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Where Welfare and Criminal Justice Meet: Applying Wacquant to the Experiences of Marginalised Women in Austerity Britain

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Abstract

Research linking social and penal policy has grown extensively in recent years. Wacquant (2009) suggests that retrenchment of welfare support and expansion of the penal system work together to bear down on marginalised populations in a ‘carceral–assistential net’. Empirical and theoretical examinations of these regimes are often underpinned by gendered assumptions. This article addresses this limitation by foregrounding the experiences of women; qualitative interviews offer an insight into their experiences at the intersection of welfare and criminal justice policy in austerity Britain. Their reflections make visible the complex, heterogeneous raft of social assistance, institutional neglect and intensive intervention that characterises women's experiences of the ‘carceral–assistential net’. The evidence presented suggests that for marginalised women interventions intensify once behaviour becomes problematic or in times of crisis. While some interventions are valued by those engaged there is little significant impact on their socio-economic position.

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... People who use drugs are identified as a particular group for welfare intervention, habitually positioned both as complicit in the reproduction of intergenerational poverty and social disengagement, and as sources of hope for interrupting such patterns. Much support for marginalised people is aimed at empowering them to make positive changes in their lives, often with limited capacity to address the structural causes of their marginality (Povey, 2016). The focus on self-responsibility and morality for people who use drugs shifts the understanding of severe marginalisation from a product of an intergenerational cycle of disadvantage and structural inequality to an attribute or deficit of the individual (Salter & Breckenridge, 2014). ...
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The sudden growth and glorification of the penal state in the United States after the mid-1970s (and in Western Europe two decades later) is not a response to the evolution of crime, but a reaction to-and a diversion from-the social insecurity produced by the fragmentation of wage labor and the destabilization of ethnoracial hierarchies following the discarding of the Fordist-Keynesian compact. It partakes of a new government of poverty wedding restrictive "workfare" and expansive "prisonfare," which ensnares the precarious fractions of the postindustrial proletariat in a carceral-assistential net designed to steer them towards deregulated employment or to contain them in their dispossessed neighborhoods and in the booming prisons that have become their satellites. This policy of penalization of urban marginality guided by moral behaviorism partakes of a broader reengineering and remasculinizing of the state that has rendered obsolete the traditional scholarly and policy division between welfare and crime. It must be grasped, not under the narrow rubric of repression, but under the generative category of production, as it has spawned new state agencies, social types, knowledges and experts. It makes the study of incarceration an essential chapter in the sociology of the state and social stratification in the era of triumphant neoliberalism.
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The riots that erupted in English cities in August 2011 were provoked by a complex mix of socio-economic factors. Sidelining structural explanations for the civil disorder, conservative commentators argued that dysfunctional families had caused the riots. Reinforcing traditional connections between criminality, the family and welfare, conservatives contended that the absence of fathers in lone mother-headed families explained both the dynamics of the civil disorder and the aggressive behaviour of some of the young men involved. Such claims located both the causes of the riots and solutions to expressions of violent masculinities in the familial sphere. Employing the framework of critical studies of men and masculinities this article interrogates these narratives and maps their depoliticising effects. Additionally, it exposes how the effects of a range of social problems were projected on to poor, lone mothers, reinforcing a range of regulatory narratives and practices that target this social group.
Article
The values of austerity are a crucial part of the neoliberal repertoire: austerity narratives reinforce the idea that poverty arises from fecklessness. While hard-working citizens are busily looking after themselves properly, the poor are indulging in the irresponsible parenting that is to blame for their offpring's lack of opportunity. The notion that individual decisions are responsible for structurally generated poverty was a key New Labour motif (and one that has not wholly been abandoned). But the Tories have cranked up the rhetoric on problem families, while the new thrift aesthetic opens up further possibilities for the demonising of spendthrifts on benefits. Meanwhile thrift rhetoric demands that the state also stops wasting money on people who after all have only themselves to blame.
Article
A defining feature of UK welfare reform has been concerted moves towards greater conditionality and sanctioning which has stimulated much academic debate. However, few policy articles have sought to examine how welfare reforms are actually implemented. Lipsky (1980) has shown that the intentions of policy makers may be frustrated by the behaviour of public service workers operating in a ‘corrupted world of service’. This article draws upon the findings of the evaluation of the Jobseekers Mandatory Activity to discuss how key welfare reforms are likely to be implemented. It argues that that discretion remains a significant feature of front-line practice with potentially profound implications for severely disadvantaged groups.
