Crime Policy and Welfare Policy

This essay examines the relationship between crime and welfare policy. Conventional policy scholarship often places these two policy areas within distinct state institutions, engaging unique sets of governmental actors, and operating under autonomous, if occasionally intersecting, policy domains. While crime and welfare policies have, in fact, been closely intertwined, the ways in which they relate to each other has differed across time and place. The German criminologist Franz von Liszt stated over 100 years ago that social policy “represents the best and most effective crime policy” (Liszt 1905, 246). This dictum reflects an underlying assumption that social policies promoting general public welfare will yield lower crime rates, mediating the need for another set of policies distinctly directed toward crime control. With the rise of welfare states in Western European countries at the beginning of the twentieth century, the roots of the “crime problem” were seen as embedded in social structures; hence, the solution to crime was to decrease inequalities and poverty with comprehensive and inclusive welfare policies. In Sweden, crime policy was almost completely absent until the 1960s, and the criminal justice system was perceived to have few opportunities to affect crime until the 1980s (Andersson 2002; Tham 2001).

Crime and welfare policies in the United States developed a more distinct set of institutions with more retributive crime policies and remedial welfare policies than its Western European counterparts. Nevertheless, in the postwar period, US crime and welfare policies advanced toward more rehabilitative ideals and relied on the assumption that the improvement of conditions for the poor contributes to diminished criminal conduct (Garland 2001). This movement of crime policy toward more welfarist aims of correction and the improvement of economic and social conditions as a critical component of effective crime control defines what Garland (2001) refers to as penal-welfarism. Since the early 1970s, rehabilitative frames have reversed, replaced by a set of punitive discourses and practices that not only shape crime policy but also increasingly define the domain of social welfare (Garland 2001; Simon 2007; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011). The punitive turn or the sharp reversal of penal-welfarism toward discipline and punishment has established a new urgency for an understanding of the relationship between crime and welfare policies.

Structural shifts in the direction of welfare contraction and carceral expansion have not only contributed to new theoretical understandings of the relationship between crime and welfare policies, they have also fueled debates regarding the extent to which these trends characterize policies beyond the US border. Studies across nation-states and welfare state regimes indicate mixed findings regarding the extent to which “governing through crime” (Simon 2007) defines policies across Western industrialized nations. Comparative research examines the question of whether welfare regime typologies explain relationships between welfare policies and crime rates (Knepper 2012) or between welfare regimes and rates of incarceration (Beckett and Western 2001; Downes and Hansen 2006).

Research suggesting the lack of correspondence between rates of crime and rates of incarceration has further prompted concerns that crime policy may be less related to the goals of crime reduction than to the management of poor and other marginalized populations (Beckett and Western 2001; Wacquant 2009).¹ In the United States, racialized discourses stigmatizing perceived recipients of welfare benefits and wide racial disparities in those penalized by an increasingly aggressive system of arrest and incarceration have raised new questions and insights into the racial dimension of both crime and welfare policies (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011; Tonry 1995; 2011; Wacquant 2009; Weaver 2007; Western 2006). Cross-national implications regarding such disparities are inconclusive as social categories salient in the United States may take on different significance in a Western European context. For example, US-defined racial categories are often illegible and may even be prohibited in the European context.² Rather, immigrant or foreign-born status may carry more social meaning. In some cases, unequal crime and welfare policy implications across native-born and foreign-born populations parallel those associated with explicitly racial categories in the United States (Barker 2012a; Tonry 1997; Wacquant 2006; 2008).

This essay provides a synthesis of criminological and social welfare theoretical frameworks, along with empirical data illuminating the links between crime policy and welfare policy within the US and European contexts. The United States and Sweden remain “exceptional” in their extraordinarily high and low levels of punitiveness, respectively. Focus on either end of the welfare and crime policy continuum provides comparative national contexts from which we will examine and evaluate theories explaining the relationship between these policy areas. Crime and welfare data dating from the 1970s and highlights from more recent trends in the United States and Sweden, with consideration of other European examples, offer further evidence informing scholarly areas of inquiry and debate.

