By underclass Charles Murray refers to a population effectively cut off from mainstream American life. These millions are impoverished not merely because they are poor but because productive work, family, and community exist for them only in fragmented and corrupted forms.

Murray asks why we must continue to worry about the underclass at a time when so many indicators in our society appear encouraging--welfare rolls are plunging, the crime rate and teenage birth rate are down. The reason, he explains, is that nothing has really changed for them. We have gotten the underclass off our minds by subsidizing them and simultaneously walling them off through a growing and insidious "custodial democracy." By examining statistics on illegitimacy, criminality, and the dropout rate from the labor force for four checkpoints from 1954 to 1997, Murray illuminates the complacency into which we have slid and alerts us to the consequences of our indifference.