Article
The movement towards localism, partnerships and governing ‘networks’ has renewed academic interest in the voluntary sector role in multi-agency work in criminal justice fields. This article argues that strategic partnerships which service systems for managing offenders are organizing into more complex formations which are poised to alter academic understanding of power relationships and roles among partners. Using Adelbart Evers’ (2005) concept of ‘hybridization’, the complexity of service delivery partnerships and the varying interchanges among participating agencies is discussed. The analysis focuses on the start-up and first year of operation of the ‘Chestnut Centre’, a community-based project for diverting women from custody based in a city in the midlands of England. The results are presented as a case study of participants’ reflections on power and legitimacy in the partnership; experiences of collaborative working; approaches towards service users; and perceptions of multi-agency partnerships.
Article
There has been an expansion in the provision of family intervention projects in Britain. These projects, in which housing providers are centrally implicated, aim to provide a form of coercive support to households subject to, or at risk of, legal sanctions. In both core accommodation and outreach models of these projects, the dwelling is a key site, and the inspection of domesticity a primary technique, of governance. This article argues that policy narratives and some academic critiques of these projects are heavily influenced by understandings of governmentality as a disciplinary power based upon Bentham's and Foucault's works on the panopticon. The article uses indicative findings from recent research to illustrate that such conceptualisations neglect the centrality of the social worlds, social class and habitus that embed non-clinical sites and modes of governance and influence the interactions between project workers and individuals subject to project interventions.
Article
This article focuses upon the introduction of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) as a replacement for the main income replacement benefit, Incapacity Benefit (IB), for sick and/or disabled people in Britain. The article argues that the process of claiming ESA, a process that is dependent upon medicalised perceptions of capability to work and which is aimed at managing the perceived economic and social costs of sick and impaired people, is a means of sorting sick and/or disabled people into subgroups of claimants. The article goes on to discuss the implications of this observation with regard to explanations of the disadvantages that sick and/or disabled people face and their implications for the income of such people. The article concludes that because the shift from IB to ESA is premised upon a number of mistaken assumptions, it represents a retrograde development for people who are sick and/or who have impairments.
Article
In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter-century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.
Article
The year 2006 marked the 30th anniversary of the publication of Michael Rutter and Nicola Madge's Cycles of Disadvantage (1976). As such, it provides an opportunity to take stock of debates over an alleged cycle of deprivation, both in the 1970s, and more recently. This article seeks to use historical methods in order to outline some areas in which a historical perspective can add significantly to existing knowledge on this topic of enduring interest. In particular, it explores five myths or misconceptions: firstly, that we know the origins of the cycle of deprivation hypothesis, secondly, that we know what happened in the course of the Research Programme, thirdly, that the Department of Health and Social Security supported the research; fourthly, that social scientists were interested in the cycle hypothesis and lastly, that there has been significant progress since 1976.
Article
This paper examines recent responses to 'problematic street culture' in England, where increasing pressure has been exerted to prevent people from begging and street drinking in public spaces, with rough sleeping also targeted in some areas. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with enforcement agents, support providers and targeted individuals, it assesses the extent to which the strategies employed are indicative of a 'revanchist expulsion' of the deviant Other and/or an expression of 'coercive care' for the vulnerable Other. It concludes that, whilst the recent developments appear, at first glance, to be symptomatic of revanchist sanitisation of public space, closer examination reveals that the situation is actually much more complex than a revanchist reading of the situation might suggest, and perhaps not as devoid of compassion.
Article
This article examines the links between childhood and adult abuse among long-term welfare recipients. In-depth interviews were conducted with 280 women who had been on public financial assistance for at least 3 years. High rates of childhood and adult abuse were reported among these long-term welfare recipients. Two-thirds (67%) indicated they were physically, sexually, and/or emotionally abused during childhood and 81% lived in a physically violent relationship as an adult. Most of the women (59%) were abused both as a child and an adult, and almost all of the women (90%) were abused as either a child or adult. There was a strong relationship between childhood and adult abuse among these long-term welfare recipients. There was also a connection between past abuse and a Child Protective Services investigation as a parent. Overall, more attention needs to be paid to family violence among long-term welfare recipients.
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