In Section II, we start by defining crime and welfare policies. Section III builds on Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s (1990) classic typology of welfare regimes to examine evolving empirical work and theories on the linkages between carceral and welfare functions of the state. Section IV investigates the crime and welfare nexus that characterizes the United States as well as the role of race, gender, and other categories of economic and social inequality that are prominent in this policy context. Section V reviews current debates regarding the convergence or persisting divergence in welfare and penal policies in Europe. In particular, we will focus on Sweden as an example of a social democratic regime that serves as a model of universal welfare and rehabilitative crime policies. The final section of the essay provides general conclusions and identifies areas for further research.

To study the link between crime and welfare policies, we start by defining these policy fields, keeping in mind significant variations across time and country. Crime policies, on the one hand, often relate to the prevention and regulation of crime through the institutions of policing, prosecution, criminal courts, jails, and prisons (Garland 2001; Knepper 2007). Reducing crime and recidivism, increasing public safety, and providing retribution are some of the goals of these policies. The expansion of and increased specialization in contemporary criminal justice systems have resulted in the development of subfields within crime policy that focus on different types of crimes, for example, violent crime, drug crime, domestic violence, sex crime, trafficking, organized crime, and terrorism. Specialized areas of crime perpetration and victimization further divide by categories of age, reflecting areas of concern that focus specifically on children, youth, and the elderly. Recently, more attention to victims and, in particular, victims of gender violence and “hate crimes” have further expanded the notion of crime and the scope of crime control to emphasize the protection of vulnerable populations including women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and sexual or gender minorities (Jenness and Grattet 2001; Kim 2013; Ljungwald 2010; Tham, Rönneling, and Rytterbro 2011).

Welfare policies, on the other hand, function to construct and support the welfare state by guaranteeing a basic standard of economic protections and equalizing the consequences of social risks such as disability, unemployment, illness, old age, and childbirth (Briggs 2011; Gilbert and Terrell 2005; Knepper 2007). Welfare policies relate to measures that promote human welfare or well-being throughout life. As such, welfare policies broadly include education, social assistance, parental benefits, housing benefits, social security, and unemployment benefits. Health protections, including medical and mental health services, are also included. Formal intersections between crime and welfare policy domains lie in the arena of community corrections where welfare policies regulate measures toward people involved in the criminal justice system, for instance, through community-based programs for justice-involved youth and psychiatric care for those with mental illness.

Under advanced capitalism, crime and welfare policies have a complex set of aims, the former emphasizing public safety, the latter promoting welfare by ameliorating the excesses of the marketplace and providing at least a minimum standard for the provision of social goods. Contemporary analyses of the “relationship” between these two domains tend to follow two trajectories. The first set of scholarship emphasizes cross-country comparisons with a focus on the relationship between the generosity of welfare policies and the punitive level of crime policy (Cavadino and Dignan 2005; Downes and Hansen 2006; Greenberg 2004; Lappi-Seppälä 2008; Lappi-Seppälä and Tonry 2011). The second set of scholarship emerges from the experiences of the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom. This line of research focuses on the reversal of penal-welfarism since the early 1970s as demonstrated by a reduction in welfare benefits, the retributive turn of crime policy, and the increasing shift of social policy from treatment to crime control (Garland 2001; Simon 2007; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2010; Wacquant 2009). This interpretation of crime and welfare policy does not necessarily refute the comparative methods and findings of the first line of inquiry. However, this focus on the relationship between crime and welfare policy emphasizes their shared aims to discipline, control, and discard the most economically and socially marginalized populations.

Esping-Andersen’s (1990) classic typology of welfare state regimes—liberal, conservative, and social democratic—remains highly influential and durable in comparative social policy research and analysis. Liberal regimes, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, rely strongly on the free market, competitiveness, and means-tested relief. Welfare benefits are minimal and target those deemed genuinely poor. Strict hierarchies and corporatism characterize the conservative model, exemplified by Germany. Its social insurance schemes are mainly based on status and occupation, and the institution of the family plays a significant role in satisfying social needs. The social democratic regime is embedded in social rights, solidarity, and egalitarianism with Sweden representing the archetypal example. In contrast to means-tested criteria in liberal regimes, social democratic regimes emphasize welfare benefits that are universal in character, aiming to build unity across classes.

