MEMOIR ON PAUPERISM.<i> By Alexis de...

It was only last year that pundits were poking fun at Hillary Rodham Clinton, pictured on the dust jacket of her hasty, ghosted book “It Takes A Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us” in Good Housekeeping-esque hairdo, pastel suit and pearls. The left called her a “village idiot” (The Nation) dispensing “campaign theater.” The right, full of its own theatrical indignation (Bob Dole), proclaimed that it takes a family, not a village. Others in the trenches of social service joked that what it really takes is the Village People--an Indian chief, a construction worker, etc.

You don’t hear much laughing now. A punitive welfare reform law (the imminent shredding of the safety net, transfer of money and authority to states and localities), corporate downsizing and the growing gap between the rich and the poor, all amid seemingly intractable social problems, keep dragging the worn cliche back onto center stage, where it is obvious that reclaiming the better aspects of our tribal inclinations to mutual support is an obvious and urgent priority. Perhaps our only hope.

In a recently reissued and largely unknown “Memoir on Pauperism,” Alexis de Tocqueville shows us that these issues are nothing new. In 1833, he toured a prosperous England that was on the brink of reducing the number of public aid recipients, which had soared to one-sixth of the population. He describes a public hearing at which able-bodied people unashamedly demanding assistance included regulars at the local tavern, an abandoned mother with her well-to-do father-in-law and an unmarried mother whose partner approvingly watched her ask for aid. While acknowledging that private charity is not always “aroused by every cry of pain,” Tocqueville was convinced that “any permanent, regular administrative system whose aim will be to provide for the needs of the poor will breed more miseries than it can cure. . . .”

Paradoxically, Tocqueville concluded that the richer the country, the bigger problem it usually has with the poor. The more wealth, comforts and education some people acquire, the more they feel the need to compensate those left behind; the more the underclass feels entitled to compensation for less-than-basic needs, he observes, the more dependent it becomes.

In “The Corner,” we come face to face with just how miserable modern poverty has become. The authors of this unsentimental narrative--journalist David Simon (author of “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets,” which inspired the TV show of the same name) and Edward Burns, a retired Baltimore police investigator--zoom in on the bottom feeders and lost souls who inhabit Fayette Street in West Baltimore, an area of more than 100 brazen open-air drug markets, with one of the highest rates of drug use in the nation.

Policies to fix the problem have been unrealistic, contend the authors, who want us to face real people, real circumstances and the real reasons programs designed by and for a middle-class mind-set don’t work. This is another world, operating on a drug-based economy, in which kids grow up learning to go to court with a clean toothbrush (in case they don’t come back home) and where it seems easier to take a knife to a welfare caseworker than to “hack through the paperwork.” Teachers are assaulted and remedial students get promoted because the system can’t sustain a 60% failure rate. Maryland has 20,000 prison beds, but in Baltimore alone there are more than 18,000 drug arrests each year among the estimated 50,000 cocaine and heroin users. Of those who can get into a publicly funded drug treatment center, only a third succeed in kicking the habit.

At the center of the story is DeAndre McCullough, the teenage son of a single mother who gets high every day and a father who fell into addiction and petty thievery after a brief success as a workaholic, Mercedes-driving businessman. The supporting characters include Fat Curt, a bloated addict who works as a “tout” (directing clients to his dealer); Rita, a staggeringly degenerate “doctor” who helps the junkies find veins; Ella Thompson, a straight-edge mom who struggles to run a recreation center, planning junior high dances for teenagers who are already sexually active and basketball leagues for boys already running in gangs; and Tyreeka Freamon, DeAndre’s girlfriend who, at 13, gives birth to their son, DeAnte.

The facts of their lives were gathered during 1993 by the authors, who visited the neighborhood daily, practicing what they call “stand-around-and-watch journalism.” The result is an occasionally meandering, but overall devastating, account of the almost daily hardening of children’s hearts and hopes. It is unbearably heartbreaking to read.

Even at 15, the macho heroin slinger DeAndre still mirrors his mother’s efforts to get herself straight, going to school when he can, backsliding when he fails a class. He gives up dating when Tyreeka gives birth and sincerely plans for their future, but after a few weeks, the pressures of domesticity send him back to the street life.

It doesn’t take long for the culture of the street to turn DeAndre into a promise breaker. One of the bleakest scenes occurs on Christmas Day, when DeAndre’s mother, Fran, stages a Norman Rockwell-like dinner for the family members left in the neighborhood. DeAndre staggers in late and loaded, rubs his baby’s head, takes his plate to the sofa where Tyreeka has been waiting for him, watching TV, for three hours. He changes the program to an action movie. She protests, “I was watching that.” He answers, “Not no more.”

