I joke around that i started writing this book on the eisenhower administration. I spent close to a decade in trying to understand the main gear of poverty in the United States. I think of this research in this book as reflecting that are typical of cities throughout the nation. It is baltimore and it is an american story. It is not just a freak accident of nature. Its not just about baltimoreans living in poverty. It is about how our government and society interacts with impoverished people and a disproportionate number of whom happen to be africanamerican. What is the population in west baltimore and what are the demographics . Neighborhoods by conducting a research arm neighborhoods which are predominately black, where more than a third of young women have had at least one child in their teens, where income levels never surpass 10,000 to 15000 per year and where most significantly governing institutions, what i call minimal institutions are ever present. I believe one of the contributions of the book is to show for the first time the extent to which poverty in the United States is cared arise not just by material, but also the overwhelming crisis of government officials in the life of the poor. Recently i was interviewed by a Different Organization and i noticed as i do in the book that it is not unusual for a child born in west baltimore to be seen by a social worker before the child is seen by her or his mother. My interlocutor asked what is wrong with that. Nothing in particular, but it does show the beginning of a trend in which a child is as much of the object of concern of government officials as it is their parents. I am sure you realize that it not exactly would have been to middleclass families living in affluent neighborhoods. A child born under those circumstances will soon be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, will be attending schools that are understaffed, overburdened and often underfunded will in the early teens already have had some contact with government officials, whether in the form of social workers are in the form of correctional officers. Its not difficult when youre a kid in these neighborhoods to be perceived at the potential risk to society. So by your early finance committee life is pretty much been determined and it has occurred very much an interaction with government officials. I do give special attention in this book to something that has not been sufficiently documented , but which i feel constitutes the underbelly of success in the United States and that is the Child Protective Services place with respect to impoverished families. Impoverished families are overrepresented among those actual child abuse but i think we know now from a statistical account that most people who are in trouble with organizations Whose Mission is to protect children are people who are impoverished. So that is a sense of problem and as i try to say in this book, the stated mission of Child Protective Services is often a conflict with the actual effect and that is the intrusive measures on the part of these liminal institutions such as Child Protective Services and fracture will go 30 impoverished parents have with respect to their children. Why did she choose west baltimore . One at Johns Hopkins university and i was affiliated with the institute for politics with the great institution. Recently i set out to do some research in baltimore in both neighborhoods and to the publication of a very important book by William Julius wilson, hell will send out harvard then at chicago. It was a book that was published in 1987 called the truly disadvantaged. In that book argued very persuasively and very importantly the part of the problems faced by low income African American had to do with processes that deindustrialization and outsourcing. I was curious to know whether that actually was happening in baltimore because as you know, baltimore was midlevel in the city in the 1970s about 34,000 people were employed by bethlehem steel. By the time i started looking in to this question a much smaller number of people were in lloyd as bethlehem steel had been curtailing operations and moving them to overseas locations. As they try to write in this book, it is not very difficult to confirm what the wilson has done in chicago and that is the industrialization is the closer factories and other Industrial Facilities have had a dire effect upon africanamerican working families, but then i found myself surrounded by lots of children who were vivacious and lovely and had ambition and idea just above the map at me to become dated in the way in which children perceive this and what the actual conditions of their life were in those neighborhoods as i write in the introduction i knew them long enough and well enough that i could actually trace their life over a period of close to 10 years so that children whose hands i had held as little boys and girls, who grew up during that period to become High Schoolers and and pimps by 1997 when i arrived in princeton, at least two of those children in my circle have died violent deaths. Part of what it is a contribution at this book is to look at how things have been living in poverty in realtime. This is not a result of Statistical Research and it is not a result of impression. Many of the things that happened to the people whose lives are memorialized in this book happened and for that reason its a very sensitive material. I hope that is part of how we do science and then it adds that knowledge production in ways that matter, but it is also a very personal narratives. Professor, what do you mean by subliminal agency . I argue on the basis of a rather tedious Academic Research which may or may not enter the audits. The governments of the United States is quite extraordinary for the reasons i think are obvious. The framers of the constitution and other institutions in the country have tremendous foresight and the created institutions that rewarded mostly an immigrant population which i know we always turn them for word and the great nation. These were the descendents of european immigrants that were accumulation of property and greater access to education. And buttress the american dream. I get tearyeyed because i dont think it is some kind of sentimental truth by which we manipulate people. I think it is very true that is what the nation did. As a result, what they got was a whole series of mainstream Government Institution which deal with the defense on the basis of their citizen status. So even the most are conan of the mainstream Government Institutions, the Internal Revenue service as he probably realizes ultimately interested in one thing. Separating you from your money after which finance and initiatives in the society or the Social Security administration is a dream come true. Adults who receive Social Security payments know how well the institution works in a works while because the approach embedded in the procedures and the mission that those government offices our interlocutors said citizen and consumers. By contrast, the main argument of the book institutions of government that deal with impoverished people do not treat them as citizens and consumers primarily. But on the basis of what i call ambivalent in other lands. That is a mixture of suspicion so that the poor are mostly understood to be potential burdens on the society. The consequence is the procedures and ideas embedded in practices on the part of those institutions violate their bed is conventions. For example they often ask for special forms of certification including provision of what you and i would find totally unacceptable in our transactions with government officials. This