Esping-Andersen’s original and subsequent reformulations of welfare state regimes do not integrate state functions of crime and punishment, rather, they confine observations on the relationship between welfare and crime to the extraordinarily punitive and stigmatizing character of poor relief within liberal regimes. Esping-Andersen’s typology, however, provides a schema on which other scholars have further theorized comparative crime and welfare policy and examined empirical data studying the relationship between factors of inequality, differential welfare policies, and indicators related to crime. Michael Cavadino and James Dignan (2005) build on Esping-Andersen’s welfare state regimes to reformulate a broader political typology, positing a correspondence between liberal, corporatist, and social democratic regimes and a set of penal policies that, not surprisingly, aligns with their orientation toward social rights, income stratification, and redistributive government policies. Esping-Andersen’s liberal regime, updated by Cavadino and Dignan as “neoliberal,” is characterized by a punitive “law and order” penal ideology and exhibits high rates of incarceration. At the other end of the continuum, they adopt Garland’s reference to a rehabilitative crime policy to categorize the social democratic regime as penal-welfarist, which ties generous and universal social welfare policies to low incarceration rates. This juxtaposition of Esping-Andersen’s welfare regime typology and variant crime policies offers a comparative vantage point from which to expand our understanding of the relationship between crime policy and welfare policy.

Interest in the distinctions between welfare state regimes and penal policies has also generated empirical comparative scholarship investigating the relationship between social and economic inequalities, welfare-related indicators, and those related to crime. Bearing in mind the methodological challenges in cross-national comparisons, empirical studies find that high levels of welfare spending, and, likewise, indicators linked to economic equality, correspond to suppressed punitiveness and lower incarceration rates (Beckett and Western 2001; Downes and Hansen 2006; Greenberg 2004; Lappi-Seppälä 2008; Lappi-Seppälä and Tonry 2011).

Explanations for the mechanisms underlying the relationships between crime and welfare policies tend to focus on social and psychological factors related to or generated by universal or remedial welfare policies, respectively. Inclusive and universal measures that help develop cognitive and social skills contribute to people’s ability to participate in society; for example, family services and education seem to reduce fear of crime (Hummelsheim et al. 2010). Other studies amplify the role of social cohesion in the link between welfare and crime policies. John Pratt and Anna Eriksson (2012) argue that because liberal welfare regimes are socially divided and lack inclusionary social mechanisms, punishment plays a great role in providing stability and cohesion. Growing inequalities and erosion of trust associated with remedial welfare policies during the last decades have further enhanced the punitiveness of liberal regimes and led to the penal excesses we have seen in Anglophone countries in recent years (Pratt and Eriksson 2012; Tyler and Boeckmann 1997). The lenient attitude toward punishment in social democratic countries is anchored in solidarity and equality; since social cohesion remains strong in social democratic regimes, there is less need for punishment to stabilize them (Pratt and Eriksson 2012).

These comparative studies uphold the expansion of welfare regime typology to include an understanding of their relationship to punitive or nonpunitive crime policy. They, however, tend to emphasize the arena of public attitudes rather than rely on a broader analysis extending to structural change, the advent of neoliberal policies, and the differential impact of categories of social inequality on crime and welfare policy.

The development of crime and welfare policies in the United States provides an important empirical example for understanding the relationship between these policy domains. Simply put, neoliberal policies supporting the rapidly rising rates of incarceration since the early 1970s and the subsequent reduction in welfare benefits starting in the 1980s support the claim that “penal and social welfare institutions comprise a single policy regime aimed at the problems associated with deviance and marginality” (Beckett and Western 2001, 44).

In Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s (1993) classic work on the US welfare system, the very function of social welfare is not to benefit the nation’s poor and vulnerable but rather to alleviate the most untenable consequences of capitalism in order to maintain civil order and uphold the system of class oppression. In Piven and Cloward’s formulation, the distribution of welfare relief carries a direct relationship with capitalist cycles of economic dislocation and downturn; relief is expanded to mitigate the “disruptions” that accompany rising levels of unemployment. It contracts when the need for civil appeasement subsides. The remedial nature of welfare benefits for the elderly, disabled, and others who do not constitute a necessary sector of the contemporary labor force serves as a visible motivation for the poor to keep working, lest they face the harsh welfare standards provided to those considered outside the category of the employable.

Crime and crime control feature as corollaries to this analysis of social welfare in two ways. First, Piven and Cloward note the historical criminalization of poverty through laws against begging and other survival activities carried out by the poor. Second, public disruptions including civil rights protests and urban unrest served as a primary motivation for the expansion of relief in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Piven and Cloward do not explicitly use the language of crime but rather refer to “disruption” and “disorder.” These civil protests, which motivated the provision of increased relief, at the same time gave rise to and legitimized strengthened “law and order” measures that feature more centrally in later analyses of crime and welfare policy (Garland 1985; 2001; Simon 2007; Wacquant 2009). Both systems of welfare and crime control support the state’s management of labor conditions and serve to socially reproduce available and disciplined members of the poor and working classes.

David Garland’s (2001) influential study of late modernity in the United States and the United Kingdom traces the development of welfarist rationales for criminal justice interventions from the late nineteenth century to the present era. The study set the context for Garland’s conceptualization of penal-welfarism, reflecting a rehabilitative focus on both crime and welfare policies in the postwar period. This term has taken on wide usage within and outside these national contexts, at times connoting a strong welfare state with an embedded, welfarist crime policy more associated with social democratic regimes. Garland also explains the appearance of a seemingly anachronistic shift in the 1970s to the conditions of retributive punishment and mass incarceration. The new “culture of control” has not only brought back a more punitive, stigmatizing, and expansive penal system but has also transformed welfare functions and institutions; they are occupied by those who are less concerned with providing support and benefits than fending off fraud and dependency. While the carceral system is seemingly autonomous, it is part of a “network of governance and social order” that extends beyond the formal carceral sphere to include the “legal system, the labour market, and welfare state institutions” (Garland 2001, 5). In its modern form, the penal system not only represses and contains, but it also differentiates populations into disciplined categories as determined by contemporary norms of civil, political, and economic participation. Crime control in the contemporary period has expanded beyond the confines of criminal justice to define the very terms and conditions of everyday life (Garland 2001; Simon 2007).

In the post-Keynesian order, the United States has fortified its penal functions as it has simultaneously capitulated its economic and socially protective capacities. Wacquant (2009) employs Bourdieu’s (1998 [1994]) distinction between the state’s feminine left hand—associated with public services dealing with health, education, and welfare—and the masculine right hand—associated with police, courts, and prisons. In the United States, the right hand has supplanted the left. In terms of social policy, the rise of the penal state accompanies the erosion of the welfare state as part of a process of “planned atrophy” (Wacquant 2009, 11), dismantling social protections while investing in the penal apparatus of the state. The state, however, has not entirely abandoned its welfare functions; rather it has reinvigorated and redefined them through the combination of socializing, medicalizing, and penalizing practices, buttressed by contemporary moral discourses dividing the deserving from the undeserving poor and the law-abiding from the criminal (Wacquant 2009).

Similarly, social policy scholars Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram (2011) emphasize that under the organizing principles of neoliberalism and paternalism, the welfare state is not dismantled; rather, it is mobilized as a “site for the application of market principles” (21). As conditions of wage employment and social protection unravel, the welfare state energizes its disciplining discourses and policies to enlist moral, economically productive citizens while abandoning or punishing those who do not or cannot conform to these market-driven standards.

The examination of race and gender in the context of the United States illuminates the broader role of economic and social inequality that results not only from neoliberal crime and welfare policies but that also constitute a driving force in creating, justifying, and reproducing such policies (Murakawa 2014; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011; Tonry 1995, 2011; Wacquant 2009; Weaver 2007; Western 2006). Race has been a central and enduring social classification in the United States; it has defined where one lives, where or whether one works, what level of education one can attain, one’s likelihood of facing arrest and incarceration, and one’s expected lifespan. The symbolic significance of race and the material consequences of racial inequality cannot be underestimated.

