Monroe County Department of Human Services

John McKnights 1995 The Careless Society is widely used in social work programs. Although it offers instructive reading, it also presents a one-sided view of service provision. This article seeks to provide balance and perspective to McKnight's assertions and may be useful as a companion paper for courses using book. In The Careless Society McKnight (1995) discussed and criticized service delivery systems vis-a-vis community. McKnight argued that service industries seek to perpetuate themselves rather than their clients. Furthermore, he argued that very existence of these services undermines people's sense of community and connectedness by supplanting personal and informal supports and relationships. McKnight (1995) specifically wrote of professionalization of medical, human services, and criminal justice industries. A recurring theme is that professionals define problem, provide services to address problem, and are only ones who can decide when problem is resolved. He stated that the client as a person has been a residual category in process (p. 19). The client is simply an object, not an active participant. McKnight's focus is on service industry in general and its focus on providers rather than clients. The assembly-line delivery of social services by large government bureaucracies, however, seems to exemplify everything that McKnight feels is wrong with service delivery. Bureaucracies contain layers of management that thoroughly distance policymakers from those providing services and those receiving them. In addition to relegating client to a mere recipient of services rather than an active participant in service process, product being delivered is not having a positive effect on larger problems that drive clients' needs. Despite recent welfare reform efforts and employment initiatives, most welfare provisions remain handouts to individuals. For example, clients get money every month to pay rent. Landlords generally do not live in same community as their tenants, and few landlords who rent to poor people do more than minimum they are required to do by law; continuing presence of lead paint demonstrates this sad reality. So, welfare provides money for poor people to pay rent to live in poor neighborhoods. Homes and communities deteriorate, transportation and child that would facilitate employment efforts remain largely unavailable, and cycle perpetuates. Poverty is treated as an individual problem, but when entire communities live in poverty, issue clearly goes beyond any individual shortcomings. Government bureaucracies, however, continue to focus on individuals and rigidly constrained provision of minimal services. Because those services do not address actual problem, need for services grows, as does need for bureaucracy. McKnight is not alone in his concerns that service industry serves itself and its members to detriment of its ostensible clientele. Soupcoff (2003) wrote a scathing commentary on The Careless Society in which he stated: Never have so few individuals with so many good intentions created so much misery for so many people whom they wanted to help. He wrote of the obvious bitter fruits of liberal-left do-gooders' all-knowing beneficence being ever-more destructive 'cures' for various real and imagined social injustices through years. Soupcoff concluded that for today's caring classes, it's their perceived sensitivity to plight of disadvantaged, and their support of efforts to help needy, that makes them feel superior to rest of society.... [I]t's caring classes who are society's true elite, because they care more.... In their minds, it's not results of their helping initiatives that count (most of which are disastrous). It's their enlightened values and words. …