is part of the legacy, which we received from england in terms of a perception in which we believe poverty is always the result of personal or Group Limitations so we always think for example as evidence of either list. In addition, because our government has been so successful in mustering human and Financial Resources it is one of those instances in which what is different about poverty in the United States, when you compare to poverty and other countries is here we have enough resources in order to interfere with the life of the poor but that life on the base. Patricia fernandezkelly, has the poverty and hopelessness in west baltimore then for a couple of generations . If so what is your solution for breaking that . I think what is important to understand the overarching argument of the book is as i understand these neighborhoods and throughout the nation is not just about material deprivation, but the very special relationship between the American Government and urban racially distinct populations. So blacks have always been overrepresented among the poor. I dont need to go into the whole historical account, but a poverty of a different kind began occurring throughout the 20th century when a very large number of africanamericans moved from the rural south to midwestern and southeastern cities. It was the great black migration, which peaked exactly begin in the processes that the industrialization. That is part of what explains the unique quality of the journey that . For the last to be incorporated, for example into labor unions and remunerative employment as both industries were beginning to close down. In addition to that end as part of the same process and i make a big deal of that in this book the levels of hostility confronted by a black internal migrants are without precedence. There is some people out there and i dont want to name names but they are quite victorious. They tend to be economists who make the argument that other immigrant groups have hostility and difficulties, yet they have succeeded were africanamerican continue to experience a large number of great difficulties and part of that has to do with reception. In other words the kind of opportunities or absence of opportunities that those migrants faced and i can guarantee and i have the facts to support this claim that africanamericans represent the truly exceptional case in terms of hostility they face. So what that resulted in without going into further detail is the presence throughout the nation of the highly segregated neighborhood in which you have wilson himself called concentrated poverty. This is different from having a few people, for example living in neighborhoods which are rather less affluent and have resources. When you have a majority of people in which everybody is black and everybody is poor the dynamics are very, very different. As for example douglas nancy, my colleague at the office of Population Research has shown in this book, american apartheid and more recent materials. One of them, climbing mount laurel. So high level residential segregation has been a major factor contributing to concentrated poverty. So the statement of the problem with a popular solution. One of the arguments made in this book is to programs for the poor have been notoriously unsuccessful and it pains me to say this because im a liberally minded person and so my people are liberals. The liberals have not been very good in the Design Program for the poor. You take this statement to a little bit of an extreme. I would say the programs of mostly benefited designers and implementors of the program. The reason is these programs are by and large focused on changing the behavior of the poor, not on changing the context which creates the problem of poverty. So if you state that, i would begin with policies that would contribute to to segregate those residential neighborhoods. Demonstration projects have shown that a transfer impoverished people into areas that are richer in terms of available resources, human as well as material of educational those families tend to be pretty well. Unfortunately, it tends that desegregating neighborhood lead to a tremendous resistant on the part of people who really dont want poor individuals and families in their own areas. I have great hope and belief in the values that formed this great nation at some point we will have it go on and there are going to be new policy measures aimed precisely at creeping lower level residential segregation which i think i can assure you we will never have a change in those conditions. The kinds of people that i write about and whose lives they try to memorialize here the book is organized around the biography of impoverished people, partly because i believe we never have given impoverished people the benefit of the extent to celebrities and that is they have a biography. Do you support merely to illustrate social problems. The book that i tried to acknowledge in this book represents between 20 and 30 million americans and they are almost invincible to more affluent and educated people. For them most of the work i did for this book occurred in the 90s. The memories that people memorialized in the book, taken back to at least the 20th century and it took me a long time to write the book. When i worried about those materials which has meant so much to me the one thing i didnt worry about was whether they were time sensitive because they are now. In other words, now after the book has been published i am still in touch with many people who i knew when they were very little in their lives basically every producing the same cycle of isolation and poverty that has been care to raise stake of their parents and grandparents. So they dont represent the majority of africanamericans but they represent a very significant number of people who are disproportionately affect did by surveillance excessive levels of surveillance, contained any punishment and the overwhelming presence of the state in their life. Who was pink floyd . Guest big floyd is a man who i met in the mid1990s. Big floyd who is now deceased by the way, was a man who is constantly seeking to be a good father and that was part of what i found very moving about him because he was not particularly stable. I contrasted his own biography to the biography of a very dear, dear man in my life Donald Bradley will send who represents chapter one of the book and mr. Wilson actually have come from the south and had actually been able to form a middleclass life. What is interesting to me is big floyd had very much the same aspirations as mr. Wilson. One of the main differences is for mr. Wilson had been able to land a job with an industrial firm, by the time floyd came around, that was not possible. So as a result of the life of big floyd represents a moment in the 1990s in which an increasing number of africanamerican young men could not find gainful employment. And yet he kept on trying and trying. It was not the person i ever met, but he really tried to bring his children back together and be a father. And the course of his life, the most dramatic moment, a man who didnt train didnt smoke didnt do drugs. I tell my students by the standards he was way ahead of me because i did smoke and a good drink although i never did drugs. The point that im making with my students in that respect is if you are going to use a moral yardstick to measure the worthiness of impoverished people, big floyd is not going to help you because he was a pretty moral person and he very much wanted to be a father. Eventually he did get a job as a Security Guard and in order to make sure this would turn into a permanent job, he needed clearance from the