Time's up

Another piece of evidence that shows that this was deliberate was that the city never really divulged what happened to all the people who were bumped off welfare during most of the six years of welfare reform. They were constantly being asked, "OK, 500,000 people have left the rolls. What's happened to them?" They didn't reveal that data.

Have they revealed that now?

Not with the sort of data that we would like to see. Just recently, we found out that only 6 percent of the people who were working WEP jobs got real jobs, which is a very embarrassing figure for the city. Of course, this is what everyone was suspecting.

You mention, at one point, that they were devoting a lot of energy and money to fraud investigators. What did these women have to deal with?

In 1995, when Giuliani started welfare reform in earnest, his top priorities were 1) to put welfare recipients to work for their benefits, and 2) to beef up fraud investigation. The idea was that if we can push people off the rolls who don't legitimately belong there, then we can really start cutting back on welfare dependency in the city. He set up a fairly expensive fraud investigation bureau in Brooklyn.

Now, when a person goes on welfare, they first get all their documents checked by the local welfare office, then they have to go to the fraud investigation office to have the same documents rechecked. They get fingerprinted. Then they have to wait in their apartments for a fraud investigator to visit their home. If you miss one of these many appointments, you get bumped off and have to start all over again. That's another reason why welfare recipients feel that all these things are designed to just get them off the rolls and not really help them. They feel like criminals. They're under suspicion from the second they apply for help.

What was your impression of the caseworkers? Are they paid well? How do they act toward the welfare recipients?

I wish that I could have had more voices of caseworkers in the book, but they were under a gag order by the mayor. The general answer is no, they're not paid well and they're fairly miserable. Their ranks were cut back enormously, so their workloads were much higher. You have the whole range of caseworkers -- some who were really happy that they could start cracking down on welfare recipients, and others who went into casework because they wanted to help people. Still, they could only tell people, "You have to go work. I don't care if you don't have the child care you like. Here's what you have to do or else we'll bump you off." The atmosphere of the welfare office was never one that didn't need reforming. It was always a fairly humiliating experience, but it wasn't quite as punitive as it became after 1995.

Do you think that Clinton's welfare reform was inadequate because they were expecting people to make these transitions in a short amount of time? Or do you think that we simply can't do without welfare in this country?

It was fairly unrealistic to expect people to just get off welfare and get a job. It did not take into consideration all the constellations of problems that individual recipients have. It failed to provide the supports that people need to get a job and stay off welfare. The goal of welfare reform was to end welfare and not necessarily to end poverty. We're seeing the results of that now with the rise of the number of working poor. People were pushed into low-paying jobs. They didn't have time to build up their skills to get better jobs and they didn't have time to go to college, so they were forced into the job market at a minimum wage level, which kept their families in poverty.

But the poverty rate fell, right?

It did fall. Economists are still trying to figure out if that was because of the amazing prosperity boom in the '90s. The researchers have found that most of the people who were most successful in getting off welfare were those who already had a high level of education and a high level of job experience. It was not successful among those who had an enormous number of barriers -- mental illness, sexual abuse, substance abuse, no high school degree and so on. That's the group of people that are still on the welfare rolls.

After witnessing what some of these women have been through, do you think it's the government's responsibility to address things like domestic violence and addiction? How can it?

This is how complicated the whole problem is -- yes, if we really are serious about getting people to work and getting them off public assistance, then we have to recognize that there are all sorts of issues that keep them from being able to keep a steady job and move up in the job ranks.

Take Christine. She almost didn't have a chance from the moment she was born. She was sexually abused her whole life. She had relatives who would blow crack in her face and addict her at a very young age. Her mother died violently when she was 17 years old -- she was either pushed or fell out of their fifth-story Bronx apartment building -- and this forever affected Christine. This is a very smart woman. She managed to get a high school degree and a real estate license. She can do it, if she gets help with a lifetime of mental illness.

This is one thing that you see a lot, especially in the Bronx. Mental health services are very sparse, and the need for them is enormous. Many of these people end up doing drugs in order to self-medicate. She also suffered domestic violence. I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of trauma in her life. I was amazed that she gets up and takes care of her four kids every day. We've got the money to deal with these issues if we want to divert it into programs that help people.

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