Life in the Poorhouse

A Times reader suggested that the contemporary use of the term “poorhouse” evoked a “kinder, gentler, age when an effort was made to provide poor people with at least some form of housing.” Indeed, shelter may have been found in the poorhouse, but those needing refuge paid dearly for it.

Constructed on a vision of self-supporting, “houses of industry” where inmates would work as a means of stimulating industry and good habits, such a prophecy was never realized.

As an example, a legislative committee in New York stated in 1856 that the poorhouses of the state exhibited “. . . Such filth, nakedness, licentiousness, general bad morals . . . (and) gross neglect of the most ordinary comforts and decencies of life, as if published in detail would disgrace the state and shock humanity.”

Yet even though the poorhouse failed in its noble mission, the shame and degradation associated with it functioned for a time, as the “last resort” of dependency, thereby ensuring a rough distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. It swept the streets of vagrants and beggars, removing the marginal poor into wage labor, at any price, when faced with the alternatives of incarceration or starvation.

Why was the institution abandoned, your reader asks? Overwhelmed by the sheer number of dependents, conditions deteriorated to the point where the facility was viewed as both a political liability and a cause of poverty rather than a solution to it. Recent efforts to resurrect the poorhouse concept in Sacramento have attempted to recreate the “last resort” character of dependency.

Maybe this is the “kinder and gentler” policies we have to look forward to in this age.

WILLIAM G. STAPLES

Culver City