Word: bronx
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...other students of the inner city are more pessimistic. "All the basic elements that spawn teenage crime are still in place, and in many cases the indicators are worse," says Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace, an examination of poverty in the South Bronx. "There's a dramatic increase of children in foster care, and that's a very high-risk group of kids. We're not creating new jobs, and we're not improving education to suit poor people for the jobs that exist...
...mountains of plowed-and-packed snow throughout the city's five boroughs Tuesday night, Robert DeJesus was relieved of his brand new snow blower at gunpoint. "I still can't get over it, and I've lived in New York City my whole life," DeJesus, a superintendent of a Bronx apartment building, told the New York Daily News. DeJesus and his 17-year-old nephew were trying to clear the front of his building when two armed men emerged from a brown van and announced that they were taking the machine. Said DeJesus: "The snow blower worked fantastic. Anything beats...
...certain distance--need not feel complicit in these tragedies. But this is the kind of ethical exemption that Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace." Knowledge carries with it certain theological imperatives. The more we know, the harder it becomes to grant ourselves exemption. "Evil exists," a student in the South Bronx told me in the course of a long conversation about ethics and religion in the fall of 1993. "Somebody has power. Pretending that they don't so they don't need to use it to help people--that is my idea of evil...
...even the most dedicated caseworkers make mistakes. Marc Parent remembers vividly the 1990 Bronx case that finally broke his spirit. On the last call of a long night shift, Parent and his partner mounted six flights of stairs, passing drug dealers and crack addicts, in search of the mother in her late 20s who was reportedly neglecting her child. When they entered the apartment, they encountered mice and five filthy children, some naked, some half-dressed. Though Parent inspected the infant in question, he didn't unwrap the baby's blanket to look at the body or take the child...
...Welfare Administration leaked to the press. For the entire six years of Elisa Izquierdo's life, it appears, lawsuits, special reports and government audits had been decrying a dangerous overload at the city agency. At week's end, the New York Times published a shocking internal memo from the Bronx office, dated Nov. 15, 1995, regarding the caseload. "Please encourage your workers to follow this simple mathematical equation," it read. "For every opening you should have two closings/transfers." But children are not numbers. And their suffering cannot be stopped by bureaucratic fiat. "The system is broken and needs...