Although the composition and dynamics of race in the United States are complex, African Americans, in particular, have a long history of being targeted by restricted eligibility for welfare benefits (Neubeck and Cazenave 2001) and have been disproportionately subject to a harsh set of criminal justice practices and policies (Alexander 2010). In the current neoliberal era, scholars argue that the very force of welfare retrenchment and invigorated crime control has been generated by a conservative political response to civil rights gains arising from the period of protest culminating in the 1960s (Wacquant 2009; Weaver 2007; Western 2006).

Despite a long history of disproportionate criminalization of African Americans, the contemporary punitive turn presents an unprecedented rise in rates of incarceration. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, one out of three African American males were at risk of involvement with the criminal justice system (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2003). While rates of incarceration declined slightly between 2009 and 2014, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that African American males were almost six times more likely to be incarcerated than white males; for males between the ages of 18 and 19, that rate increases to African American males being ten times more likely to be incarcerated than white males (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2015). Historical trajectories of institutional and geospatial segregation, particularly with regard to African-American populations in the United States, contribute to policies confining certain racial populations to “ghettos” or otherwise excluding them from access to the benefits of more desirable residence, employment, services, and recreation (Massey and Denton 1989; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011; Wacquant 2009). New punitive politics of poverty and the abandonment of the Keynesian support for wage labor and social supports further targeted marginalized populations discriminated by race.

In post–civil rights United States, de jure discrimination against marginalized racial groups has been deemed unlawful. However, racially coded discourses have continued to inform the production, implementation, and justification of crime and welfare policies that stigmatize, economically and socially exclude, and criminally target certain racialized individuals and groups (Tonry 2011; Weaver 2007). In the United States, attitudes toward welfare that were previously uncorrelated with race prior to 1965 became increasingly characterized by negative images and narratives associating African Americans with welfare dependency and stigmatizing discourses of deviance and criminality (Gilens 2003).

By the time the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) passed, public opinion already reflected growing racial anxieties and prejudices that linked perceptions such as “laziness” among African Americans, compared with white Americans, with concerns about overly generous welfare policies (Gilens 2003). Increasingly, covert forms of “implicit bias” offered cognitive coherence to racialized social categories and accompanying assumptions (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011). These, in turn, served to construct and justify a set of social and crime policies, particularly in those issue areas where race is perceived to be particularly salient.

Key among these policies was the move from the treatment of substance abuse as a mental health or public health issue to a new focus on the criminalization of illicit drug use and sales (Alexander 2010; Tonry 1995; 2011). The US “war on drugs,” initiated in the 1980s by the Reagan and Bush administrations, promoted aggressive crime control measures, organizing public fear of drug-related crime and creating a policy climate that rapidly advanced criminal justice measures contributing to conditions of mass incarceration. Among these were the addition of new crimes, removal of discretionary sentencing, mandatory minimums for certain charges, and the shift of funding from drug treatment to law enforcement (Tonry 1994). Racialized discourses put the onus on urban African-American youth. In 1986, passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act established a 100-to-1 quantity ratio between powder cocaine and crack cocaine (Palamar et al. 2015). Egregiously higher penalties for crack cocaine, the only drug that African Americans distribute at a higher rate than white Americans, resulted in what Wacquant (2009) refers to as the “hyper-incarceration” of the most marginalized and stigmatized populations, defined, not only by class, but by race. Punitive drug policy has had direct effects upon welfare policy. By 2015, fifteen states passed legislation requiring drug testing as a screening mechanism to deny welfare benefits (National Council of State Legislatures 2015).

