Policing Welfare

Policing Welfare PDF Author: Spencer Headworth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022677953X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Means-tested government assistance in the United States requires recipients to meet certain criteria and continue to maintain their eligibility so that benefits are paid to the “truly needy.” Welfare is regarded with such suspicion in this country that considerable resources are spent policing the boundaries of eligibility, which are delineated by an often confusing and baroque set of rules and regulations. Even minor infractions of the many rules can cause people to be dropped from these programs, and possibly face criminal prosecution. In this book, Spencer Headworth offers the first study of the structure of fraud control in the welfare system by examining the relations between different levels of governmental agencies, from federal to local, and their enforcement practices. Policing Welfare shows how the enforcement regime of welfare has been constructed to further stigmatize those already living in poverty and deepens disparities of class, race, and gender in our society.

Policing Welfare Fraud

Policing Welfare Fraud PDF Author: Scarlet Wilcock
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003815715
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Book Description
Policing Welfare Fraud charts and interrogates the suite of measures ostensibly designed to combat welfare fraud and non-compliance. In Australia, which serves as the empirical focus of this book, these strategies include stringent ID checks, pre-emptive data surveillance technologies including the infamous and illegal ‘robodebt’ programme, a dedicated fraud hotline and an ‘intelligence-led’ fraud investigation framework. Drawing on original documentary and interview data, including interviews with fraud investigators, this book unpacks the logics that underpin these anti-fraud initiatives with a focus on how these initiatives are imbued with logics and practices more readily associated with the criminal justice system. The central argument of the book is that the emergence of contemporary welfare compliance regimes represents a form of ‘governing through fraud’ in which the threat of welfare fraud has effectively necessitated a regime of criminalisation within the welfare state. This has been enabled by a broader process of neoliberal welfare reform, which has cast suspicion over all welfare use. The overall effect of this regime is to restrict access to social security, punish welfare recipients and stigmatise welfare use. Policing Welfare Fraud also highlights points of contradiction and multiplicity in the enactment of specific welfare compliance initiatives, including attempts by welfare officials to moderate or reformulate these strategies ‘on the ground’. These findings demonstrate that the criminalisation of welfare is neither uniform nor inexorable, and that more progressive welfare reform is possible. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, politics and those interested in the policing of welfare recipients.

Cheating Welfare

Cheating Welfare PDF Author: Kaaryn S Gustafson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814732917
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
Over the last three decades, welfare policies have been informed by popular beliefs that welfare fraud is rampant. As a result, welfare policies have become more punitive and the boundaries between the welfare system and the criminal justice system have blurred—so much so that in some locales prosecution caseloads for welfare fraud exceed welfare caseloads. In reality, some recipients manipulate the welfare system for their own ends, others are gravely hurt by punitive policies, and still others fall somewhere in between. In Cheating Welfare, Kaaryn S. Gustafson endeavors to clear up these gray areas by providing insights into the history, social construction, and lived experience of welfare. She shows why cheating is all but inevitable—not because poor people are immoral, but because ordinary individuals navigating complex systems of rules are likely to become entangled despite their best efforts. Through an examination of the construction of the crime we know as welfare fraud, which she bases on in-depth interviews with welfare recipients in Northern California, Gustafson challenges readers to question their assumptions about welfare policies, welfare recipients, and crime control in the United States.

Criminalizing Race, Criminalizing Poverty

Criminalizing Race, Criminalizing Poverty PDF Author: Kiran Mirchandani
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
The criminalization and penalization of poverty through increased surveillance and control of welfare recipients in recent years has led many poverty advocates to claim that "a war against the poor" is currently in progress. The authors argue that poor people in general and people of colour in particular are most often the casualties in governments' desire to roll back the welfare state. Relying on myths and stereotypes about racial difference, the enforcement and policing of welfare fraud policies constructs people of colour and the poor as potential "cheaters" and "abusers" of the system. This has allowed for the stigmatizing and discriminatory treatment of these people to persist unchallenged within the welfare system. Book jacket.

Policing Black Lives

Policing Black Lives PDF Author: Robyn Maynard
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
ISBN: 1552669807
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates. Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities. A call-to-action, Policing Black Lives urges readers to work toward dismantling structures of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society.

Policing Welfare

Policing Welfare PDF Author: Spencer Headworth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022677936X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
"Government assistance in the United States requires that recipients meet certain criteria and continue to maintain their eligibility so that benefits are paid to the "truly needy." Welfare is regarded with such suspicion in this country that considerable resources are spent to police the boundaries of eligibility. Even minor infractions of the many rules can cause people to be dropped from these programs. In this book Spencer Headworth gives us the first study of the structure of fraud control in the welfare system, the relations between different levels of governmental agencies, from federal to local, and their enforcement practices. Policing Welfare shows how the enforcement regime of welfare is trained on those living in poverty furthering their stigmatization and often deepening racial disparities in our society"--

Private Policing of Economic Crime

Private Policing of Economic Crime PDF Author: Petter Gottschalk
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000344312
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
This book discusses private policing conducted by fraud examiners and financial crime specialists when there is suspicion of white-collar crime. The theory of convenience applies to the suspected crime, while the maturity model applies to the conducted investigation. Private policing of economic crime by fraud examiners in internal investigations is a topic of increasing concern as there is a growing business for law firms and auditing firms to conduct inquiries and reviews when there is suspicion of misconduct, wrongdoing, and crime by white-collar offenders. The key features of this book are the application of a structural model for convenience theory and the application of a maturity model for fraud examinations. The structural model assesses convenience themes for motive, opportunity, and willingness in each case study, while the maturity model assesses the level of private policing maturity in fraud examinations. For the first time, two emerging frameworks to study white-collar offenses and private policing maturity are introduced and applied to a number of cases from Denmark, Iceland, Moldova, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. This book will be essential to those studying law, business, and criminology, as well as practicing fraud examiners.

Conditional Citizens

Conditional Citizens PDF Author: Laila Lalami
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1524747165
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
A New York Times Editors' Choice • Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, L.A. Times What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize­­–finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of American rights, liberties, and protections. "Sharp, bracingly clear essays."—Entertainment Weekly Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today. Lalami poignantly illustrates how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation, with the result that a caste system is maintained that keeps the modern equivalent of white male landowners at the top of the social hierarchy. Conditional citizens, she argues, are all the people with whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other. Brilliantly argued and deeply personal, Conditional Citizens weaves together Lalami’s own experiences with explorations of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture.

United States Attorneys' Manual

United States Attorneys' Manual PDF Author: United States. Department of Justice
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Justice, Administration of
Languages : en
Pages : 720

Book Description


Cheating Welfare

Cheating Welfare PDF Author: Kaaryn S. Gustafson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814760791
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
Discusses the history and prevalence of welfare fraud using interviews and case studies.