In a Sacramento Yard, Good People Finally See Their Dirty Work

The nation has been shocked by news that seven old people may have been murdered and buried on the grounds of their Sacramento boarding house for the sake of their Social Security checks. How could such a thing happen? Who is responsible?

As the story has unfolded, attention has focused on the criminal record of the suspect, the investigative failure of the police, the failure of federal agents to supervise a parolee who was known to be dangerous, the oversight provided by the county mental-health department, the licensing practices of state agencies and the policies of the Social Security Administration, which allow others to cash checks for mentally impaired recipients of disability insurance.

Now a social worker steps forward to report that some or all of the bodies dug from the ground may have been those of clients whom she referred to the boarding house. We are told that such clients are often disturbed and abusive; they get drunk and vomit and pass out; they take drugs and have hallucinations and paranoid ideas. No one wants these people. Their need for care is often desperate. Desperation can lead to the erosion of standards and to taking risks when no alternative care is available.

What concerns me is that care for the frail elderly, for the chronically ill and dependent, for neglected and abused children is often determined in the face of desperation. And that in our search for someone to blame we may fail to address such desperation as a major cause of what occurred in Sacramento--desperation resulting from that absence of alternatives, that bankruptcy of caring resources, that leads so often to placing dependent children and adults at risk of injury to their lives, their well-being, their dignity and self-respect. Over and over again we read of under funded programs in mental health, in child-protective services, in care for the frail elderly and the chronically ill. It is easy to be indifferent to the impersonal message of statistical and budget analysis. But the murder of real, identifiable human beings is not so easy to push aside.

After World War II, sociologist Everett Hughes undertook to explain how it was that the good people of Germany allowed such dirty work to be done in their name in the concentration camps. He described a process in which good people build social distance between themselves and dirty work. Social distance encourages the perception that we are dealing with things rather than people, with groups rather than persons--with the poor, the sick, the mentally ill, the winos, the homeless. They are not like us. They think and feel differently, even strangely. The very fact of such difference explains why they suffer and we do not.

This process works well as long as great social distance is maintained, as long as good people are not forced to know those who suffer in personal terms. Let one case be known, let one victim be humanized so that we can identify with him, and we will shower him with contributions and change every rule to be helpful. Confronted with their humanity, we are not able to deny our own.

We have a vested interest in not knowing. There is an unspoken compact between good people and dirty workers (teachers, nurses, physicians, judges, child-care and nursing-home workers who serve the institutionalized poor). “Do your dirty work but don’t tell us about it; don’t confront us with unpleasantness.”

The police, parole officers, mental-health workers, social workers and others can tell us a lot about the community’s dirty work. Fortunately, one social worker in Sacramento has been brave enough to come forward, brave enough to escape the fear of blame, brave enough to break the compact of silence between good people and dirty workers. She has told how bad it really is, how few are the resources for the mentally disturbed, how desperate is their need .

We have to try to hear that message and to connect it to the statistics that we hear about people and budgets. Cutting budgets for the human services has consequences. One consequence is a sense of desperation in providing care for those in need. One consequence of desperation is that risks are taken that place people in danger of harm from those on whom they depend for care.

While it may lack the satisfaction of a finding of individual guilt and the simplicity of punishing an individual offender, it is important that good people know about the dirty work that is being done in their name. Perhaps then they will accept responsibility for the failure to support the range of human services required to replace desperation with choice and the assurance of safety for those who are unable to protect themselves.