The Audacity of Hope

Strategies like an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit that help all low-wage workers
can make an enormous difference in the lives of these women and their children. But if
we’re serious about breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty, then many of these
women will need some extra help with the basics that those living outside the inner city
often take for granted. They need more police and more effective policing in their
neighborhoods, to provide them and their children some semblance of personal security.
They need access to community-based health centers that emphasize prevention—
including reproductive health care, nutritional counseling, and in some cases treatment
for substance abuse. They need a radical transformation of the schools their children
attend, and access to affordable child care that will allow them to hold a full-time job or
pursue their education.
And in many cases they need help learning to be effective parents. By the time many
inner-city children reach the school system, they’re already behind—unable to identify
basic numbers, colors, or the letters in the alphabet, unaccustomed to sitting still or
participating in a structured environment, and often burdened by undiagnosed health
problems. They’re unprepared not because they’re unloved but because their mothers
don’t know how to provide what they need. Well-structured government programs—
prenatal counseling, access to regular pediatric care, parenting programs, and quality
early-childhood-education programs—have a proven ability to help fill the void.
Finally, we need to tackle the nexus of unemployment and crime in the inner city so that
the men who live there can begin fulfilling their responsibilities. The conventional
wisdom is that most unemployed inner-city men could find jobs if they really wanted to
work; that they inevitably prefer drug dealing, with its attendant risks but potential
profits, to the low-paying jobs that their lack of skills warrants. In fact, economists
who’ve studied the issue—and the young men whose fates are at stake—will tell you
that the costs and benefits of the street life don’t match the popular mythology: At the
bottom or even the middle ranks of the industry, drug dealing is a minimum-wage
affair. For many inner-city men, what prevents gainful employment is not simply the
absence of motivation to get off the streets but the absence of a job history or any
marketable skills—and, increasingly, the stigma of a prison record.
Ask Mac, who has made it part of his mission to provide young men in his
neighborhood a second chance. Ninety-five percent of his male employees are exfelons,
including one of his best cooks, who has been in and out of prison for the past
twenty years for various drug offenses and one count of armed robbery. Mac starts them
out at eight dollars an hour and tops them out at fifteen dollars an hour. He has no
shortage of applicants. Mac’s the first one to admit that some of the guys come in with
issues—they aren’t used to getting to work on time, and a lot of them aren’t used to
taking orders from a supervisor—and his turnover can be high. But by not accepting
excuses from the young men he employs (“I tell them I got a business to run, and if they
don’t want the job I got other folks who do”), he finds that most are quick to adapt.
Over time they become accustomed to the rhythms of ordinary life: sticking to
schedules, working as part of a team, carrying their weight. They start talking about
getting their GEDs, maybe enrolling in the local community college.
They begin to aspire to something better.