Time's up

Welfare reform enacted in the prosperous '90s is pushing the first wave of families off public assistance amid today's recession. An expert talks about the consequences.

By Suzy Hansen

Feb 4, 2002 | One of the many questions that critics of President Clinton's 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act -- the "end of welfare as we know it" -- used to ask was, "What happens to the poor when there's no more welfare and the economy goes bust?"

That dark scenario became a reality last month as the first wave of Americans lost their benefits during a recession accelerated by a national tragedy. To many, welfare reform seemed like a success story: The number of people on welfare dropped 50 percent; the number of people living in poverty dropped, too. That was during good times, however, and now many states, afforded more freedom by the 1996 law, are wondering whether their deadlines have come too soon.

But beyond unemployment and thinned-out welfare rolls, what were the last five years like for welfare recipients? Surprisingly, as LynNell Hancock, author of "Hands to Work: The Stories of Three Families Racing the Welfare Clock," writes, we haven't heard much about the people supposedly benefiting from the policy often touted as one of the most important reforms of Clinton's administration.

Hancock, who's written for the New York Times and Newsweek, spent over three years with three very different Bronx women who were trying to survive in a post-welfare reform world. She observed the tiny details of their stress-ridden lives. There's Brenda, an African-American single mother of two; Christine, a Puerto Rican mother of four and a heroin addict; and Alina, a young Russian refugee desperate to become a doctor. What Hancock found was a mind-bogglingly bureaucratic system unsympathetic to the complex and varied lives of the people it intended to serve.

Salon spoke to Hancock from her home in Montclair, NJ.

A lot of people lost their welfare benefits this January.

It's like two trains colliding. One train is this recession that was already starting before Sept. 11 and then was exacerbated by it. Unemployment is rising -- 35,000 people were laid off from Ford just the other week. The other train is all these welfare recipients who are timing off their benefits and are expected to go out into an economy that has fewer and fewer jobs.

One of the hallmarks of welfare reform -- the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act -- was a deadline. Families have a five-year lifetime limit to be on welfare. So if you went on welfare in 1996, and you had a family, your benefits timed out at the end of December. Now, every month, a new wave of people time out of their welfare benefits for a lifetime. The assumption is that a deadline is all people need to become self-sufficient, when in fact the situation can be much more complicated. And it doesn't take into account something like Sept. 11, which accelerated the recession and unemployment. States are already looking at their deadline policies and giving exemptions to more people than they thought they would. In September, Congress is going to look at all these policies. I hope they decide to eliminate the deadline. It seems arbitrary.

How many people have been pushed into self-sufficiency? Do we know?

Success rates depend on who you talk to. Welfare rolls have dropped by more than half, so the assumption is that a percentage of those have moved out of poverty. Unfortunately, there are too many others who are working but are still poor. Those are the numbers that are growing and are more alarming.

Recently, the U.S. Conference of Mayors put out a survey that showed a 23 percent rise in the number of people who are seeking emergency food help in soup kitchens and a 13 percent rise nationwide in people seeking homeless shelter over last year's figure. Only 60 percent of the people who are eligible for food stamps actually are getting them. That's another indication that there is a problem with hunger out there.

What made you decide to look at the personal side of welfare reform?

In 1995, I was on a bus in the Bronx and I saw a group of junior high school girls giggling and taking over the atmosphere of the bus. Then, all of a sudden, they stopped. One of the girls was looking out the window and she whispered to her friend that that was her mother picking up trash on the side of the street. She said, "My mother told me she was working in an office." This was a long time ago, before the Personal Responsibility Act was passed, but the city had already instigated a work experience program that put 35,000 welfare recipients on the streets working off their benefits by picking up trash.

We'd only heard stories in the paper that were mostly self-congratulatory about how wonderful the system was and how it was really helping to push people off the welfare rolls and into jobs. But in that instant on the bus, I realized there must be a hundred personal stories about how this was affecting real people's lives. I was surprised how many people so generously agreed to let me into their lives.

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