The shift from penal-welfarism to punitive crime and welfare policies is also organized by gender. The use of welfare policies to regulate women marginalized by class and race through the construction of moral standards tied to reproduction, family, and child-rearing; access to education; and relationship to paid employment form the foundations of remedial welfare policies (Abramovitz 1996; Gordon 1994; Piven and Cloward 1993, 1997). The retrenchment of welfare, which disproportionately affected the lives of women and children, formed another disciplining force for marginalized populations. Starting with the Reagan administration in the 1980s, welfare programs were made more restrictive, benefit levels were reduced, and eligibility criteria were narrowed (O’Connor 1998). Between 1980 and 1993 total federal spending on employment and training programs was cut almost in half, while federal spending on correctional activities increased by 521 percent (Currie 1996). With the 1996 passage of PRWORA under the Clinton administration, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was renamed Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). In this example of the punitive turn, TANF benefits for parents, primarily mothers, with children were tied to mandates to participate in activities tied to work. State-level spending of TANF funds for nonworking individuals were restricted to two years, with a lifetime limit of five years. A study on state-level implementation of TANF restrictions found that those states adopting the most punitive policies had the highest percentages of African Americans in their welfare caseloads, confirming the significance of race with regard to the form of welfare most associated with poor mothers (Soss, Schram, Vartanian, and O’Brien 2001).

While welfare and crime may form “two gendered sides of the population coin” (Wacquant 2009, 16), women, and particularly racially marginalized women, have been increasingly entering the US criminal justice system. One way this has happened is through the ties that women have to incarcerated men. With the one-in-three likelihood of African American men’s involvement in the penal system, the lives of many African American women have increasingly revolved around visits to jails and prisons. Household resources, which could have been spent on basic needs, health, education, and recreation, have instead gone to the costs of carceral visits, legal fees, and other support for those more directly involved in the criminal justice system (Comfort 2008). In addition, the regulation of reproduction has increasingly fallen into the sphere of crime control. Child protective services and the disproportionate targeting of African American children for removal and placement in foster care raises the level of punitive consequences levied by the welfare state (Roberts 2002). In some states, the use of illicit drugs during pregnancy is not a social welfare concern but a crime (Roberts 1997).

Increasingly, women have been subjected to incarceration in US jails and prisons with current rates of incarceration rising at a level higher than men. Between 2000 and 2010, women entered jails and prisons at a rate two times that of men (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2014b). While racial disparities do not reach the levels for incarcerated men, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2014a) reported that in 2013, African American women were twice as likely to be incarcerated than white women. Studies have found that the rise in female incarceration rates can be explained by increasingly punitive policies; girls and young women, in particular, have not become more prone to criminal behavior (Luke 2008; Steffensmeier et al. 2006). Symptoms of social and psychological problems among girls and young women that may have warranted noncriminal disciplinary action or treatment under a previous penal-welfarist era have now been “relabeled” as crimes involving the criminal justice system (Chesney-Lind 2002). This pattern echoes the policy shift with regard to substance use and abuse away from treatment and the amelioration of underlying economic and social conditions to the arena of crime control.

Immigrants represent another group that has been subject to heightened criminal targeting and discriminatory practices in the United States, including the criminalization of the act of immigration itself (Chacón 2007; 2009; Ewing, Martinez, and Rumbaut 2015). In line with the punitive turn, since the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), immigrants have increasingly been identified as national threats (Ewing, Martinez, and Rumbaut 2015). Welfare policies, such as the 1996 PRWORA, have also removed the protection of immigrants from social welfare mandates. Until recently, the immigration system constituted a set of institutions distinct from those of crime control. Erosions in the boundaries between policing and immigration control predating 9/11 have resulted in the integration of immigration with law enforcement institutions (Chacón 2007). Because immigrants violating immigration law are increasingly deemed criminals, the methods of detention and deportation involve warehousing immigrants into detention centers that resemble prisons and are, at times, a part of the prison system (ACLU 2014).

During the last decades, scholars have debated whether European crime policies are becoming similar to those of the United States as reflected in higher incarceration rates, harsher prison conditions, and greater degrees of criminalization (Pratt 2008a; 2008b; Snacken and Dumortier 2012). Comparative empirical studies illuminate different and sometimes contradictory patterns.

