Policy changes in criminal justice and social welfare are responsible for many of the problems faced by poor women today, said Prof. Emeritus Rosemary Sarri in a Jan. 17 discussion of her latest book, “Women at the Margins.”

The 1980s marked a shift from social benefits to social control approaches in welfare, said Sarri, who retired from the School of Social Work in 1994 but maintains her active academic lifestyle by teaching, researching and writing. She currently is a senior research scientist emerita at the Institute for Social Research.

Today, welfare funds that were appropriated for financial assistance to families are used to promote marriage rather than to help families who need assistance, she said during the speech, which was sponsored by the Women’s Studies Program and was part of the symposium honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Such a shift has led to insufficient funding for childcare and Head Start programs, and an increase in abuse and neglect as mothers are forced to work 40 hours per week at low wages with little to no assistance, Sarri said. “It’s a Catch 22.”

“Today’s situation is much like the recession of 1982-1984 for poor women,” she said. A lot of tax and business solutions, she said, are proposed to solve the country’s economic problems while the plight of homeless people is treated indifferently. Sarri cited such national problems as welfare assistance no longer being an entitlement program and the poverty level not being adequate to deal with basic needs. Recently, self-sufficiency standards have been developed by several policy researchers as better measures of real need because they take into consideration housing, child care, health care, transportation payroll taxes and other costs that lower-income families face. The poverty level measure that was developed in the l960s is no longer appropriate because it was based heavily on the cost of food, but that relative cost has decreased since 1960 while other expenses have increased, Sarri said.

While President Bush emphasizes charity as a way to solve the problem of poor people, Sarri does not see this as the ultimate solution. “Charity has been around since the beginning of Christianity. Although important, it is only a short-term and partial solution,” she said.

She also noted that female incarceration is growing twice as fast as the rate among men. “There are 93,000 women in the American ‘gulags’ (prisons and jails) today,” Sarri said, noting that the largest offense category is substance abuse.

A Michigan case, Bazzetta v. McGinnis, concerning children’s visitation to their parents in prison, will be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States this year. Despite support for visitation in the federal district court in Michigan and from the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, the Department of Corrections has appealed to the Supreme Court to prohibit visitation. The issue is particularly relevant for women because they are most likely to be sole custodians of their children when they enter prison or jail. There is substantial research that maintenance of family ties through visitation is important since most children are returned to their mothers following incarceration.

Sarri stressed the need to target policies, such as the marriage policy as a solution for poor families and the substance abuse policy regarding incarceration. The country needs to move away from a social control focus back to a social benefits emphasis, she said. In order to solve problems such as high incarceration rates and long sentences, Sarri said, society needs to build a community among all women regardless of their race, class or political views so that there is greater concern for the lives of poor women.

“There is a need for activism for and with marginalized women,” Sarri said. “We need to build collaboration with other groups.”

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