Justice at the City Gate
Susan G. Neisuler
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2003 Writers Advantage
ISBN: 0595269508

Social Policy, Social Services, and the Law.

35 million people in America live in poverty. 14 million of those are children. While we rely on our social service programs to intervene, often they serve only to exacerbate the situation. Why does poverty continue to plague the richest country in the world? & why do social service agencies fail to bring relief to needy family?

Attorney Susan G. Neisuler, with a decade of experience in Boston's Juvenile Courts, looks at 300 years of New England policies & politics & the people who created them.

Justice at the City Gate is a dreadful book! Don't get me wrong, Susan Neisuler's writing is impeccable -- no, it's the subject that is dreadful.

If you have ever felt a smidgeon of romance about the life & times of the Puritans as they lived & labored on the fringe of this vast continent, be warned, the milk of all human kindness is going to sour, rapidly.

Life as a Puritan man was grim, heavily laced with super-paranoia, hyper-chauvinism, vicious religious self-righteousness & bloodcurdling “compassion”.

Life as a Puritan woman was grimmer, heavily laden with being a disposable chattel, with the cause of Man's fall from Grace, a hyper-sensitivity to men's morality, without a soul to protect them. That is a double entendre because up until recently religious men have averred that the female of the species didn't have a soul neither did their children, the American Indian, the American Slave, nor dogs!

Life as a Puritan child was grimmest, if you survived! You were burdened from conception & blamed from birth with a host of sins you knew nothing about. You were compelled by violence & starvation to do your parents' or your masters' bidding. You worked as long as any adult at dangerous chores, & you were punished with barbaric regularity.

As the old saying goes: that which you fear the most will come about or, in a simpler way, when bicycling & you spot a pothole up ahead, if you focus on it, you will hit it! It takes a mind set in uncovering evil, to find evil everywhere. I had an aunt like that. She was so fixated on protecting my “innocence” that she filled my ears with heretofore unknown evils! & that was, essentially, the way our ancestors thought, courtesy of their religions.

& these were the people who thought up our social services? Those that were to give comfort to the needy, the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, the fragile, the abused(although this one came much, much later!) & the abandoned. & you wonder why our modernday social services are a nightmare of moral judgementalism, a labyrinth of irrational rules meted out by a horde of ever-changing sullen bureaucrats with imperious & impervious rightness?

In each case I worked as a Children's Advocate in our local Domestic Violence Prevention Program I would come upon the double whammy that in apprehending the abuser, punishment of the innocent was inevitable. That was why children were (& still are!) reluctant to tell their stories of abuse within their families. They know that the horror they live with could not be worse than what the System will mete out -- on them for being the cause for separated siblings, jailed parents, & families lost forever. My suggestion that families need to learn how to transform the quality of their lives rather than be punished, fell on self-righteous deaf ears ... crime = punishment.

Susan G. Neisuler sets out to explain it all by citing some of the cases of the families & children she advocated for within Boston's gargantuan social services. & she does this admirably, with large doses of indignation & anger.

If you have ever pondered on our welfare system, & I have as I had to accept some while I was raising my children, then this book of horror stories & legal history will be a fascinating tour into the dungeons of “do-gooder-ism” gone wrong!

If you know of or are one of the millions of Americans & their spouses & children facing catastrophic financial or emotional hardship, then Justice at the City Gate will let you know you are, tragically, not alone!

Absolutely a Mach 4 must read! Lots of history, case studies & insights into how & why social services do not work & how they could.
(02/29/04)

Rebecca