A similar debate is present in welfare state research, which distinguishes “convergence theory” from “resilience theory” (Olsen 2008). Convergence theory, defining the first research stream, argues that many countries in the developed world are transforming into liberal and residual welfare states, similar to the United States, emphasizing punitive sanctions, privatization, and selected, as opposed to universal, social provisions (Ewald 2002; Gilbert 2004). This change can be attributed to various factors, including the diffusion of neoliberalism, slower or stagnant economic growth in the wake of globalization, the expansion of the European Union, the free movement of labor, and an increase in immigration (Handler 2009). One belief is that economic liberalization in international and national economic systems has increased the power of capital markets, which can exert pressure on governments to make cuts in social spending and social legislation (Albert and Standing 2000). Nevertheless, according to Wacquant (2009), the shift from a welfare state to a penal state has taken a different form in Europe. While in the United States, the state’s right hand (police, courts, and prisons) has supplanted the left (health, education, and welfare), Wacquant (2009) argues that in the European Union, the left hand has been supplemented by the right. In other words, in the United States criminal justice functions have reformulated and replaced social welfare functions; in Europe carceral capacities and elements have been added to welfare programs that may have otherwise remained intact. As Wacquant (2004) argues, refined systems of supervision and control connected to welfare programs are often an alternative to mass imprisonment in countries with a social democratic tradition, such as Sweden. Emphasis on differential welfare and crime policies targeting marginalized immigrant populations further support convergence arguments (Barker 2012b; Shammas 2015).

The second line of research, based on resilience theory, criticizes the tendency to see the United States as a forerunner in crime and welfare policies and underlines the recognition of national variations regarding how these policies are formed (Cavadino and Dignan 2005; Knepper 2012; Nelken 2009; Young 2003). Many welfare state scholars argue that European countries are not likely to transform into residual and punitive welfare states (Taylor-Gooby 2001; Bergh 2004; Lindbom 2007; Olsen 2008; Palme 2008). Tonry (2004) points out that crime policies have varied widely within countries and have not followed a consistent pattern over the last 30 years. According to Sonja Snacken and Els Dumortier (2012), the core values of many European societies, such as social equality, human rights, and democracy, continue to resist increasing punitiveness despite some worrying developments.

A third line of research addresses both convergence toward and resistance against increasingly punitive crime and welfare policies in Europe (Bergmark 2008; Lappi-Seppälä 2008; Lacey 2008; Ljungwald 2010; Ljungwald and Elias 2010; Olsen 2008; Rothstein and Lindbom 2004). While this set of scholarship acknowledges changes reflective of trends more characteristic of liberal welfare states, it also emphasizes their limited scope and impact. Welfare programs such as health care, education, pensions, and parental leave often maintain strong public support, whereas means-tested programs, such as social assistance provision from the social services sector, are less popular (Bergmark 2000; Kuhnle 2000; Rothstein and Lindbom 2004). Such researchers emphasize the endurance of universal welfare and low criminalization policies in European welfare states. However, they also point to areas of eroding penal-welfarist policies with changes mainly affecting those at the bottom of the social and economic ladder, such as single parents, social assistance recipients, the long-term unemployed, and immigrants (Handler 2009; Pratt 2008b; 2015).

The example of Sweden illustrates the ways in which the social democratic welfare regimes have shifted in the wake of demographic, economic, and social change. Demographic homogeneity, which has characterized Sweden and other Nordic countries, may facilitate lenient penal policies; however, it may not follow that demographic heterogeneity leads to punitive policies (Lappi-Seppälä 2008). In the early 1990s, a severe economic crisis and the influx of immigrants largely from Eastern Europe shifted the economic, political, and social context that gave rise to the Swedish welfare state. According to Sune Sunesson et al. (1998), universal principles of the Swedish welfare state changed throughout the 1990s with some increase in the proportion of people relying on means-tested relief rather than rights-based welfare. A conservative political turn reflected in the popularity of right-wing populist parties also resulted as a response to the perceived crisis. However, the rise in right-wing sentiment did not necessarily result in significant welfare and penal policy changes at that time (Pratt 2008b). Until the late 2000s, many welfare scholars argued that the Swedish welfare state had maintained many of its distinctive features, despite conditions of demographic, economic, and social change (Kuhnle 2000; Montanari, Nelson, and Palme 2007).

