Elliott sorts the various agencies that intervene in the family’s lives into four categories: “Child Protection. Criminal Justice. Public Assistance. Homeless Services” (27). Dasani and her family’s interactions with these various organizations serves as a focus for the book: In telling the story of this one family, Elliott is also telling a story of city institutions’ failure to serve the most vulnerable.

Elliott mentions several times that Public Assistance and Homeless Services in New York are among the most generous programs in the country. However, the financial support and services they provide come with a lot of stipulations. The family is constantly being supervised by one or more of these organizations, to the extent that Dasani learns at a young age to identify caseworkers and evaluate them. The children are constantly inspected by caseworkers for signs of abuse, and most of them learn to resist these inspections. Almost all the children seem to develop, from an early age, an awareness of how representatives might interpret what they say, leading to more supervision and intervention.

There are many contradictions embedded in the function of these agencies. For Chanel, they “[profit] off the poor […] while punishing them for that very condition” (63).