Poverty: The War Within the War

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-JOB CORPS. Set up to provide remedial education and job training for unemployed, out-of-school youths from 16 to 21, the Job Corps has 25,609 trainees (about 50% Negro) at 100 centers. The cost through June 30: $493 million. In many ways it is the bad boy—and occasionally the bad girl —of the poverty program, since its wards, as Shriver notes, are "dropouts from society before we get them. If we save three out of four, or two out of three, that's a miracle right there." Many arrive as complete illiterates; 79% have never seen a doctor, 85% a dentist. One in six has been rejected as unfit for military service. The camps have indeed had their problems—sodomy, knifings, thefts, riots and vandalism in neighboring towns—and they are likely to continue.

Among other charges of inefficiency and influence, G.O.P. critics pointed out that the Kanawha Hotel in Charleston, W. Va., which the Job Corps converted into a women's center for $187,400, plus $90,000 a year in rent, has chiefly benefited a prominent local Democrat named Angus Peyton, who held a sizable interest in the property. To the girls, the hotel became "Peyton's Place," and before long there were charges that some of them were living down to the name by running a prostitution racket. The charges were never proved and were eventually dropped—and so were several girls for "indiscreet" behavior.

Skeptics dubbed the centers "country clubs for juvenile delinquents," noted that the cost of training the men and women in several dozen occupations, from automobile repairs and underwater welding to cosmetology and nursing, came to $9,945 a year—more than the cost of sending a student to college. On the other hand, notes Shriver, it costs taxpayers some $100,000 to keep a man on relief for a lifetime. Since 1,500 Job Corps graduates have found jobs, and cooperating firms have a "stockpile" of 10,000 jobs awaiting future grads, he figures that the investment is worthwhile.

-NEIGHBORHOOD YOUTH CORPS. Where the Job Corps considers itself "curative," the Neighborhood Youth Corps is "preventive." Officially, it is designed to occupy needy teen-agers before or just after they drop out of school with $1.25-an-hour jobs in local libraries, parks and other institutions. Unofficially, by keeping the boys busy during the hot summer months, it has also proved

a handy device for defusing tense urban ghettos. By the end of June, it will have employed 603,000 boys and girls at a cost of $391 million. It has worked so well that some House Democrats would like to give it more than $550 million for the year beginning July 1. Much of the money would be spent to ease racial unrest in the 21 "high-tension" U.S. cities.