The Charity Organization Bulletins were printed for the confidential use of charity organization societies by the Charity Department of the Russell Sage Foundation. The bulletins for December 1913 through November 1914 cover topics such as the culture of family life, fundraising, large families with small wages, and vacations and office hours at charity organizations.

The Charity Organization Bulletins were printed for the confidential use of charity organization societies by the Charity Department of the Russell Sage Foundation. The bulletins for December 1912 through November 1913 cover topics such as training in casework, financial appeals, salaries in charity organization societies, and the training of volunteers.  

This booklet covers the development in the United States of schools for the training of guards and other prison officers modeled on one in England. Topics include the U.S. Training School at 427 West Street in New York City, the Keepers’ Training School on New York’s Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island), and the British Training School in Wakefield, England. The booklet also contains forms relating to candidates for prison service in England and Wales.

HASTINGS H. HART was a consultant in delinquency and penology at the Russell Sage Foundation.

This article, from the Woman’s Medical Journal of January 2013, is a reprint of a 1912 report by the Russell Sage Foundation. It deals with infant mortality and the means of combating it by the instruction and care of expectant mothers. It provides a summary of characteristic features of certain cities personally investigated by the author.   

ELLEN C. BABBITT worked in the Child-Helping Department of the Russell Sage Foundation.

This booklet provides guidance on setting up a program of work relief. Topics include underlying work relief, finances, advanced planning, personnel, the office system, registration of applicants, determination of need, choice of work projects, work assignments, transfer and dismissal, reassignments, wage rates and hours, method of payment, and protection against injury.

JOANNA C. COLCORD was the director of the Charity Organization Department at the Russell Sage Foundation.

A form listing people and places—including churches, employers, medical agencies, and public officials—that social agencies might have visited with columns for noting the number of visits to each. An explanation following the list notes that agencies using the largest number of outside sources of information will be seen as having made the best investigation into the cases they are treating.

This illustrated booklet focuses on the causes of poverty and ways to alleviate it. It asks such questions as which is better: helping the poor in their poverty or helping the poor out of their poverty and is it money alone that the poor need?

The United States has one of the highest child poverty rates among wealthy countries and stands out among its peers as the only country that does not offer a child benefit – regular payments from the government to most or all families with children, not conditioned on parental employment. During the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in 2021, the CTC functioned as a child benefit, and the child poverty rate fell to the lowest level ever recorded in the United States. Despite this decrease, the CTC expansion was not renewed. Concerns about enacting a child benefit include the cost, the possibility of misuse of money by parents, and how it might affect parental employment and fertility. In Child Benefits, social policy scholar Jane Waldfogel details the history and origins of child benefits around the world and comprehensively assesses how child benefits affect family spending, fertility, employment, child poverty, and child wellbeing to address such concerns and to determine the benefits of enacting such a policy permanently.

Drawing on research from peer countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as well as the United States, Waldfogel shows that a child benefit would prevent poverty and hardship and protect children from deep poverty and income instability. The research is clear that families would spend the money from a child benefit on food, clothing, and other items for their children and that a child benefit would not have large negative impacts on parental employment or family decisions about fertility. It also shows that a child benefit would promote short- and longer-term child and family wellbeing. Child benefits have been shown to enhance opportunity and benefit society through healthier and better-educated young adults and stronger and more stable families. And rigorous benefit-cost analyses indicate that a child benefit, while costly, would more than pay for itself, yielding a large return on investment.

Waldfogel evaluates four current, major proposals for a child benefit and provides recommendations for a policy that would deliver the best outcomes for children and families and the best return on investment. She argues that such a policy would be more generous, not tied to parental employment or earnings, available to all parents but phased out for higher-income families, delivered in monthly payments through the tax system, and provided in addition to existing social programs.

Child Benefits provides fascinating insights on the history and impacts of child benefits and makes a clear and definitive argument for the establishment of a child benefit in the United States.

JANE WALDFOGEL is the Compton Foundation Centennial Professor for the Prevention of Children’s and Youth Problems at the Columbia University School of Social Work and a visiting professor at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics.

This booklet presents the report of the Committee on Lock-ups, Municipal and County Jails, of the American Prison Association on United States prisoners boarded out by the federal government. It discusses the origins of the boarding-out system, congressional action, three U.S. penitentiaries, federal reformatories, U.S. prisoners boarded out, the difficulties of reforming the county jail system, jail from the prisoner’s point of view, and suggestions for grand jury surveys of conditions under which federal prisoners are kept in county jails.

HASTINGS L. HART was the chairman of the committee of the American Prison Association and consultant in delinquency and penology at the Russell Sage Foundation.  

This booklet presents evidence indicating that social work salaries are too low for the development of social work as a profession. It includes diagrams presenting results of a study conducted by the Russell Sage Foundation that aimed to trace the course of salaries in social work over the period of rising prices and wages during and just after World War I and through the subsequent period until 1926.

RALPH G. HURLIN was director of the Department of Statistics of the Russell Sage Foundation.