The Power of Second-Order Legal Consciousness: Authorities’ Perceptions of “Street Policy” and Welfare Fraud Enforcement

Headworth, Spencer

doi:10.1111/lasr.12470

Cited by 14 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Parole candidates are scrutinized for signs that their remorse is genuine, versus following a script. This finding echoes Headworth's description of welfare fraud enforcers, who expressed frustration that welfare recipients shared advice with each other about what to say or how to act to ensure that they would receive food stamps (Headworth, 2020, p. 332). Headworth found that the enforcers he studied do not want to reward people who “game” the system or do not truly “buy into it.” So, too, parole commissioners sought signs that a parole candidate was not so rehearsed that his remorse appeared artificial.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

“…Previous work on relational and second‐order legal consciousness has spanned a variety of substantive settings. Young (2014) and Headworth (2020) each examined opposite sides of the enforcement coin, looking at how the legal consciousness of enforcer/subject is influenced by each group's beliefs about the other group's legal consciousness. Abrego (2019) and Wang (2019) show the manifold relational ways that legal consciousness (specifically, understandings of citizenship in Abrego's analysis; disputes over eldercare and inheritance in Wang's) are produced and shaped within families.…”

Section: Legal Consciousness and Emotionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But although she introduced both terms to the legal consciousness lexicon, Young did not distinguish between “relational” and “second‐order” (2014). Since then, scholars who have written explicitly about legal consciousness and relationality have oscillated between the terms “second‐order” (e.g., Headworth, 2020) and “relational” legal consciousness (e.g., Abrego, 2019; Chua & Engel, 2019; Wang, 2019). Whether the two concepts are discrete has been unclear.…”

Section: Legal Consciousness and Emotionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How parole boards judge remorse: Relational legal consciousness and the reproduction of carceral logic

Young

Chimowitz

2022

Law Soc Rev

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One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these “lifers” will someday be eligible for discretionary parole. But little is known about a key aspect of parole decision‐making: remorse assessments. Because remorse is a complex emotion that arises from past wrongdoing and unfolds over time, assessing the sincerity of another person's remorse is neither a simple task of lie detection, nor of determining emotional authenticity. Instead, remorse involves numerous elements, including the relationship between a person's past and present motivations, beliefs, and affective states. To understand how parole board members make sense of remorse, we draw on in‐depth interviews with parole commissioners in California, the state with the largest proportion of parole‐eligible lifers. We find that commissioners' remorse assessments hinge on their perceptions of lifers' relationships to law and carceral logic. In this way, relational legal consciousness—specifically, second‐order legal consciousness—functions as a stand‐in for the impossible task of knowing another person's heart or mind. We distinguish relational from second‐order legal consciousness and argue that understanding how they operate at parole hearings reveals the larger import of relational legal consciousness as a mechanism via which existing power relations are produced and reproduced, bridging the legal consciousness and law and emotion literatures.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

Section: Legal Consciousness and Emotionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Legal Consciousness and Emotionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How parole boards judge remorse: Relational legal consciousness and the reproduction of carceral logic

Young

Chimowitz

2022

Law Soc Rev

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“…Language errors could also signal lower educational attainment, and perhaps lower social class. Given the general stigma against less educated and poorer people-and fraud workers' common distrust of poor people who participate in welfare programs (Headworth, 2020)-such signals could similarly make LEP reporters seem less reliable and their reports therefore less promising, discouraging bureaucratic gatekeepers from investing time and energy in them. Hence:…”

Section: Race Ethnicity Immigration and Welfare Workers' Decision-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Listening to snitches: Race/ethnicity, English proficiency, and access to welfare fraud enforcement systems

Headworth

Ríos

2021

Law & Policy

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How does the state respond to members of the public seeking to mobilize its coercive power? Focusing on welfare fraud control units in the United States, we examine how race/ethnicity and written English proficiency affect access to systems for reporting welfare fraud suspicions. Using a correspondence audit, we assess fraud control authorities' likelihood of taking up reports from Latinas and Whites with higher and lower English proficiency. We find that fraud units are less likely to take up lower-proficiency Whites' reports, but that lower proficiency's uptake-dampening effect does not hold for Latinas. To explain the mechanisms underlying our experimental results, we draw on interviews with fraud investigators. The interview evidence reveals the determinations of investigative promise underlying these uptake disparities. For White reporters, English errors cue gatekeepers' preexisting skepticism about public reporters' reliability, decreasing enthusiasm for investing resources in these reports. Reports from lower-English proficiency Latinas offer special viability appeal, however, offsetting the negative influence on uptake probability that errors demonstrate for White reporters. Our results shed new light on contemporary racial/ethnic dynamics in the US welfare system, and advance social scientific understanding of how bureaucratic gatekeepers decide what to do-if anything-with volunteered reports of misconduct.

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“… 3 For more details on welfare fraud investigation policies and practices, see Headworth (2019, 2020); Headworth and Ossei-Owusu (2017).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Broke people, broken rules: Explaining welfare fraud investigators’ attributions

Headworth

2020

Punishment & Society

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There is a notable contrast between welfare clients’ and welfare fraud investigators’ accounts of rule breaking behaviors. Clients describe some actions (or inactions) that constitute rule violations as accidental, and tend to attribute others to situational factors: program rules’ complexity, the exigencies of day-to-day subsistence, and time and energy limitations. Fraud investigators, on the other hand, are comparatively likely to identify rule breaking as deliberate and cite clients’ dispositions to explain the behavior. In part, this disparity reflects the “fundamental attribution error,” the tendency to overestimate dispositional factors’ role in driving others’ behavior. However, evidence from interviews with welfare fraud workers from five US states reveals the impactful administrative and normative factors that encourage them to make and assert attributions of intentionality and dispositional motivation. First, administrative priorities foreground intentional violations: federal authorities financially incentivize deliberate fraud charges, and managers favor these cases, which permit client suspensions and disqualifications. Second, emphasizing internal motivations over situational pressures serves a valuable normative function, establishing punished clients’ blameworthiness and thus defending the legitimacy of both individual fraud workers and the units they compose. These findings demonstrate how policy structures and enforcement practices do not just respond to blameworthy or legally culpable behavior, but help construct narratives of blameworthiness and culpability.

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The Power of Second-Order Legal Consciousness: Authorities’ Perceptions of “Street Policy” and Welfare Fraud Enforcement

Cited by 14 publications

References 61 publications

How parole boards judge remorse: Relational legal consciousness and the reproduction of carceral logic

How parole boards judge remorse: Relational legal consciousness and the reproduction of carceral logic

Listening to snitches: Race/ethnicity, English proficiency, and access to welfare fraud enforcement systems

Broke people, broken rules: Explaining welfare fraud investigators’ attributions

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