Cheating Welfare

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.

Kaaryn S. Gustafson is Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine.

C. Emory Burton:
The book is a readable account of welfare mothers (and a few fathers), emphasizing how these people understand and often violate the rules they are supposed to follow. It would be useful in a course on welfare or perhaps as supplementary reading in a course on poverty.

Corey Shdaimah,author of Negotiating Justice:
Cheating Welfare is simultaneously compassionate and scholarly. Gustafson provides a rare insider perspective on how citizens understand and use welfare. The stories that she relates are a testament to the resilience and strength of people caring for others as best they can in the face of great adversity. Her discussion of necessary, sometimes inadvertent, non-compliance as a form of resistance brings a more complex understanding to theories of rule abidance. This compelling book is a must-read for students, policymakers, and scholars who wish to have informed opinions based on how policies actually shape the behavior of and outcomes for low-income citizens in the context of their complex lived reality.

The 1990s ushered in an era of neoliberal changes in the US in public policies aimed at the poor. Key to these modifications was a shift in ideological thought that mandated personal responsibility for all. Poverty researchers have always paid attention to the hegemonic discourses that shaped public policy, ranging from regulating the behaviors of the poor, to determining which poor are worthy of assistance, to punishing the poor (e.g., Loïc Waquant, Punishing the Poor, 2009; Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor, 1989). Gustafson (law, Connecticut) continues this tradition by focusing on how US welfare policy has increasingly become criminalized despite the polyvocality of welfare recipients. She examines the similarities and differences of 34 female and male respondents concerning their knowledge, perspectives, and experiences of the rules and sanctions governing welfare. The author begins by offering a comprehensive overview of US poverty embedded within a criminalization of poverty,and draws upon rational choice theory to conceptually frame her arguments. She adeptly demonstrates the need for a new paradigm that embodies the words of the Founding Fathers to "promote the general Welfare" of all US citizens. Students and researchers alike will benefit from her multidisciplinary approach. Summing Up:Recommended.Most levels/libraries.