criminalizing the poor: from wellfare to cellfare

http://www.nationofchange.org/criminalizing-poor-welfare-cellfare-1330094117

On Au­gust 22, 1996 Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton signed into law his now in­fa­mous Per­sonal Re­spon­si­bil­ity and Work Op­por­tu­nity Act thereby “end[ing] wel­fare as we have come to know it.” The Act re­placed Aid to Fam­i­lies with De­pen­dent Chil­dren (AFDC) with Tem­po­rary As­sis­tance for Needy Fam­i­lies (TANF). TANF es­tab­lishes a life­time limit of 60 months (5 years) for fed­eral as­sis­tance, man­dates that sin­gle par­ents par­tic­i­pate in work ac­tiv­i­ties for an av­er­age of 30 hours per week, and caps fed­eral block grant con­tri­bu­tions to states at $16.6 bil­lion per year. (As a re­sult of in­fla­tion the real value of the TANF block grant has al­ready fallen by 28%.)

And de­spite few fluc­tu­a­tions in the poverty rate since TANF sup­planted AFCD, the par­tic­i­pa­tion rate among el­i­gi­ble fam­i­lies has plum­meted by 52% since 1995.

Over the same time pe­riod—and de­spite flat to de­clin­ing crime rates— the U.S. prison and jail pop­u­la­tion has in­creased by 44%. Per­haps a quickly ex­pand­ing prison pop­u­la­tion is pre­cisely the un­spo­ken foun­da­tion upon which “wel­fare to work­fare” rests. We haven’t “ended wel­fare;” in­stead we’ve in­vis­i­b­lized it by shift­ing its ben­e­fi­cia­ries from the pub­lic square to the prison yard.

The at­ro­phy of the so­cial wel­fare state and the growth of the penal state rep­re­sent a dou­ble crim­i­nal­iza­tion of poverty. Con­sid­er­ing TANF/AFDC data along­side trends in in­car­cer­a­tion is nec­es­sary for re­think­ing the role of the state in pro­vi­sion­ing basic so­cial ser­vices. The tran­si­tion from wel­fare to work­fare and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of bod­ies be­hind bars taken to­gether “work to mar­gin­al­ize pop­u­la­tions—by forc­ing them off the pub­lic aid rolls, on the one side, and hold­ing them under lock, on the other—and even­tu­ally push­ing them into the pe­riph­eral [and deeply pre­car­i­ous] sec­tors of the labor mar­ket.”