Abstract:State-level public assistance agencies completed nearly a million SNAP fraud investigations in fiscal year 2016. These investigations hinge on compiling incriminating information about clients. Drawing on interviews with welfare fraud workers in five U.S. states, this article shows how fraud investigators creatively exploit clients’ social networks to extract such information, and thus use clients’ social ties against them. Investigators gain some information through elective cooperation, when people voluntari… Show more
“…Nevertheless, he invokes such a judicial reputation to explain his unit's cultivation of a reputation for strictness as a way of influencing clients. Eastcoast investigator Tiffany also sees street policy as central to clients’ thinking about rules and rule violations, and agrees that fraud units should put clients’ networks to use for their own purposes (see also Headworth ):The problem with word‐of‐mouth with clients is, you know, “Oh, come in and say this and you'll get this amount, come in and say this and you'll get that.” So that's the biggest thing that we're trying to combat, is how clients come in and say, “I came in and said that and I got, the fraud unit called me.” And that's what we're really trying to be able to catch up and get, let the word be out that we're, we do look into things, and it's not going to be as tolerated as it may have been in the past.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Others prosecute these cases under general theft or fraud statutes. See Headworth () for more details on fraud units’ basic operations.…”
Legal authorities’ second‐order legal consciousness—their perceptions of others’ understandings of law—shapes the social realization of legal power. Analysis of interviews with welfare fraud enforcement workers from five US states reveals their perceptions of how clients view law, policy, and enforcement practices, and shows these perceptions’ consequences. Enforcement workers’ perceptions influence the discretionary work of policy implementation, as fraud workers attempt to circumvent what they see as clients’ evasive maneuvers and act in ways they believe will influence clients’ thinking and behavior. Fraud workers’ second‐order legal consciousness can also influence welfare law, when their perceptions of clients’ understandings and behaviors drive changes in written rules. Together, these effects demonstrate the power of authorities’ second‐order legal consciousness to affect both law in action and law in books. Through documenting the impact of authorities’ second‐order legal consciousness, this study fills an important gap in social scientific knowledge of how ongoing, dynamic processes of assessing others’ thinking and responding accordingly shape law‐infused environments.
“…Nevertheless, he invokes such a judicial reputation to explain his unit's cultivation of a reputation for strictness as a way of influencing clients. Eastcoast investigator Tiffany also sees street policy as central to clients’ thinking about rules and rule violations, and agrees that fraud units should put clients’ networks to use for their own purposes (see also Headworth ):The problem with word‐of‐mouth with clients is, you know, “Oh, come in and say this and you'll get this amount, come in and say this and you'll get that.” So that's the biggest thing that we're trying to combat, is how clients come in and say, “I came in and said that and I got, the fraud unit called me.” And that's what we're really trying to be able to catch up and get, let the word be out that we're, we do look into things, and it's not going to be as tolerated as it may have been in the past.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Others prosecute these cases under general theft or fraud statutes. See Headworth () for more details on fraud units’ basic operations.…”
Legal authorities’ second‐order legal consciousness—their perceptions of others’ understandings of law—shapes the social realization of legal power. Analysis of interviews with welfare fraud enforcement workers from five US states reveals their perceptions of how clients view law, policy, and enforcement practices, and shows these perceptions’ consequences. Enforcement workers’ perceptions influence the discretionary work of policy implementation, as fraud workers attempt to circumvent what they see as clients’ evasive maneuvers and act in ways they believe will influence clients’ thinking and behavior. Fraud workers’ second‐order legal consciousness can also influence welfare law, when their perceptions of clients’ understandings and behaviors drive changes in written rules. Together, these effects demonstrate the power of authorities’ second‐order legal consciousness to affect both law in action and law in books. Through documenting the impact of authorities’ second‐order legal consciousness, this study fills an important gap in social scientific knowledge of how ongoing, dynamic processes of assessing others’ thinking and responding accordingly shape law‐infused environments.
“…Organizations that take a holistic perspective on social problems and offer a range of responses become a useful resource for other frontline bureaucrats. In this context, rather than complaints (Herring 2019) or interpersonal conflicts (Bergemann 2017; Headworth 2019) driving referrals, merged therapeutic and punitive logics invite referrals from frontline bureaucrats with rehabilitative aspirations they feel they cannot fulfill. The possibility of coercive intervention, however, also generates widespread apprehension.…”
Each year, U.S. child protection authorities investigate millions of families, disproportionately poor families and families of color. These investigations involve multiple home visits to collect information across numerous personal domains. How does the state gain such widespread entrée into the intimate, domestic lives of marginalized families? Predominant theories of surveillance offer little insight into this process and its implications. Analyzing observations of child maltreatment investigations in Connecticut and interviews with professionals reporting maltreatment, state investigators, and investigated mothers, this article argues that coupling assistance with coercive authority—a hallmark of contemporary poverty governance—generates an expansive surveillance of U.S. families by attracting referrals from adjacent systems. Educational, medical, and other professionals invite investigations of families far beyond those ultimately deemed maltreating, with the hope that child protection authorities’ dual therapeutic and coercive capacities can rehabilitate families, especially marginalized families. Yet even when investigations close, this arrangement, in which service systems channel families to an entity with coercive power, fosters apprehension among families and thwarts their institutional engagement. These findings demonstrate how, in an era of welfare retrenchment, rehabilitative poverty governance renders marginalized populations hyper-visible to the state in ways that may reinforce inequality and marginality.
“…In an updated introduction to The Society of Captives , Bruce Western (2007) considers the relevance of Sykes’s analysis of total power and its association with social suffering for contemporary analyses of overpoliced and hyperincarcerated neighborhoods. It is not surprising then that many researchers today examine penal power outside of the prison: in the school (Nolan 2011; Shedd 2015), in the welfare office (Headworth 2019), in the hospital (Lara-Millán 2014), and so on (see also, Cunha 2014). 1…”
Ethnographic studies inside prisons are especially difficult to execute. In addition to facing amplified challenges in gaining site access, earning subjects’ trust, and tolerating the exhaustion of fieldwork, researchers who collect participant observation and in-depth interview data behind bars must confront an explicit asymmetrical power relation. Prison ethnographers penetrate, to varying levels of depth, a social universe where staff dominate prisoners and where prisoners, largely in response to the pains of their imprisonment, carve paths to dignity. This paper considers how and where non-staff and non-incarcerated ethnographers can awkwardly fit into (or fail out of) this space. Drawing on insights from two ethnographic studies in the United States, the authors detail their particular and common experiences across three phases: access, collection, and exit. These experiences motivate a description of prison ethnography as “punishing fieldwork.” Such research is not only exacting, it is also significantly contained and directed by penal power.
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