big Bang theory for the underclass, has not gone down. One quarter of all homes are now headed by a single parent, and this number swells. One out of two black households are headed by a female, according to March 1997 Census data, compared to only one in seven white and one in four Hispanic households. Seven out of ten black babies are born out-of-wedlock, compared to two out of ten white and four out of ten Hispanic babies. Most of these babies are born with income, or health, or housing disadvantages. The males are often deprived of a role model, and females often come to think being supported on welfare—even if it is demeaning—is normal. These are the true victims. Too many of their fathers reside in prison, where the number of inmates in federal and state facilities has risen from 328,695 in 1980 to 773,124 in 1990 to 1,218,256 in mid 1997. The vast majority of those in prison are minorities. Justice Department figures for 1996 report that black Americans accounted for fifty-five percent of all murders, most of these to fellow blacks, and fifty-eight percent of all robberies. And many of these inmates, like the communities from which they come, are cursed by a new drug of choice—crack cocaine—that didn’t exist when this book first appeared. Unlike heroin, which produces a mellower high, crack often provokes wild, senseless behavior. And budding armies of crack babies, born with medical and mental deficiences.

The number of those in the underclass is relatively small, yet its reach multiplies. My former principal at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, a wise and judicious man named Abraham Lass, once explained why. He remembered that the Board of Education, in order to promote racial balance, began busing about 300 minority students to Lincoln in 1969. Soon there were racial incidents and some violence. We became alarmed, recalled Lass. At the beginning we assumed these kids were no different from ours. There was a big debate on that. We decided we didn’t want them to feel different. Then when those things began to pop up we studied it and discovered that every time there was a racial incident or rumble, the same names came into my office. Maybe eight or ten kids out of four thousand. But it wasn’t eight kids because you had to multiply each by eight. Why eight? Because you’ve got to take eight kids and multiply by eight periods. So what we really had was fifty-six explosive, hostile, nasty, disturbed, and disturbing kids. By keeping these eight or so students under surveillance—and refusing to brand all minority students as disruptive or innocent—Lass succeeded in restoring order at the high school.

The impact of the underclass exceeds its size. Too often, it remains undiscussed, hidden. It still requires—as it did when this book first appeared—not just brave political leadership but a willingness on the part of the public to be led. This requires a communal sense of obligation, a civic pledge to search for answers and to sacrifice greater public resources. Without this effort, the underclass looms, as Thomas Jefferson said of the Missouri Compromise, like a fireball in the night.

—New York, April 1999

1.

The BT-27 Class

The life-skills class convenes on Tuesday and Friday mornings, and among the twenty-two students initially registered are people who have been murderers, muggers, stickup men, chain snatchers, pimps, burglars, heroin addicts, drug pushers, alcoholics, welfare mothers, and swindlers. Their teacher, Howard Smith, is a former heroin addict, drug peddler, welfare cheat, and alcoholic, and has spent several of his thirty-nine years behind bars. Beginning in December 1979, I joined these students and rode a creaking elevator to the tenth floor of the Wildcat Skills Training Center, on West 37th Street, for the first meeting of the class known as Basic Typing 27, which would continue for ten weeks and, for those who successfully completed that hurdle, would be followed by a twenty-week course called advanced office practices. Five afternoons and three mornings each week, in dreary, unheated classrooms with windows caked with dirt and naked pipes crisscrossing the ceiling, they would partake of standard training fare: English, math, and clerical and typing instruction. The remaining six hours would be devoted to life skills, the course that Howard Smith teaches.

Life skills is not a typical academic offering, but then this is not a typical class. Most of the students are high school dropouts; few have ever held a regular job. To be eligible for BT-27 and the other classes at Wildcat, which are part of a national experiment, a person must satisfy one of four unusual criteria: be an ex-offender who has been released from prison within the past six months; be an ex-addict who has recently been or is currently in a treatment program; be a female who has been unemployed and on welfare for thirty of the preceding thirty-six months, and has no children under the age of six; or be a youth between the ages of seventeen and twenty who has dropped out of school (half of the dropouts must be delinquents). In the sixties, such people were referred to as the hard-core or structurally unemployed; today they are sometimes referred to as the underclass. Whatever they are called, they constitute a group that few training or jobs programs reach. This experiment, called supported work by its founders, tried to test whether in the course of one year, with special counseling and training, such people could be lured into the world of work. Each participant was provided private or government employment at an initial salary of $105 a week. Unlike most supported workers in the United States, the Wildcat recruits who qualify also attend school for seven months of their year’s enrollment. The experiment was designed by a New York-based nonprofit corporation, the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), which attracted money from the federal government, the Ford Foundation, and other sources to help finance the program.

