Adding Spring to the Safety Net: Expanding Work Programs for Poor Men
September 26, 2011
Online registration for this event is closed. Walk-in registrations will be accepted.
If you cannot attend, we welcome you to watch the event live on this page.
Bipartisan welfare reform efforts of the mid-1990s, which required poor mothers to work in return for assistance, cut the welfare rolls in half and helped many families escape poverty. But to fully address family poverty in America, the same lessons need to be applied to nonworking men. Lawrence M. Mead, author of Expanding Work Programs for Poor Men (AEI Press, 2011), argues that poor fathers, like welfare mothers, need "both help and hassle." That is, they need better benefits, but they must also be expected--and required--to help themselves. His strategy is to graft new work programs on to the child-support and criminal-justice systems that already deal with low-income men, moving them from the underclass into the working class. Elaine Sorensen of the Urban Institute and Judge Kristin H. Ruth will respond.
If you cannot attend, we welcome you to watch the event live on this page.
Bipartisan welfare reform efforts of the mid-1990s, which required poor mothers to work in return for assistance, cut the welfare rolls in half and helped many families escape poverty. But to fully address family poverty in America, the same lessons need to be applied to nonworking men. Lawrence M. Mead, author of Expanding Work Programs for Poor Men (AEI Press, 2011), argues that poor fathers, like welfare mothers, need "both help and hassle." That is, they need better benefits, but they must also be expected--and required--to help themselves. His strategy is to graft new work programs on to the child-support and criminal-justice systems that already deal with low-income men, moving them from the underclass into the working class. Elaine Sorensen of the Urban Institute and Judge Kristin H. Ruth will respond.