Observers and analysts foremost, the authors offer no practical solutions. If there were hope, in their view, it would have to involve the systematic reintegration of the inner city into the nation’s economic fabric, a proposal that would demand “prolonged energy and will and a connectedness between classes and races that no longer exists and may never have existed.” It would require the restraint of “‘unbridled capitalism.” It would not include passing a welfare reform law that comes down to blaming the neighbors on Fayette Street for making choices the authors believe “were never really choices at all.”

In contrast, Lisbeth Schorr, head of the Harvard University Project on Effective Intervention and author of “Common Purpose,” offers not only hope but also evidence that “the system” can reform itself to respond more effectively to the problems of youth violence, school failure, intergenerational poverty, single parenthood and child abuse.

Schorr, who wrote about breaking the cycle of disadvantage in her 1988 book, “Within Our Reach,” observes that many successful small-scale programs are often defeated when they attempt to expand--not only because of the large social forces aligned against them, but also because of the system itself.

Schorr spent seven years on “Common Purpose,” reviewing 40 initiatives in 20 states and interviewing more than 200 practitioners, administrators, funders and scholars. She learned that irony and paradox abound in human services: Whenever a limited program achieves success, the main obstacle to the government spreading it around is its procedures and the mind-set of its administrators.

Many of the problems stem from rigid rules to prevent wrongdoing or scandal and measurements of success based on how well those rules are being followed. Any case worker reading this book will be depressingly familiar with the maze of expanding service categories and dehumanized regulations that can be imposed upon the most vulnerable children and families. Schorr documents a number of their stories:

* A New York foster child placed in 37 homes in two months.

* A total of 238 programs for Los Angeles students defined as being “at risk.”

* Three professionals working with a troubled Milwaukee teenager, each aware that the family had been without electricity for six weeks but none acting to get the lights turned back on because it wasn’t in her job description.

* A supervisor in Maryland who says his case workers do an “excellent job” keeping errors low by making sure each welfare applicant completes 20 forms but have no time “to spend with the human being.”

Schorr strengthens her case by appreciating the real dilemmas in social service, such as the long-standing and legitimate fears over too much discretion by those on the front line. Invoking the cases of Rodney King and Mark Fuhrman, she writes, “There is no overestimating the terror that discretion in the hands of omnipotent police officers, prison guards, housing inspectors, welfare workers and psychiatric attendants can strike in the hearts of those at their mercy.”

She also acknowledges and supports conservatives’ concern with accountability, calling for new types of program evaluations, like those already being implemented in Oregon that measure the obvious bottom line: whether children and families are actually better off. These evaluations would combine “hunch” and “insight” with logic and evidence. While some practitioners prefer to justify their programs with the Mother Teresa approach (“God has called on me not to be successful but to be faithful”), Schorr realizes that faith is not enough. Demonstrable efficiency is essential to obtain public and political support for social programs.

The need to mend our villages has never been more critical in light of the 1996 repeal of federal guarantees of support for poor children that restructured Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the nation’s 61-year-old cash assistance program, and the passage of rigid work requirements for their low-skilled mothers. Advocates for the poor fear the policies that make as much sense as the lifeguard in a New Yorker cartoon who, ignoring a drowning swimmer, explains to a group of onlookers, “We’re encouraging people to become involved in their own rescue.”

Real welfare reform, according to Schorr, would require that the lifeguard not only abdicate his role but provide adequately paid jobs and quality child care to save the swimmers. Cutting off benefits to teenage mothers is much less likely to help them succeed, help them obtain adequately paying jobs, she argues, than improving the social conditions that have lowered the girls’ horizons. As in other successful programs, what matters in preventing teen pregnancy is having a portfolio of remedies that addresses multiple factors over a long period of time.

In Schorr’s view, law and policymakers must understand that there will never be a single magic bullet or a quick fix. What are already working to make welfare, child-protection and school programs creative and safe, flexible and accountable, reliable and effective are multi-pronged, custom-tailored, long-term approaches. In addition, according to Schorr, bureaucrats must be willing to decentralize and embrace public-private funding and partnerships with families and communities. Collaborating in long-term programs staffed by professionals will surely be messy. And undoubtedly costly. But Schorr says that it doesn’t seem much compared with incarceration, foster care, rehabilitation and lost lives.

