Poverty is not simply a matter of small incomes. It is in the backaches of home health aides and certified nursing assistants, who bend their bodies to hoist the old and sick out of beds and off toilets it is in the feet and knees of cashiers made to stand while taking our orders and ringing up our items it is in the skin rashes and migraines of maids who clean our office buildings, homes, and hotel rooms with products containing ammonia and triclosan. In the words of the poet Layli Long Soldier, that’s just “the oil at the surface.” But we need to start there, to better understand the kind of problem poverty is-and grasp the stakes-because poverty is not simply a matter of small incomes. Į can’t hope to understand why there is so much poverty in America solely by considering the lives of the poor. This is what winning looks like on the tenth floor of Newark’s courthouse: giving up two of your children so you have a chance to raise the third alone and in poverty. Outside the courtroom, he hugged his public defender, who considered what had happened a real victory. So the father gambled, surrendering his two older children to his stepmother and hoping the authorities would allow him to raise the youngest. The authorities didn’t think the father could care for his three children alone, and their mother, who had a serious mental illness and was using PCP, wasn’t an option either.

Its ugly recipe was laid bare in the authorities’ toxicology reports, making him look like a career junkie and not what he was: an exhausted member of America’s working poor. Sometimes when pulling a double shift, he would snort a speedball-cocaine mixed with benzodiazepine and morphine, sometimes heroin-to stay awake or dull his pain. There I met a fifty-five-year-old father who had stayed up all night working at his warehouse job by the port. I recently spent a day on the tenth floor of Newark’s courthouse, the floor where the state decides child welfare cases. It aims to foster the fruitful exchange of expertise and perspectives across fields, and opinions expressed do not necessarily represent the views of the OECD. The Forum Network is a space for experts and thought leaders-from around the world and all parts of society- to discuss and develop solutions now and for the future. Published by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

From the book POVERTY, BY AMERICA by Matthew Desmond.

Poverty by america matthew desmond