Policing Welfare

This highly original, insightful, and carefully researched book takes us into the inner workings of welfare fraud investigation units, revealing how the obsessions of policymakers with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse are expressed in ways that at once 'police welfare' and the people who count on it to feed and house their children and extend the logics of policing into the administration of poverty policy in the United States. The analysis of the 'welfare police' and theory of 'punitive?adversarialism' Headworth advances in these pages will shape political and urban sociology, the broad and interdisciplinary punishment and society literature, and work in legal theory and the life of the law for decades to come. This is precisely the book we've needed to grasp the work of the administrative state in what is shaping up to be the long twenty-first century. -- Reuben Jonathan Miller, author of?Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration Policing Welfare?is a breakthrough book, a close-up examination of how welfare fraud investigation units institutionalize surveillance and punishment as the chief imperatives of contemporary welfare bureaucracies in the United States. Spencer Headworth's rich empirical study skillfully integrates insights from the sociology of law, stratification, and organizations to show how welfare enforcement erodes the dignity of impoverished citizens literally struggling to purchase a simple loaf of bread. It is a remarkable accomplishment that shows how debates on inequality and policing must be broadened to include welfare agents and the criminalization of poverty. -- Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, author of Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison