Deciding to Discipline: Race, Choice, and Punishment at the Frontlines of Welfare Reform

Abstract

Welfare sanctions are financial penalties applied to individuals who fail to comply with welfare program rules. Their widespread use reflects a turn toward disciplinary approaches to poverty management. In this article, we investigate how implicit racial biases and discrediting social markers interact to shape officials' decisions to impose sanctions. We present experimental evidence based on hypothetical vignettes that case managers are more likely to recommend sanctions for Latina and black clients—but not white clients—when discrediting markers are present. We triangulate these findings with analyses of state administrative data. Our results for Latinas are mixed, but we find consistent evidence that the probability of a sanction rises significantly when a discrediting marker (i.e., a prior sanction for noncompliance) is attached to a black rather than a white welfare client. Overall, our study clarifies how racial minorities, especially African Americans, are more likely to be punished for deviant behavior in the new world of disciplinary welfare provision.

Race and the Local Politics of Punishment in the New World of Welfare

“…Where TANF administration is more centralized, we find race to be unrelated to sanctioning. In sum, our findings buttress prior research that demonstrates how race has influenced the rolling out of a more disciplinary regime of U.S. poverty governance, both across the states (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2008) and by frontline case managers (Schram et al 2009). …”

“…In such cases, group reputations can frame interpretations of ambiguous policy-target behaviors and cue assumptions about the kinds of policy actions that are likely to be effective. The effects of a particular group reputation, however, will depend on the policy relevance of its contents and on situational factors that may strengthen or weaken its utility as an information proxy (Schram et al 2009). …”

Integrationen och arbetets marknad: Hur jämställdhet, arbete och annat "svenskt" görs av arbetsförmedlare och privata aktörer

“…I en europeisk kontext har workfareprojektet haft en bredare betydelse och indikerar en allmän förskjutning från passiva till aktiva insatser. Dessa insatser baseras likt den amerikanska workfarepolitiken på kontroll och disciplinering, men även på en logik som strävar efter att utveckla den arbetslöses kompetens (Johansson & Möller 2009, Thorén 2008, Schram 2009). Mer konkret har skiftet inneburit att en stor del av välfärdspolitiken kopplas till krav på motprestationer.…”

Stereotyped perceptions of chronic pain

“…Doctors treat patients differently resulting in unequal access to treatment; teachers see certain pupils' problems as self-inflicted and others as disabilities, and social workers use stricter evaluation practices on some clients and easier ones on others. This issue of discrimination is, at worst, reproduced within the political administrative categories as institutionalized bias towards certain human characteristics (Schram et al 2009). …”