Do Social Work Institutions Really Help?

An Interview with William Epstein

Aired February 1, 2000

David C. Barnett–Sociologist William Epstein makes the argument that our social work instituions, though well-intentioned, actually do little for the people they're supposed to help. Epstein is a professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He notes that broken, single families have been the major source of the increase in poverty in the past few decades.

William Epstein–Well, if you take folks living on working class salaries, and they split up, it means there's got to be two households, and if the mother's got to stay home with the kids, it means there's still pretty much one income. So you've got one marginal income now divided among two households, plus a little bit of welfare, and this has been one of the major sources of the stability of the poverty rate in the United States for 25-30 years. One would have expected "if a rising tide lifts all boats," one would have expected a much smaller proportion of the population under the poverty line, but indeed it stayed the same pretty much for 15-20 years now.

DCB–You cite foster care as a classic social service substitute for a broken home. What does that imply?

WE–Well, the whole point of foster care is to provide an alternative family when none exists. You can take a look at social serivces in two regards. One tries to compensate or provide a substitute for a social institution that doens't exist or didn't function like the family. The other is through things like counseling as an attempt to short circuit the process of deprivation and the problems that come out of it, and through a couple of hours of speaking to an allegedly intelligent person, trying to restore deviant behavior to customary behavior, so foster care is the heart of social work, which is to provide these alternative environments for the millions of children who don't have natural families, and it's failed terribly.

DCB–So what are they doing, are they providing band-aid solutions to bigger problems or what exactly?

WE–Not even that. I think it's public abuses of substitute for private abuse. The wealthiest nation in history of the world, wealthier than it's ever been can't provide decent living environments for children without families. It's a sign of American cruelty, where the upper-upper culture in the United States, an extraordinary thing, the United States has achieved a level of sophistication and a level of wealth unprecedented and a level of democracy, even. But along with that comes an extraordinary amount of cruelty, especially to the 700,000 children who are in foster care at any time, plus the 20-some-odd percent of kids who are in poverty at any time.

DCB–How would you say that it is cruel to be in the foster care system?

WE–Oh, there's an enormous amount of abuse that continues. They force the families that come up to volunteer to handle the kids routinely damage themselves. It's got poor people providing services to other poor people and it's not done out of love, it's done out of need for money. The institutions of the congregate homes of foster care are atroities by and large.

DCB–But are you saying that there is no good foster care? I mean, there's good foster parents out there.

WE–A couple, but certainly not the level that is needed, and I say a couple advisedly for the 20 years that I've been teaching. I routinely ask students and workers in the foster care system, what percent did your foster parents should be in foster care themselves, perhaps about 25-30-35% are patently incapable of taking care of themselves, let alone other people.

DCB–So, in your view, how would we do this better?

WE–You've got to spend more money, you've got to create decent places like Boys' Town, for example, and their appropriate supervision, and you've got to sort of acknowledge that many children aren't going to be adopted or restored to families and we've got to be prepared to provide a decent environment for many, many years to children who need it, and we don't do that now.

DCB–So how does Boys' Town do it differently?

WE–Well, they spend $55-60,000 a year per child, and they provide all the substitutes that are needed, and they should be given credit because the cottage parents seem to be doing an awfully good job. Of course, there's no substitute for a good family, but there sure as heck is a good substitute for a lousy family. Indeed, we have a public culture, a public civic culture that's really a mirror on our charitable, and it's to convince ourselves how good we are, but the values that are underneath, that determine American social welfare choices, are simply appaling, they're selfish, they're anti-republican, they're geared to the marketplace, they're very ingenerous values and we see this with the SSI. The SSI population of foster children with poor people, generally an unwillingness to spend money on obvious social problems in the United States, and we're wealthy enough now to do whatever we wish with our money. We can solve almost any social problem we address. We refuse.

DCB–Thank you, Dr. Epstein.

WE–Thank you, sir.

DCB–William M. Epstein is a professor of social work at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. His most recent book is Children That Could Have Been: The Legacy of Child Welfare in Wealthy America.