Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,168
her age. They could not offer her shelter or much money, but they could fly to her side during a fight.
3. On the presence of Child Protective Services in the lives of poor black families, see Christopher Wildeman and Natalia Emanuel, “Cumulative Risks of Foster Care Placement by Age 18 for U.S. Children, 2000–2011,” PLOS ONE 9 (2014): 1–7; Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
4. In 2010, the New York Times reported that one in every fifty Americans lives in a household with an income consisting only of food stamps. Jason DeParle, “Living on Nothing but Food Stamps,” New York Times, January 2, 2010.
23. THE SERENITY CLUB
1. From Scott’s disciplinary proceedings in front of the Wisconsin Board of Nursing.
2. Consequential and costly policy decisions have been made based on the collective assumption that poor people lack connections to kin and friends who are gainfully employed, college educated, and homeowners. Mixed-income housing is intended to “provide low-income residents with exposure to employment opportunities and social role models.” Neighborhood relocation programs, such as Moving to Opportunity, are designed to connect low-income families to more “prosocial and affluent social networks.” But many poor people have plenty of ties to the upwardly mobile. Roughly 1 in 6 Milwaukee renters lives in a neighborhood with above average disadvantage but is embedded in networks with below average disadvantage. But simply having ties to the middle class is insufficient. Likely because of the popularity of the term “social capital,” researchers tend to think of prosocial connections to important or resource-rich people as something you “have” and that, like money, can be used whenever you’d like. In reality, as Scott’s experience shows, those connections matter only insofar as you are able to activate them. On social programs designed to combat “social isolation,” see US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program: Final Impacts Evaluation (Washington, DC: Office of Policy Development and Research, 2011); US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mixed-Income Housing and the HOME Program (Washington, DC: Office of Policy Development and Research, 2003). For canonical theories about poverty and community life holding that spatial isolation (residential ghettoization) brings about social isolation (network ghettoization), see William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). For a detailed analysis of neighborhood and network disadvantage, see Matthew Desmond and Weihua An, “Neighborhood and Network Disadvantage Among Urban Renters,” Sociological Science 2 (2015): 329–50.
3. When he was using, Scott would sometimes call it “self-medicating.” It wasn’t just nurse talk. So many words and phrases exist to help cover over the rotten thing festering at the base of the root. How often, I wonder, is coping mistaken for culture?
4. The psychiatrist asked Scott, “Do you want to go straight to two hundred in Zoloft, or do you want to work up to it?”
“Straight to two hundred,” Scott answered. He didn’t think it made sense to drop his dosage, high as it was, since he had been on 200 mgs before.
5. When methadone made the news, it usually wasn’t pretty. The year Scott began his treatment program, methadone accounted for less than 2 percent of opioid pain-reliever prescriptions but almost one-third of the overdose deaths caused by opioid pain relievers. The medical community attributed the troubling rise of methadone-related deaths to the increasing use of the drug to treat pain, not addiction. When it comes to treating heroin addiction and its broader social ramifications, methadone has been highly effective since being introduced in 1964. Known as a full opioid agonist, it feeds an addict’s cravings and allows him to function without impairment, if the dose is right. The evidence is consistent. Methadone reduces or eliminates heroin use, lowers overdoses as well as criminality associated with drug use, boosts patients’ health, and helps many live full, productive lives. When it comes to heroin addiction, the drug simply outperforms abstinence-only programs like AA. “You hear all these harsh stories about methadone,” one expert said, “but you never hear about the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are taking methadone every day, who work, who have largely conquered their habits and lead normal lives.” Scott was becoming one of those people. Peter Friedmann, quoted in Harold Pollack, “This Drug Could Make a Huge Dent in