To most Americans, the idea of using orphanages to break the cycle of poverty for the next generation seems a radical, cold-hearted proposal espoused by conservatives who want to slash the welfare state.
But Alphonso Jackson, an African-American who has spent the better part of his career running public housing projects, has been advocating a similar idea since 1983, long before sociologist-provocateur Charles Murray or House Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich were talking about it.
Now chief executive of the Dallas Public Housing Authority, Jackson said his experiences with welfare families over more than a decade have convinced him that too few inner-city children face a future other than welfare or prison.
“That’s child abuse,” said Jackson, who argues that it would be more humane to remove them from crime-ridden, impoverished surroundings and place them in tightly run boarding schools.
He recalled a recent encounter with a 30-year-old welfare mother whose 15-year-old daughter just gave birth to a baby boy.
The new grandmother, he said, was listening to music on a boombox with several men “who looked like they were on drugs. They were laughing (about the baby.) They thought it was funny,” Jackson said.
“The chances of that baby ever having a productive life are almost nil. The chances of his mother or grandmother ever getting off welfare are almost nil.
“Logic tells me that the only chance of giving him a future is to put him in an environment where people will teach him moral and spiritual values, along with the three R’s, and by the time he’s 17, we will have produced a human being who will become a taxpayer.”
Of course, most welfare parents aren’t dysfunctional or neglectful of their children.
While Jackson and Gingrich view orphanages or boarding schools as a sensible component of a tough-love approach to welfare reform, others dismiss such proposals as unrealistic, mean-spirited and outrageously costly.
“It’s terrible and it’s expensive and there’s no point in even thinking about it,” said Ann Hartman, dean emeritus at Smith College’s School of Social Work and a child-care expert. “Gingrich is a backward idiot who knows nothing about children.”
Taking kids away from their parents simply because they are poor “is a chilling idea,” said Frances Fox Piven, political science professor at City University of New York and a founder of the welfare rights movement. “It will never happen.”
Even apart from the potentially disastrous effect on children’s emotional development, the cost of institutional care (at least $36,000 per child annually) would far exceed the expense of the current welfare system (about $2,500 a year per child), said David Leaderman, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America.
The sudden burst of media attention on modern-day orphanages has focused on places such as Boys Town, the fabled Omaha home that evokes Hollywood-style images of troubled youths finding new lives under the guidance of loving clergy members.
But the history of such facilities is mixed at best. In 1909, under the Taft administration, inadequate conditions in the nation’s orphanages prompted a White House conference on children to conclude that parentless youths should be placed with families rather than in institutions.
As psychologists learned more about child development, the foster-care system was developed for maintaining children in long-term, familial situations.
A sign of changing attitudes was the federal “mothers’ pension” program, a precursor to the current welfare system, begun in the 1930s in order to keep fatherless families together.
“If they don’t have continuous relationships with one or two caretakers, children grow up unable to form personal attachments, unable to care,” Hartman said. “If you look at the histories of (notorious sociopaths), you’ll find people who have been shoved from home to home.”
After World War II, “orphanages just about disappeared as places for domiciling children,” Hartman said. Today, orphanages and group homes exist predominantly as places for kids with emotional or behavorial problems or other special needs.
Attempts to revive their role surfaced several years ago as social crises inundated the child-care system with abused and forgotten youths.
In the late 1980s, for example, New York City opened 17 orphanages to relieve an overburdened foster-care system but later closed them when the young wards failed to thrive.
“They were all total disasters,” Hartman said. “Kids had nine or 10 different adults taking care of them. They weren’t vaccinated. They were rocking in their cribs and banging their heads.”
And now, with welfare reform at the top of the Republican priority list for 1995, Gingrich has included orphanages as one of a range of solutions in his proposed “Contract with America.”
Gingrich’s plan, designed to reduce the number of teen pregnancies and illegitimate births, would drastically overhaul the rules recipients would have to follow in order to recieve a check from the $23 billion Aid to Families with Dependent Children program.
If the plan were approved by Congress, women who bore illegitimate children when they were younger than 18 would no longer be eligible for cash assistance, and states would be allowed to also bar those who did so before age 21.
All recipients, except in cases of rape or incest, would have to identify their children’s fathers. After two years on AFDC, mothers would be required to take jobs. And they would automatically be dropped from the rolls after a total of five years of benefits.
Experts estimate that, if such rules were adopted, about 5 million children would lose financial support because their mothers were cut from AFDC rolls. That’s nearly half the 9.7 million children in the program.
What would happen to those kids?
Many cash-strapped families would likely double up with relatives or friends. Others would simply be left destitute, become homeless or resort to criminal means to get by.
No one has proposed forcibly removing children from poor homes-legally the government hasn’t the right to do so without documented evidence of neglect or abuse. But without the means to provide for their kids, abandonments, abuse and neglect would undoubtedly rise, further swamping the already strained foster-care system.
To handle the influx, Gingrich has proposed taking the savings that result from reduced AFDC rolls (estimated at $40 billion over five years) and giving the funds to states to run orphanages and group homes for children. They also could use the money to operate homes for unwed mothers and programs for discouraging out-of-wedlock births.
But would it be enough money?
Child-care experts predicted that about 1 million kids-and perhaps as many as 3 million-would be in need of institutional care.
With orphanages running at a minimal cost of about $100 a day, the cost of residential care for so many children could range from $37 billion to $120 billion annually, far more than Gingrich’s plan would ever save. And that would only cover expenses for a bare-bones facility.
“That’s essentially warehousing them,” Hartman said. Taking a more lavish approach, as author Murray has suggested, offering high-quality education and care, would cost two or three times as much, if not more, she said.
Republicans suggest charities would step in to fill the need, but few believe the private sector would be able to close such a large cost gap.
Already some are backing away from Gingrich’s proposal for orphanages.
“The federal government has never built orphanages and never will,” vowed Rep. Clay Shaw (R-Fla.), who will head the Ways and Means subcommittee presiding over welfare reform bills.
Yet with states already hard-pressed to cope with growing numbers of troubled children, whether or not orphanage proposals are dropped on Capitol Hill could be a moot point if Congress slashes welfare funding while attaching stringent time limits and work rules to AFDC.
“If current programs are dismantled, you could find orphanages emerging as the only alternative,” said Ronald Feldman, dean of Columbia University’s School of Social Work.
Already an Illinois task force is working on recommendations that the state create orphange-like homes to alleviate the growing caseload at the state Department of Children and Family Services.
Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly believe children in welfare families are better off with their parents. For example, a survey by Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation in Washington found 77 percent oppose the notion of moving children into orphanages until their mother or father finds a job that removes them from welfare rolls.
Feldman suggested that instead of spending money on orphanages, poor families would benefit more from counseling, parent training and child-care programs.
“What we need are multiservice centers offering help to parents in high-risk neighborhoods,” he said. “All of these things would cost far less than orphanages, while reflecting true family values and sound ideas about child development.”
