These three issues of 2000-2001 "Focus" present a collection of papers focusing on issues related to poverty. The first issue discusses child support enforcement policy and low-income families, highlighting such issues as fragile families and child wellbeing; low-income families and the child support enforcement system; child support enforcement policies and never-married mothers; reshaping child support strategies for welfare families; the welfarization of family law; and child support policy regimes in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries. The second issue focuses on understanding poverty, including such topics as mobility, persistence, and the intergenerational determinants of children's success; health policies for the nonelderly poor; reducing poverty through human capital investments; redefining the social contract for poor citizen families with children; housing discrimination and residential segregation as causes of poverty; and the role of group affiliations in determining socioeconomic outcomes. The third issue highlights such topics as evaluating welfare reform in an era of transition; the private food assistance network; medical spending, health insurance, and the measurement of U.S. poverty; incarceration, unemployment, and inequality; racial disparities in imprisonment; and United States poverty in a cross-national context. (SM)