Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty

2 Reconstructing Social Ills: From the Perils of Poverty to Welfare Dependency

| 17 2 Reconstructing Social Ills From the Perils of Poverty to Welfare Dependency Assistance to the poor has never been provided without strings attached. Aid to the poor, particularly government-sponsored aid to the poor, has been designed to regulate—markets and the economy, families, morality, even motherhood. That is not to say that providing for the poor has been divorced from a public desire to do good for the poor. From the beginning, the provision of welfare in the United States has rested upon some core moral values, particularly the belief that poor and vulnerable members of society require society’s assistance. At the same time, this belief has been accompanied by the idea that only some of the poor deserve assistance—usually the very young, the very old, and the disabled. The welfare system in the United States, a lightly regulated free-market economy, has also been guided by beliefs about how individuals will or should behave as members of the labor force. One of these ideas is that individuals will participate in the paid labor market only if working will put them in significantly better economic circumstances than not working. Another guiding belief is that individuals living in a free-market society implicitly covenant to engage in economic risk, whether the risk leads to benefit or peril. Further, to maintain a free-market economy where individuals are motivated to take economic risks, society must refrain from protecting individuals too much from the hardships of economic failure. The underpinnings of the American welfare system, however, have created contradictions and stresses within the design and the functioning of the system itself. Both law and social science have heavily influenced the ideals behind social welfare programs, the discourses framing social problems, and the structure of the social welfare system itself. Past welfare policies, programs , and motivations echo in today’s welfare politics. That history is outlined below. 18 | Reconstructing Social Ills From Charitable Aid to Government-Sponsored Relief In the United States, early efforts to aid poor families grew from efforts to create morally upright mothers who would then raise morally upright children . In the early twentieth century the discipline of social work dominated the framing of the social issues and social problems, including poverty. As is the case today, women and children found themselves particularly vulnerable to poverty. Perhaps in contrast to today’s political context, however, women constituted the strongest political force shaping aid programs for the poor. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, female reformers sought wide-ranging political and economic transformation. Many of the female reformers represented the elite—white, economically privileged women drawn from the first great wave of women college graduates. They brought about transformations in the areas of health, education, and welfare , including the adoption and implementation of aid programs known as Mothers’ Pensions. Mothers’ Pensions, programs established first through private charities and later implemented as state-level relief programs, provided aid to poor children (Leff 1973; Skocpol et al. 1993). The goals of Mothers ’ Pensions were twofold: first, to provide aid to poor, white widows who, with the loss of their husbands, had few legitimate means of financial support ; second, to inculcate poor immigrant families with the moral ground rules of the dominant, middle-class American society (Gordon 1994, 44-47). These dual purposes of providing for the sympathetic deserving poor and policing and surveilling families at the margins have held steady through American aid programs, both private and public. Social reformers of the Reform Era believed that creating good mothers was good for the greater welfare of society. America’s privileged classes wanted younger generations to be raised in an atmosphere of traditional middle-class values. Providing aid and social services gave social workers a way to regulate what went on in poor homes. Social workers overseeing state aid programs considered routine surveillance of poor families essential to determining their “deservingness” of aid (Katz 1989; Gordon 1994). Whether a family was deserving depended not only on a family’s economic need but also on a host of other criteria related to hygiene and morals used to gauge whether a family maintained a “suitable home” (Katz 1989; Bell 1965). Immigrants and working women, whose cultures and practices were commonly most at odds with the motherhood ideals held and fostered by the privileged social workers, were those least likely to receive state-sponsored aid (Ladd- Reconstructing Social Ills...