Week 1

Key Questions

• How has welfare historically developed? What are the ways in which this development has been influenced by gender, race, and class?

• How has the development of welfare been entangled with punitive logics? What influenced the increasing punitivity of welfare over the course of its development?

• What caused welfare and the criminal legal system to become entwined? How are people on welfare criminalized?

Required Materials:

• Kaaryn Gustafson, Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty, “Reconstructing Social Ills: From the Perils of Poverty to Welfare Dependency”

• Kaaryn Gustafson, Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty, “The Criminalization of Poverty”

Supplementary Materials:

• Peter Edelman, Not A Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America, “Criminalizing Public Benefits”

• Marco Brydolf-Horwitz and Katherine Beckett, “Welfare, Punishment, and Social Marginality: Understanding the Connections”

• Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, “Welfare ‘Reform’ as Poor Discipline and Statecraft”

• François Bonnet, The Upper Limit: How Low-Wage Work Defines Punishment and Welfare, “The Great Adjustment: Punishment and Welfare in Postwar America”

• Krys Maki, Ineligible: Single Mothers Under Welfare Surveillance, “A Brief History of Welfare Surveillance in Ontario”

• Krys Maki, Ineligible: Single Mothers Under Welfare Surveillance, “Mapping the Welfare Surveillance Apparatus”

• Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race, “Race and Federalism in Welfare’s Disciplinary Turn”

exercise

Create a timeline of the welfare state. How far back should the timeline go? What are defining moments in its development? Continue to add to the timeline while progressing through the remaining weeks.