'I'm not your typical welfare case . . .':
Stout, Robert Joe
ANOTHER LOOK AT WELFARE FRAUD 'I'm not your typical welfare case . . .' ROBERT JOE STOUT "I'M NOT your typical welfare case. . . ." The slightlyI built 23-year-old woman twisted a loose strand...
...specks from the man's plaid shirt that she was wearing...
...HEY...
...You get a job, you got to pay somebody for child care...
...Another AFDC mother's advice that "I forget trying to work and live on welfare until the kids were in school" was repeated by a San Francisco social worker...
...For these women, the problem is not welfare, but poverty...
...So I quit my job to take care of them, and the welfare people, they got on my case and acted like I was a leech on the government...
...For years, law makers and bureaucrats have attempted to redefine poverty with terms like "disadvantaged" and "safety nets...
...At least, with my staying home with them, they're not out on the streets...
...Edwin L. Dale Jr., of Reagan's Office of Management and Budget, admits that the proposed welfare changes would penalize low-paid workers who qualify for some welfare benefits...
...And he quit sending me money...
...Her husband took care of the children in the day-time but contributed nothing financially to their support...
...So I sat home with the kids...
...My boss, he said I could leave but 'you be back here at six in the morning!' I spent all day trying to get another baby sitter...
...Jobs like I can get, they don't just let you call in when your kids are sick...
...Bound over to probation after the San Francisco public defender who had been appointed to represent her in court wrangled a reduction of the charges against her from felony to misdemeanor welfare fraud, Sondra Angel says she is "too burned-out to care what they do to me now...
...Many recipients] both work and receive public assistance and still are not financially advanced over sub-poverty level incomes...
...The car broke down and she spent the night in an all-night gas station waiting for her father to drive north to pick her up...
...It was from the month before and I thought it was all right for me to cash it...
...Again her fingers tugged at her hair, then brushed imaginary ROBERT JOE STOUT, a novelist and journalist living in California, is a previous contributor...
...These, and cosmetic offerings such as "Work-fare" or "negative tax credits" are more for treating middle-class consciences than the disease whose symptoms are poverty, apathy, and despair...
...I knew if I did I'd never get child support money from him ever again...
...But she got to crying and the neighbors turned me in for child abuse...
...A New Jersey study quoted by Philip A. Auclaire noted that AFDC families in that state depended upon welfare for only forty-two percent of their actual income, the rest coming from temporary or part-time earnings or child-care payments from absent spouses, which, in many cases, was insufficient to keep the recipients above minimum subsistence levels...
...Even an employment agency counselor told her the same thing...
...A 19-year-old black AFDC recipient told me, "A single person, okay, she can get by, live in an apartment with a roommate, that's fine...
...That first-offense sentence was stiffer than those meted out that same day by the same judge to an armed robber, a man who committed assault with a deadly weapon, a drunk driver who smashed into and nearly killed a 10-year-old bicyclist, a fifth-offender panderer and several prostitutes...
...I was behind on the rent, I didn't have any clothes to go job-hunting in...
...Those who stay on welfare for a period of years become increasingly dependent, both financially and psychologically...
...Sociologists Marie Withers Osmond and Charles M. Grigg insist that being on welfare "is not an alternative to being employed...
...But it took six weeks to get any money...
...My baby, he got left in a backyard by a baby sitter...
...she sighed...
...I think he's forgotten about me...
...It's just that I got behind and...
...Three months later the unreported income caught up with her...
...So why punish the kids...
...So she applied for welfare...
...Many recipients go to great lengths to conceal their welfare status...
...Like Sondra Angel, she pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges and was fined and placed on probation...
...The average AFDC recipient stays on welfare only five to eight months...
...I even pulled leftover lettuce and cabbage out of a grocery store garbage can...
...These attitudes sometimes lead to self- or child-abuse or neglect and create victims for swindlers, adventurers, and pushers...
...I was offered a permanent job but I didn't have any cash to pay a babysitter...
...You can't live in the same little apartment...
...Chances are, whoever you get won't take care of them as good as you would yourself...
...Sure, I was working, but I had less than eight bucks in my purse when my welfare check was forwarded from San Luis Obispo County...
...Evicted from their Potrero Hills flat after he left, Sondra bundled her kids into a 17-year-old Volkswagen and headed down the coast to the little town near San Luis Obispo where her parents lived...
...Sondra NEVER reported her collection agency earnings after her temporary job folded...
...Nor did she report income from a bartending gig in a Powell Street saloon...
...The implementation of a "Work-fare" system in California in the late '60s under then-Governor Ronald Reagan precipitated an increase in the number of applicants in many of the participating countries when poverty-level wage-earners applied for benefits in hopes of acquiring better jobs...
...Through an employment agency she got a temporary, but full-time, job with a Reno-Las Vegas outfit set up by the casinos to collect gambling debts from Bay Area residents...
...Within two weeks she had a job in a fast-food outlet but neither her mother (who also worked) nor a married sister could take care of the babies and no private child-care facilities were available for children that young...
...A public defender used letters written by friends of an AFDC recipient in Santa Clara County, California, to show the court how his client, arrested for possessing stolen property, had faithfully supported his wife and children by sending them money each month...
...Harold R. Kerbo notes, "To many beneficiaries and potential beneficiaries one of the costs of participating in a welfare program is a loss of pride...
