Policing Welfare

Punitive Adversarialism in Public Assistance

AvSpencer Headworth

Inbunden, Engelska, 2021

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Beskrivning

Means-tested government assistance in the United States requires recipients to meet certain criteria and continue to maintain their eligibility so that benefits are paid to the “truly needy.” Welfare is regarded with such suspicion in this country that considerable resources are spent policing the boundaries of eligibility, which are delineated by an often confusing and baroque set of rules and regulations. Even minor infractions of the many rules can cause people to be dropped from these programs, and possibly face criminal prosecution. In this book, Spencer Headworth offers the first study of the structure of fraud control in the welfare system by examining the relations between different levels of governmental agencies, from federal to local, and their enforcement practices. Policing Welfare shows how the enforcement regime of welfare has been constructed to further stigmatize those already living in poverty and deepens disparities of class, race, and gender in our society.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2021-05-22
Mått:152 x 229 x 23 mm
Vikt:513 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:272
Förlag:The University of Chicago Press
ISBN:9780226779225

Utforska kategorier

Sociologi och antropologi inom Samhälle och politik

Mer om författaren

Spencer Headworth is assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University.

Recensioner i media

“This highly original, insightful, and carefully researched book takes us into the inner workings of welfare fraud investigation units, revealing how the obsessions of policymakers with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse are expressed in ways that at once ‘police welfare’ and the people who count on it to feed and house their children and extend the logics of policing into the administration of poverty policy in the United States. The analysis of the ‘welfare police’ and theory of ‘punitive adversarialism’ Headworth advances in these pages will shape political and urban sociology, the broad and interdisciplinary punishment and society literature, and work in legal theory and the life of the law for decades to come. This is precisely the book we’ve needed to grasp the work of the administrative state in what is shaping up to be the long twenty-first century.”

Innehållsförteckning

List of AbbreviationsChapter 1. The Strings AttachedChapter 2. One Nation, Finding FraudChapter 3. The Mill and the GristChapter 4. The Welfare PoliceChapter 5. Occupational Frames and Identities in Fraud Control WorkChapter 6. Fraud Control as PerformanceChapter 7. The Blame GameChapter 8. Finding Welfare Rule ViolatorsChapter 9. ConclusionAcknowledgmentsAppendixNotesReferencesIndex