Most readers probably won’t get through all 484 pages (including notes), of “Common Purpose,” and Schorr’s arguments, which occasionally fall into wonk-like jargon, are unlikely to convince those who insist that poverty is the result of moral failing and are determined to dismantle rather than reform ineffective government.

The book’s biggest contribution may lie in Schorr’s compilation of 22 pioneering reforms, already well underway but rarely reported because of their typically low drama and high complexity. Fellow reformers will find support in the scope of experiments--from home visiting to school-community collaborations and literacy programs--that embody many of her practical solutions: Adapt a successful program to its new setting, obtain the permanent backing of an intermediary organization, respect both the people and the institutional contexts, use an outcomes-based evaluation and tackle the problems associated with large-scale change.

Pioneering reforms are in place in Michigan and Los Angeles County, where decentralized family preservation programs have been instituted to deal with escalating numbers of children separated from their families and placed in foster care, mostly because of substance abuse-related neglect. The programs developed relationships with nonprofit agencies in the neighborhoods that offer or subcontract for a wide range of services. Working in partnership with the parents themselves, they provide housing assistance, drug treatment, parenting classes or other services close to home. In Los Angeles County, early figures showed one-third fewer children entering foster care in the areas were the networks were operating. There were similar decreases in Michigan, which expanded the program to all 82 counties in the state by 1995. The success of the Michigan program stimulated reforms to decategorize funds and grant waivers to remove rules and regulations that were not family-friendly.

In New York, YouthBuild, a program for young people with high-risk backgrounds that teaches construction and leadership skills through building housing in their communities, has grown to 100 programs in 34 states, through a collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which selects the sites; a local policy committee; and an advisor on call 24 hours a day.

Schorr cites cities such as Baltimore, Newark and Boston that have revived inner cores with comprehensive community development projects that not only rehabilitate housing but also bring in social services with residents at the helm and funding from public and philanthropic sources.

Attending to those neighborhoods--and the small businesses they entice--will be crucial to our future work life, according to author Tom Shachtman, who shows us the inner workings of Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood in “Around the Block.” His lively look at the multiethnic residential and business block (between West 17th and 18th streets) follows the lives of the daytime shopkeepers for a year, but his aim is to illuminate the future workplace for almost everyone.

As he observes, 75% of the population of the United States will soon be working and / or living in or near large metropolitan areas, and as corporate giants downsize, small companies are becoming the source of first-time jobs for most people. As Chelsea goes, he figures, “so goes the future of our nation’s cities.”

Actually, not a lot happened around the block during 1993, but we do meet some interesting people: Helen, a computer game programmer who risks her and her husband’s nest egg on an idea she’s sure will sell; Marc, whose financially troubled adoptive father committed suicide so that Marc would inherit the business; and Alan, a whirling dervish of “mental capital,” a building owner who once chaired the psychology department at the University of Maryland, hosts a radio talk show, volunteers in the mayor’s office, serves on the block’s Democratic committee, is writing a book and is studying Spanish.

After a year, some businesses have succeeded, some have failed. Some find they are mutually dependent. Even as Barneys, the block’s big fish, stumbles toward bankruptcy, it sends business to an architect and ventures into new projects with a restauranteur.

Other businesses get ahead by defining community as a smaller circle based on ethnic roots. Low-cost start-up loans for members of their communities were offered by established Korean American businesses, the Hebrew Free Loan Society and similar Italian and Irish organizations.

Among the most useful lessons offered by Shachtman: Be sure to buy the building your business occupies because you can’t trust your landlord. By the spring of 1997, about 20% of the storefronts had changed hands. Most had gone out of business or moved because they couldn’t afford the rent hikes.

Tocqueville in “Memoir on Pauperism” was also intrigued by the possibility of individual property ownership giving the working poor a stake in the future. In her introduction to the memoir, conservative scholar Gertrude Himmelfarb notes that Tocqueville also wrote an unfinished sequel in which he struggled with several ways this goal might be accomplished. He concluded, however, that none could avoid encouraging the undesirable growth of powerful, centralized organizations--in short, a governmental bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, Tocqueville believed remedies could be found, as long as we do not delude ourselves into thinking a rising tide will automatically raise all boats. As long as there is progress, he wrote, some parts of society will become better educated and standards of living will rise, while at the other extreme, more people will need help to share in those benefits. It will be possible to moderate these parallel movements, he concluded, “but no one can stop it.”

What does it take? Surely, it takes a family that adores its members. It takes caring neighborhoods, churches and schools. It also takes leaders who can move beyond turf issues, professionals who are willing to tolerate the untidiness of human motivations and statesmen and women who accept responsibility for the common good without anesthetizing initiative.