Transcript Staff Writer

A book detailing poverty in Oklahoma -- and published more than six years ago -- is still an eerily accurate portrait of the state's economic condition, a consultant for the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy (OICA) said Thursday.

Sandy Ingram, an international social policy consultant, said Robert Lee Maril's book, "Waltzing with the Ghost of Tom Joad," still provides "an incredibly accurate" account of poverty and low-wage labor in the Sooner state. The book, published by the OU Press, portrays the lives of poverty stricken residents and examines the myths surrounding poverty in Oklahoma.

Ingram, CEO of Oklahoma-based Ingram and Associates, did the data analysis for the OICA's 2005 Oklahoma Kids Count Factbook. That report, released last year, parallels Maril's work of five years earlier; both documents show the number of Oklahoma children in poverty increasing.

"When I read Dr. Maril's book I said to myself, 'yeah, that's what's going on here,'" Ingram said. "And I still believe that."

The sad fact is, she said, that Oklahoma's impoverished culture isn't going away any time soon. "We're developing a cultural of poverty. And it seems to me the gaps between the haves and the have-nots are getting even bigger."

According to Maril's book, the number of children living in poverty in 1970 stood at 34.2 percent. In 1990 that figure had jumped to 35.1 percent and those figures, Maril wrote, would get worse. "Poverty is, in short, not an exceptional phenomenon but unusually common to the state."

Last Tuesday, Maril was, again, proven right.

The 2006 Kids Count report -- released by Annie E. Casey Foundation -- ranked Oklahoma 40th nationally in the condition of children across the country and said more Oklahoma youngsters were living in poverty this year than in 2003.

Additionally, the report said, 34 percent of Oklahoma children lived in single parent families -- an increase of four percent since 2000.

Thirty-six percent of state youngsters were living in households were parents lacked full-time work -- an increase of three percent since 2000.

Maril -- a former Oklahoma State University sociology professor -- said he's not surprised by the Casey foundation's latest statistics.

"I won't say, 'I told you so,'" he said, "because the facts are so bleak. But, honestly, I'm not surprised. Oklahoma has been locked into a boom-bust economic cycle for decades and it doesn't look like it's getting any better."

Maril, now teaching at the East Carolina University, in Greenville, North Carolina, said low-wage labor and the on-going myth 'that wages are low here because the cost of living is low here' both conspire to keep thousands of Oklahomans at the bottom of the economic ladder.

"Low-wage labor is a major component of the Oklahoma's economy," he said. "And the fact that so many still live in poverty is no surprise at all."