Hard battle on poverty
The Advocate
April 23, 2009
Last year, a particularly horrific crime in the slums of the nation’s capital shocked Americans. The four children of Bonita Jacks were found dead when marshals were sent to evict the family. The girls had apparently been dead for months. The mother is awaiting trial on murder charges.
The poor are always with us, the Bible says, and clearly evil is with us, too. But the Jacks case has provoked some soul-searching among officials in Washington, where a series of social services agencies were supposed to be helping the family. Mayor Adrian Fenty has shaken up the city bureaucracy in the aftermath of the crime.
An interesting footnote to this story came when the city’s inspector-general issued a report on the case. Certainly, there were “errors of omission and commission” by city agencies, schools, police, and nonprofit groups that led to the deaths of the four girls, as the report said.
Still, it’s not as if the family never got any help. “Most striking was the inspector general’s finding that this was not a story of a family living in isolation but rather of one that sought and received numerous services and benefits from a generous city,” The Washington Post commented. “But different groups worked separately, oblivious to the efforts of others, with the result that no one entity knew the whole story.”
The report does cite individual instances of workers not doing their jobs, errors that probably helped contribute to the tragedy. The main lesson is that while there were people who were doing their jobs, earnestly trying to help, but there was no single point at which the blossoming catastrophe could be comprehended by those trying to help.
“It is heartbreaking to read how social workers investigating a complaint about possible neglect reported not being able to find the family even as the family was interacting with multiple other agencies,” the Post said.
The Advocate’s recent accounts of Louisiana’s efforts to deal with the scourge of poverty have listed the 90 programs in three state departments that are intended not only to head off tragedies but give poor families a leg up in life.
The Washington case isn’t purely a lesson for Louisiana. In some ways, because the city of Washington is an urban area, the problems in Louisiana are harder. A family in the Mississippi or Red River deltas may have fewer resources available because of rural isolation; at the same time, there may be more robust private social networks in a small town that help, sometimes a lot. The circumstances of urban and rural families are often dramatically different, but the state has responsibility for both types.
But the Washington case underlines one easy message that Gov. Bobby Jindal does appreciate: State programs’ “delivery system” must be effective, and programs that are working well should get resources.
It is does not take a Rhodes Scholar governor to note, as many in private charities see, that programs run by different groups and agencies often overlap, causing some anti-poverty efforts to be over-funded and others to be starved for money.
“What will be helpful to drive even more coordination is a budgeting process and programmatic process that focuses on outcomes,” Jindal said recently.
That technocratic language should not obscure the realities of case management, the ability of workers to coordinate work with specific families with other agencies, and to work together to intervene effectively.
Jindal reasonably wants to “drive outcomes-based investments,” but he should also keep in mind the human element that is often obscured — until there’s a tragedy, and a witchhunt begins for the public officials’ errors that contributed to a case such as that in Washington.
The governor and policy makers might make a point to visit the front-line workers, in public and private settings, who deal with troubled families, or working people who are just plain so broke that their children have no options in life.
The lessons of the Washington report are not perfect parallels in Louisiana but the report might nevertheless provide some guidance for changes.
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