Criminally Dependent? Gender, Punishment, and the Rhetoric of Welfare Reform

Over the past twenty-five years, parallel increases in the severity of U.S. criminal justice and welfare policies have had devastating consequences for poor women and their families. Feminist criminologists argue that sharp restrictions in welfare provisions and dramatic increases in the number of women sentenced to prison do not constitute a war on drugs, crime, and poverty so much as a war on women. Other observers suggest that these trends are indicative of a larger policy regime that organizes penal-welfare responses for the purpose of governing social marginality. Embedded in both accounts are assumptions about coordination within and across state systems, as well as how larger policy mandates are implemented at the local level. The present study relies on ethnographic data collected from a state prison for women to examine whether and to what extent welfare and criminal justice policies were coordinated during the drug and poverty wars of the past decade. Findings reveal that drug war policies did indeed transform punishment practices on the feminine side of the penal system, but such transformations were ultimately premised on changes to institutional interpretive structures that altered the ways state actors conceptualized gender, crime, and women's needs. Central to this interpretive reconfiguration were institutionalized links between the welfare and criminal justice systems and state actors strategic appropriation of dependency discourse associated with welfare reform.

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