In the first several weeks of the training regimen, the enrollment of BT-27 dwindled from twenty-two to sixteen. Ronald Brooks was arrested; Phillip Rivers, Earl Billings, Larry Pearl, and Stanley Lawrence were dismissed from the program for excessive absences and lateness; Liza Lance quit, because, Smith said, she doesn’t feel she can make it—she feels that everyone in the class is smarter than she is. (The names of all the trainees have been changed.) With the orientation period over, Smith was ready to begin in earnest the life-skills process; his aim is to help each of the students confront the reality of his life, accept responsibility for it, and learn to communicate with others. Smith is a lean, lanky black man with a goatee, a mustache that rims his mouth, and a closely cropped Afro. He has the long arms of a basketball player, which he might have been if a birth defect had not deformed his right shoulder. He smiles easily, speaks softly, moves languidly, usually dresses casually, in a blazer and an open-necked shirt, and achieves an instant rapport with most students, because, he says, I’ve been where they’ve been.

On this December day, Howard Smith circles the formica-topped tables at which the class sits, and dispenses crayons and large sheets of white paper. He asks the students to sketch anything significant in your life.

After several minutes, he invites William (Akim) Penn to step to a lectern at the front of the room, put his drawing on an easel, and share an account of his life with BT-27. Penn, a wiry, muscular man with jet-black skin and a short Afro, begins haltingly, almost shyly. Pointing to a line of capital letters he has written across the top of the paper—"

LOVE AND PEACE AND HAPPINESS

—Penn explains, I had a close family. My mother and father were very close. That’s why I put ‘love and peace and happiness’ there. In the eighties, I want to give them what they gave me. So far, he feels, he has given them heartache. He has been in and out of state prison frequently between 1974 and 1979, the last time for armed robbery. He has consumed pills, marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol, and has committed acts he would like to forget. Though he is only twenty-three, numerous scars mar his skin. A tiny bald spot in the middle of his head is from a knife that gouged a piece of his scalp. Two weeks after he was released from prison in 1979, four toughs leered at his date on a subway platform. Penn lunged at them, and they left him lying on the platform with a broken jaw and a gash that went from one side of his chin to the other. After that incident, I was ready to put a pistol back in my hand, he says. But I used my intelligence. It didn’t help. Employers were wary of an ex-convict. Penn offered few skills, no job references, and a rather menacing look. Unable to find work, he turned to alcohol and welfare. Still, he says that the 1980s—he has written the numbers in bold black on his sheet of paper—are going to be good years, because supported work will teach me I can be a person, allow me to recognize my abilities. He adds, It also gets me off the street and puts money in my pocket." He boasts of his four-year-old son; of plans to marry the boy’s mother, a twenty-three-year-old domestic worker who is on welfare; of his ambition to lead a new life. The members of BT-27 applaud Penn, and several slap his palm as he returns to his seat.

Next, William Mason ambles to the front of the room and attaches to the easel a drawing of a house surrounded by stick figures. At thirty-seven, Mason is the senior male member of BT-27, and in time he will become the dominant member of the class. A thin beard hugs his jawline, reaching up and around his mouth; he has a slightly waved Afro, with a red tint; he usually wears mirrored sunglasses, a bright flowered shirt, and gold chains. The house he has drawn, Mason explains, was in Salt Lake City, where he was born. When he was nine, the family moved to Brooklyn. My mother had nineteen children, fifteen of them with my natural father, he says. He saw little of his father, and grew up with a man he called his stepfather. My brothers and I were all right for a while, he says. I looked after my baby sisters—there were four girls and fifteen boys. But I wanted to cut loose. I was the lead singer of a group called the Jesters. There were other things I wanted to do. I was a hell of a softball center fielder. And I idolized three people on the pool table. I became a good pool player. But I always wanted to be a fighter. So I walked away from sports and pool and became a fighter. I was good with my hands, but my hands got me put away. Mason explains that he had earned several karate belts, and while working as a bouncer in a bar he got into a fight with three men, which led to two months in jail. This was one of several collisions he had with the law, the most serious of which led to his spending thirteen months in prison for narcotics possession. Now I want to be a success at Wildcat, he says. He tells the class that he has nine children, the oldest of them twenty-one, and eleven grandchildren. He is divorced, and currently lives with another woman and the youngest of his children, an eleven-year-old daughter.

A member of the class asks, Are your brothers and sisters alive?

All but one sister, he replies. She was murdered a month before I got out of prison.

Mason is the substitute father for his brothers and sisters. When a brother was mugged and stabbed, Mason sped to the hospital and spent the night there. When a sister was arrested, he accompanied her to court. In a fatherless home, he became the family rudder, as he would become the rudder for several members of BT-27.

Willy Joe is called upon, and he comes to the front of the room and puts his sketch on the easel. A thin twenty-four-year-old who jams his hands into the pockets of a black leather jacket, Joe moves lethargically, speaks slowly, and has a good-natured smile for everyone. The combination of kindness and vulnerability makes him appealing. He is not given to swagger or showboating, as some of the others are; he eagerly shares a backgammon game he brings to class every day, and he still possesses an innocence that allows him to open his life to strangers. Yet in depressed moments Willy Joe will sigh and say, I just feel crushed. He has a passive personality; where a Mason will create and shape his opportunities, Joe waits for his. Joe starts by

Reviews for The Underclass

[maya47bob46 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The debate about how to move people from the bottom to the middle class is still fiercely debated today. It might be a good time to go back a read Kin Auletta's study of the anti-poverty programs run by two community groups and see what worked and what didn't.