...She contrasted her situation with that of a city-employed social worker...
...What was I supposed to do," she asked the judge who sentenced her, "kick him out and let him sleep on the streets...
...It wasn't that I wanted Joe around but he'd been laid off or fired by Reynolds and was drinking again...
...The slightlyI built 23-year-old woman twisted a loose strand of her long red hair around her forefinger, then abruptly pushed it back over her ear...
...Twice a week, in the evening or on weekends, she drove nearly 11 miles to a grocery store in another part of town so that no one in her neighborhood would learn that she received food stamps...
...Ironically, they are the ones being lopped off the rolls by the Reagan administration's "truly needy" definition...
...Child care difficulties caused her to leave five jobs in less than 11 months...
...Finally I did but she calls the next morning and says she's changed her mind and won't take my kids...
...So I locked the kids in the house and told the four-year-old he should take care of the baby...
...Few welfare recipients drive Cadillacs...
...a Syracuse, New York, woman advises single-parent family heads...
...She moved out of her parents' house and adopted her children's father's name to spare Mom and Dad embarrassment...
...But I got to get somebody to take care of my kids first.' " A Corpus Christi, Texas, mother arrested for welfare fraud admitted that she had been living with her estranged husband while collecting AFDC payments of $214 a month...
...For a week all we ate was day-old : bread and over-ripe bananas...
...A high school drop-out, she never has earned more than 20c-an-hour over the minimum wage...
...But the Reno-Las Vegas debt collectors called and "I went back to work...
...FORGET trying to work...
...The California Welfare Rights Organization estimates that over ninety percent of the people prosecuted for welfare fraud are AFDC recipients who pocketed less than $1,000 in illegal aid "usually for unreported income, duplicate payments from two different counties or violation of non-resident father requirements...
...Continuing friction with her family prompted her to return to the city...
...His family," she shrugged, "won't let him come back and marry me...
...I did...
...I've had a year of college and I really want to work...
...I didn't know what to do...
...As inflation increases, and mergers and mechanization cause entry-level job opportunities to decline, as housing becomes scarcer and decaying social patterns create, more and more single-parent families, millions of Americans find themselves clinging to the edge of the "good life...
...He was crying and throwing up and a neighbor came to get me where I was working at a restaurant...
...They're not learning things I don't want them to learn...
...I had to put an extra three-hundred dollars advance on the dinky little apartment I rented...
...How we deal with their problems may in the long run tell us more about our survival as a nation than all the oil tankers ploughing the Atlantic or the amounts of military hardware that we ship out to prop up the governments of supposed allies...
...Her two children, ages two and three, had been placed temporarily in a state-funded receiving home...
...His studies, and those by Goodwin and by Chrissinger, confirm that most welfare recipients share the same work-ethic values expressed by middle-class wage-earners...
...Hell!' I told them, 'I want to work...
...But when you got kids, you got to take care of kids...
...Their low self-esteem is often reflected by their actions and their appearance...
...When I worked I had to pay somebody to take care of the kids...
...Most of them, like Sondra Angel, slip in and out of the work force...
...I was paying two-seventy a month rent and forty a week for food, plus ten bucks a day for child care every day I worked or looked for a job.'' By this time, the welfare office in San Luis Obispo County had learned that Sondra was in San Francisco...
...In Baltimore, a convicted prostitute told a judge,"At least I'm not on welfare, I'm proud to say...
...Okay, so what happens now...
...They took her off their rolls and instructed her to reapply in San Francisco...
...For many it already has slipped away...
...A divorcee from a middle-class Chicago neighborhood admitted that she had kept her three children indoors eight hours a day for over two years because "I didn't want anyone to know I was on welfare...
...She don't need so much money...
...A welfare fraud investigor cornered her and she admitted her guilt...
...Their father, a Spanish-born Mexican exchange student whom Sondra had lived with for nearly four years but had never married, was back in Mexico...
...A Los Angeles police officer told a newspaper reporter, "I'd rather take a murderer to dinner...
...But in respect to those values, they view themselves as "failures...
...No one ranks lower than a welfare recipient in the public's eye...
...Later it was determined that his ex-wife had invented those payments in order to conceal the fact that she was receiving welfare...
...She had re-enrolled in school on the basis of receiving child support payments from him and "I didn't want to blow the whole thing by quitting in mid-semester...
...I'd've gone out and sold my body if I knew how - or thought I could get anything for it...
...She would collect $518 a month from welfare, while her net disposable income as a wage-earner comes to only $542...
...A Superior Court judge sentenced her to 10 days in jail, a fine of $500 and ordered her to pay restitution for the money that she illegally had received from welfare...
...it's a small town and "people talk...
...The Chicago Center for the Study of Welfare Reform reports that a working mother with two children who earns $4 an hour in New York City would be better off financially not working at all...
...By then I was desperate...
...Listen, I was really pushed for money...
...When the three-year-old, Joaquin, developed alimentary tract problems, Sondra applied for AFDC (Aid for Dependent Children) in order to become eligible for Medicare...
...I needed the extra cash...
...I just . . ." she started, then slumped forward and dropped her hands into her lap...
...Despite her assertion to the contrary, Sondra Angel's case "was a re-run of what I hear twenty times a week," according to her probation officer...
Vol. 108 • June 1981 • No. 11
