By: Marc Steiner


photo by Marshall Clarke


Joe Jones knows what it’s like to have a father—and to lose him. Jones spent the first nine years of his life living with his mother and father, who tag-teamed on childrearing while training to become a nurse and a teacher, respectively. “We lived in the projects in East Baltimore, [but] I didn’t even realize that we were kind of poor,” Jones says. “I was in this cone, you know, being protected and raised and nurtured by them.”

That changed when his parents divorced, and Jones and his mother moved to West Baltimore. He started running with a pack of older kids who were dealing and using drugs. “Not having my father in the household anymore, only having limited contact with him,” he says, “my image of what life was transitioned from that cocoon environment with both my parents to this street culture environment.” By 13, he was using and selling heroin. His addiction to heroin and cocaine would last for seventeen years, during which he would spin in and out of prison.

Since getting clean in 1986, Jones has rededicated his life to another calling: patching wayward fathers back into the families they helped create. He was the driving force behind the Baltimore City Health Department’s Men’s Services program as well as a local affiliate of the national STRIVE employment services program. In 1999, he founded the nonprofit Centers for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development, since renamed the Center for Urban Families. The organization provides services ranging from childcare to job training, all aimed at helping fathers provide for, and remain a part of, their families. Jones was a member of President Bill Clinton’s Work Group on Welfare Reform and currently serves on President Barack Obama’s Taskforce on Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families, as well as on several local and national boards of directors.

“When we think about the way in which we have designed interventions for families in our country, it really is code for ‘women and children,’” Jones says. “One of the biggest challenges I think we face as a community—as a nation—is the number of children who grow up in families where the fathers are not present. I think that is at the crux of all of the challenges we have with children not having the level of support [they need]."




Q Let’s talk about the importance of families in the lives of children. Some people look at the inner city and see children running amok, without supervision, without any kind of parental guidance. How real is that?

A It’s very real. Families are really challenged in terms of being able to provide the longitudinal, intimate, consistent relationship with the children that adults bring into the world.

I look at it in practical terms. If you’ve got a city block and there are twenty houses, and you’ve got a two-parent family in each one of those houses, when one or two families disintegrate and you end up having single-parent households in two of those twenty houses, the ability for that neighborhood to absorb that is relatively high because the single-parent households are still two out of twenty. But when you have neighborhoods where the overwhelming majority are single-parent households, the likelihood [is much lower] that a community can absorb that and it won’t negatively impact children’s outcomes.

We try to incarcerate our way out of this, you know. We build more prisons, we put more laws on the books. We try everything to deal with these issues [of troubled kids]. But children’s outcomes in our country are limited by our [in]ability to engage the men that helped bring them into the world.


Q How do you propose that we do that?

A There’s a study called the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. This is a study that’s being conducted by Princeton and Columbia universities in twenty-something cities, including Baltimore, where they survey low-income women who have given birth in hospitals. And they try to assess the status of the relationship between the pregnant mom and her partner. Around the time of the birth of the child, the women [usually] indicate they’re in a romantic relationship with the expectant father. They have aspirations to marry. They have aspirations to be good caregivers to their children. But one or two years down the road, those expectations and aspirations aren’t realized, and those relationships begin to disintegrate. There should be some intervention at that point.


Q So what goes wrong, and how would you intervene?

A So, you got a fictitious couple, Keisha and Raheem, right? Keisha’s pregnant and she’s poor. Raheem is poor. So Keisha goes to the welfare office; she says, “I’m pregnant, and I need some support to make it through.” The welfare office says, “Keisha, given your situation, you meet the eligibility requirements. However, we need to know about Raheem." And the welfare office only needs to know about Raheem because in order for Keisha to be eligible for the benefits, Raheem has to be held accountable for paying back the system, through child support, for the benefits that Keisha and ultimately the child will receive. So the benefits that she receives [are] basically a loan to Raheem. That’s how child support begins to accrue.

Let’s think about this. We know that around the birth of the child, this relationship is still likely to be romantic. Wouldn’t it make more sense that, when Keisha comes in, the caseworker says, “I want you to think about bringing Raheem in because we also want to think about a set of services not just [for] you, Keisha, but for you and Raheem.” If he’s going be financially held accountable for child support, what do we now need to do, to get him into the labor market so that he has the ability to pay?

We need to engage these low-income men and encourage them be involved in the lives of their children. We gotta create more opportunities for them to play the mainstream game and [make sure that] public policy doesn’t cut off their necks.


Q A lot of policy makers—especially conservative policy makers—might also say, well, he owed the money. He didn’t live up to his responsibilities, so it’s our duty to get that money from him.

A I’m not saying that Raheem doesn’t have an obligation to pay. But we have to be flexible enough in our policies so that he can come above ground, so he can get into the labor market and be put in a position where he can pay.

The state of Maryland actually has an initiative called the Child Support Incentive Payment Program. As long as Raheem gets a job, a legal job with a pay stub, and he’s paying consistently over a twelve-month period on his original support order, then the amount of debt that he has accrued can be wiped off the books.

Some people question, “Why would we as taxpayers want to do that?” Well, I want Raheem to have a relationship with that child. I want Raheem to be a caregiver who’s in a position to help shape the values and the beliefs of that child. I want to be working with Raheem to help him understand how to manage his own behavior so he doesn’t end up producing other children that he’s not in a position to take care of. This multiplying effect is what’s killing us.


Q It’s one thing to give child support. It’s another thing to say that the father is actually in the kid’s life.

A There are really only two dedicated public funding [streams] that have anything to do with men in our country. One is prison: the criminal justice system. And the second is the child support system. We’ve gotta do something that has not been done in any significant way, and that is invest in families that include fathers.

Barack Obama has talked ad nauseam in his speeches, in his writings, about the responsibility of men to take their rightful role in the family and help to raise children. This year, Sen. Evan Bayh from Indiana and [Illinois] Rep. Danny Davis from Chicago introduced what’s called the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act of 2009. This legislation, if passed, will provide an additional public resource that communities, state governments, nonprofit organizations, and criminal justice institutions can [use] to begin to address the needs of low-income men who happen to be fathers.

About 65 to 70 percent of men who are incarcerated are fathers, right? Think about the impact when we’ve taken the men from the community. What does that do for a child who’s growing up without their father around?


Q So in order to bring family structure back to an inner city world, a world of poverty, you’re saying you have to change the entire way we address our social service system.

A We’ve gotta have intentional public policy. We’ve gotta have intentional intervention that focuses on the family as a whole, not just women and children. We’ve gotta do it.


  On the air: Listen to a podcast of the full interview with Joe Jones at www.steinershow.org or tune in to The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on November 11.




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