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| 1 1 Introduction Mention the word welfare in a room full of people in the United States and you can expect to see brows furrow and mouths tighten in disgust. Welfare, the colloquial term for some public benefits in the United States, no longer holds its original meaning: well-being. Instead, it has become a pejorative term used to label “welfare mothers” or “welfare queens.” And while welfare use has always carried the stigma of poverty, it now also bears the stigma of criminality. Welfare rules assume the criminality of the poor. Indeed, the logics of crime control now reign supreme over efforts to reduce poverty or to ameliorate its effects. As government policies targeting the poor have changed with time, so have the experiences of poor families who use welfare. Many of today’s welfare policies are far removed from basic goals of ensuring the well-being of families. Rather, policies are, first and foremost, intended to deter welfare use, to guard against misuse, and to punish welfare cheating. Policing the poor and protecting taxpayer dollars from fraud and abuse have taken priority over providing security to economically vulnerable parents and children. Today’s welfare system treats those who use public benefits , or who even apply for benefits, as latent criminals. Nationwide, welfare recipients are treated as presumptive liars, cheaters, and thieves. Their lives are heavily surveilled and regulated, not only by the welfare system, but also by the criminal justice system. Changes in public attitudes and government practices have led to what can be described as the criminalization of poverty. The term criminalization is used in this book to describe a web of state practices and policies related to welfare. There are several different strands of criminalization. First, there are a number of practices involving the stigmatization , surveillance, and regulation of the poor. These practices are historically embedded in aid programs to the poor but seem to be expanding. Second, many welfare policies and practices assume a latent criminality among the poor. Reforms over the last two decades have been aimed at excluding from welfare those individuals who have engaged in illicit behavior in the 2 | Introduction past and have also aimed at imposing harsh penalties on those who engage in illicit activities while receiving public benefits. These policies adopt the gettough -on-crime approach once relegated to the criminal justice system. Third, criminalization involves the growing overlap between the welfare system and the criminal justice system. This intersection includes not only overlapping goals and attitudes toward the poor but also collaborative practices and shared information systems between welfare offices and various branches of the criminal justice system. Very concrete examples of this criminalization exist—most notably, aggressive investigations of and prosecutions for welfare fraud. Despite this criminalization of the welfare system, poor families continue breaking the rules of welfare receipt and continue hiding information from welfare officials. Many of those who receive public benefits actually do cheat. But they do not all cheat for the same reasons. Some cheat because of the need to provide food and shelter for themselves and their families, some cheat because they have figured out how to avoid getting caught, some cheat because they perceive no risks of cheating, and some cheat because they cannot comprehend the complicated rules of the system. Some cheat for several of these reasons. The title of this book, Cheating Welfare, is intended to rouse readers to think about not only the ways welfare recipients cheat the welfare system but also the ways the existing system is at odds with the welfare of families and the welfare of society. This study looks at the welfare system from two vantage points: from the policy level and from the perspective of those who use public benefits. It provides insight into the history, social construction, and lived experience of welfare and shows why cheating is all but inevitable—not because poor people are more immoral than anyone else but because ordinary individuals navigating complex systems of rules are likely to become entangled despite their best efforts. It also challenges readers to question their assumptions about welfare policies, welfare recipients, and crime control policies in the United States. The book examines the creation of welfare rules by the lawmakers; the reconstruction of those welfare rules by administrators ; the acceptance of or resistance to those rules in the abstract by the poor; the day-to-day negotiation of the rules by welfare recipients; and, finally, the punitive responses of the state to...

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