This book has emerged in response to social service workers' vivid descriptions of changes in the practice of their craft during the past 15 years and to the scanty literature that addressed their concerns. Few works have attempted to explore the interplay between the recent broader changes affecting the welfare state (fiscal crisis, cost containment, privatization, etc) and the restructuring of social service work. Yet, it is clear that the fiscal decisions of the 1980s profoundly affected both the context and content of social service practice. "The Welfare State Crisis and the...

The authors persuasively argue that the present cascade of reforms to public education is a consequence of a larger intention to shrink government. The startling result is that more of public education s assets and resources are moving to the private sector and to the prison industrial complex. Drawing on various forms of evidence structural, economic, narrative, and youth-generated participatory research the authors reveal new structures and circuits of dispossession and privilege that amount to a clear failure of present policy. Policymaking is at war with the interests of the vast majority...