November 1, 2001 | Read Time: 1 minute
Prospecting Among the Poor: Welfare Privatization, by Bill Berkowitz, examines the privatization of welfare services that occurred after the passage in 1996 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. When responsibility for welfare devolved to the states, writes Bill Berkowitz, a research fellow at the Applied Research Center, in Oakland, Calif., many chose to provide welfare services like child-support enforcement and job training and placement by contracting with nonprofit groups and for-profit corporations. This booklet highlights some of the problems that have occurred in the wake of such privatization, offering four examples of corporations that received government contracts but provided poor or inadequate services.
