A Second Chance for Low-Income Men

Editor's note: This post is contributed by Monica Potts, Senior Writer at the American Prospect and Fellow in the Asset Building Program. This post previews an event on Friday, April 11th exploring the challenges of reentering the financial mainstream after incarceration. Please join us in person or as part of our online audience.

Fatherhood, and the role black men take on as fathers, has been a favorite topic of the President’s, to the point where some of his speeches on the topic can sound like conservative hectoring. In March, Obama launched a “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative to improve outcomes for young black and Latino men. At the same time, Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee, decided to turn his attention to inner-city black men as well, launching a new debate about the challenges those men face. This new focus was a big reason I wanted to concentrate on low-income men in Baltimore for my most recent article in The American Prospect.
 
National-level anti-poverty programs have traditionally left low-income men out of the equation. Policy-makers have assumed men had jobs, or were capable of getting jobs. Financial assistance was reserved for widows and single-mothers—women who had in one way or another been, it was thought, abandoned by their paycheck-earning men.
 
Those assumptions remained in place with The Family Support Act of 1988, and welfare reform, in 1996. When men came into the picture, the policy challenges centered on forcing absent fathers to help support their children. Some of this was necessary. At the time, two-thirds of fathers who didn’t live with their children did not pay child support, and finding them and making them pay was difficult. New laws made it easier to collect, and also allowed states to use child support payments to reimburse themselves for funds used to support mothers and children through programs like welfare and childcare support. But a 2001 study from the Urban Institute found that about a quarter of those who did not pay were poor themselves, and had barriers to employment that resembled those of poor mothers, like low education levels. Unlike women, however, these men did not have access to job-training courses provided by programs like welfare, and it was harder for them to qualify for other programs that would support then as they transitioned into jobs, like food stamps.
 
During the George W. Bush administration, the role that men played within their families as fathers and husbands became more of a concern. Most of it, however, was directed at whether or not they would marry the women with whom they had children. The marriage promotion classes Bush started redirected money from Temporary Aid to Needy Families in order to convince low-income parents to get married, in the hopes that their children would do better and be more likely to move up the income ladder later in life. The classes, by and large, did not raise marriage rates. Bush also signed the first Second Chance Act, a law which provides money for programs that help men re-enter society and get jobs after prison is up for renewal in the next fiscal year. Under Obama, the goals of the marriage-promotion classes changed to helping relationships between low-income parents stay healthy, whether they are married or not, and engaging men in fatherhood programs. He also worked to integrate workforce-development and re-entry programs into issues of fatherhood as well.
 
The Center for Urban Families in West Baltimore, where I focused my piece, has lived through all of these policy changes. It began in 1999 as both a workforce-development and fatherhood training center. It adopted marriage-promotion classes during the Bush administration, but evaluations found that actually made men less likely to get married. (Researchers theorized that once men learned all that was involved in a healthy marriage, they felt less able to live up to expectations.) Now, it has a course for couples. The center has always worked to support men getting jobs and finding ways to be involved with their children, even when prison or splits with children’s mothers make it difficult. It’s fifteen-year life as an organization focused on helping low-income men is rare.
 
Joseph T. Jones, the founder of the center, has been involved in policy discussions in Maryland and Washington, D.C. since he founded the center. “One of the gifts that God has given me is the ability to infiltrate—infiltrate is not the word I should use, but that’s the only way I can describe it—is to infiltrate and get into the room, to get into the room and learn and observe,” he says. He’s active in advocating policy changes that make it more likely that men and women can work together in raising their children even if they are not married, and reduce the child-support arrearages that can accumulate when men are in prison and not earning wages. It’s the flipside of the work he does at the center, especially the intense workforce-training program that teaches people soft-skills they might not have, called Strive. “We’re in that room asking those people, those men and women, change your behavior,” he says. “But then you look on TV and there are nuts in DC not doing it.”
 
For all of the new attention on low-income men and ex-offenders, Jones often reminds policy-makers about how difficult these men’s lives are. Racism works against them in the job market. They’re raised in violent neighborhoods. The prison population has exploded nationwide in the past three decades, and by and large most of the people in prison are black men. They leave prison to find few opportunities, and a society that isn’t keen on offering second chances.
 
In November, Jones was asked to speak on a panel at the Brookings Institution about a trial program in New York City that would expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, the refundable tax credit that helps the working poor, to noncustodial parents, most of whom are men. Traditionally, the tax credit for that population has been so low that it’s barely a benefit. The New York program would put the money these men receive more in line with what women qualify for. Now, Obama has proposed expanding the EITC to noncustodial parents at the federal level in his most recent budget. But at the Brookings event, Jones cautioned against needing to see results right away. He noted that $2,000 a year in extra benefits for working a $7-an-hour job might not be much when weighed against the forces at work against them. “When you think about the dire circumstances of these guys, the likelihood that you’re going to get significant outcomes early on, you know, is not realistic,” he said. “But it’s the right thing to do.”