Journal ArticleDOI
"The Crime of Survival": Fraud Prosecutions, Community Surveillance and the Original "Welfare Queen"
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TLDR
The authors examines the role of the thousands of informants who reported recipients for earning wages, sexual impropriety, or owning "inappropriate" consumer goods, and argues that the spectacle of surveillance and prosecutions convinced many citizens that all welfare recipients were deceitful, undeserving, and linked to criminality.Abstract:
\"Welfare queens\" and welfare fraud became national obsessions during the 1970s. This hysteria eroded public support for efforts to redress the racism and gender bias inherent in state programs and delegitimated the welfare state itself. This article chronicles the story of the first \"welfare queen,\" Chicago's Linda Taylor, and the context surrounding Illinois legislators' efforts to crack down on welfare fraud. In an attempt to curb welfare costs, legislators stiffened criminal penalties for fraud, accelerated random home visits, established an anonymous tip line for people to report their acquaintances, and considered plans to fingerprint all welfare recipients. This article juxtaposes legislators' fiscal and political motivations for these policies with the experiences of recipients struggling to make ends meet when neither welfare nor wage work provided sufficient income. It also examines the role of the thousands of informants who reported recipients for earning wages, sexual impropriety, or owning \"inappropriate\" consumer goods. The article argues that the spectacle of surveillance and prosecutions convinced many citizens that all welfare recipients were deceitful, undeserving, and linked to criminality. These punitive policies served to obscure poor families' material conditions while helping to construct a highly stigmatized social category outside of full citizenship.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
TL;DR: A Consumers' Republic (Cohen 2003) is an overview of the political and social impact of mass consumption on the United States from the 1920s to the present day as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
Misdemeanor Justice: Control without Conviction1
TL;DR: This paper explored how the criminal justice system functions to regulate significant populations without conviction or sentencing in New York City's pioneering experiment in mass misdemeanor arrests, finding that the preponderance result in no finding of guilt and no assignment of formal punishment.
Book
Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing
TL;DR: In the book Misdemeanorland, Issa Kohler-Hausmann describes the inegalitarian workings of the misdemeanor legal process in New York City and how it operates as a system of managerial social control over the disadvantaged even when it stops short of convicting and incarcerating them.
Journal ArticleDOI
Surveillance Studies and Violence Against Women
TL;DR: In this article, the authors place questions of surveillance technologies into a theoretical framework that foregrounds the challenges that new surveillance technologies pose to anti-violence movements, and consider the ways that surveillance technologies are used disproportionately in the criminalization marginalized groups.
Journal ArticleDOI
Stuck data, dead data, and disloyal data: the stops and starts in making numbers into social practices
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the tensions that occur when indicators have not yet become stable entities, when the conditions of possibility for the indicator's continued existence are less assured, and the labor it takes to build numbers into something socially meaningful becomes surprisingly visible.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Protecting soldiers and mothers : the political origins of social policy in the United States
TL;DR: Theda Skocpol et al. as discussed by the authors show that the United States nearly became a unique maternalist welfare state as the federal government and more than 40 states enacted social spending, labour regulations, and health education programmes to assist American mothers and children.
Book
The origins of the urban crisis : race and inequality in postwar Detroit : with a new preface by the author
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe the deindustrialization of the city of Detroit in the 1940s and 1970s, and discuss the role of race and housing in this process.
Journal ArticleDOI
The origins of the urban crisis : race and inequality in postwar Detroit
TL;DR: Sugrue as mentioned in this paper asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty, and argues that America's dilemma of racial and economic inequality is the root cause of urban poverty.