Support for a welfarist criminal justice system also remains strong in Sweden. The direct translation of the name of Sweden’s national correctional agency is “Criminal Care” (Kriminalvården). To this day, the agency emphasizes the harmful impact of imprisonment, and policy aims to minimize its use (Swedish Prison and Probation Services 2015). Historically, the Swedish prison population rate has stayed around 60 incarcerated people per 100,000, reaching its peak in 2006 with 79 incarcerated people per 100,000 of the nation’s population (International Center for Prison Studies 2015). Compare this with 2006 figures of 501 people per 100,000 in the United States (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2014b). Since the mid-2000s, the Swedish prison population rate has decreased 22 percent (Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention 2014). The Swedish public has among the lowest levels of fear of crime compared with other countries (van Dijk, van Kesteren, and Smit 2007) and on average demand lower sentences than judges (Balvig et al. 2015).

Among European nations, however, Sweden has been known for harsher policies related to drug-related, violent, and sexual crimes (Tham 2001). Sweden’s “zero-tolerance” drug policies instituted since the late 1960s have progressively added drug-related penalties, expanding beyond smuggling and drug sales to include consumption (Pratt 2008b). Likewise, the Swedish “abolitionist” crime approach to sex trafficking has served as both a model of feminist crime control and an example of excessive criminalization of a social problem or an issue more appropriately handled as one of labor rights and sexual self-determination (Halley, Kotiswaran, Shamir, and Thomas 2006). While these crime policies may pose a social democratic counterpart to punitive US responses to drugs and sexual offenses, they are within a context of dramatically lower rates of incarceration and carceral conditions that remain corrective and rehabilitative compared with those in the United States. Sweden has also turned to electronic monitoring as an alternative to imprisonment, which has offset some of the pressures caused by the increased penalties for violent, sexual, and drug crimes (Lappi-Seppälä and Tonry 2011).

Since the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, scholars have increasingly challenged claims about the progressiveness and resilience of Swedish crime and welfare policies. In 2014, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (2014) concluded that inequalities are growing at a faster pace in Sweden than most other European countries. Cuts in public education have also been especially sharp in Sweden compared with other countries. According to the OECD, such reductions in public spending are likely to make quality education more costly for lower-income households in particular. A bulwark of the social democratic welfare model has been a strong commitment to full employment with many welfare benefits tied to work status. Between 1970 and 1990 the rate of unemployment stayed between 2 and 4 percent. In the aftermath of the economic crisis in the early 1990s, unemployment reached its peak of 9.3 percent in the summer of 1993 and has remained around 7 percent since the early 2000s (Statistics Sweden 2005; 2011). Persistent unemployment has left a portion of the Swedish population ineligible for employment-related benefits such as sick leave, parental benefits, and unemployment insurance.

A closer look reveals the ways in which certain populations are affected by selected changes in crime and welfare policy, suggesting that the persistence of the welfare state has come to serve a demographically homogeneous middle class rather than a new working class and sector of the unemployed (Rothstein and Lindbom 2004). Since the mid-2000s the government has cut taxes for the upper-middle class; for example, it abolished the wealth tax in 2007 and the property tax in 2008. At the same time, it has become increasingly difficult for certain groups, such as immigrants, the unemployed, and people with part-time jobs, to qualify for many welfare programs. This has further contributed to income disparities between those who are working and those who are not. The demands on those needing means-tested assistance, the bottom tier benefits, has also increased (Bergmark 2014). For example, the language of the Swedish Social Services Act (SoL 2001:453), which regulates means-tested support, has progressively moved from structural to individual explanations for social problems, such as poverty (Ljungwald and Elias 2010; Ljungwald 2010). The government has also introduced sanctions and work incentives into the Act, for example, by mandating that young people participate in job training or skill-enhancing activities in exchange for assistance (SoL, 4:5). A recent government report (Ministry of Health and Social Affairs 2015) suggests that, rather than merely receiving benefits because of need, individuals must actively be engaged in looking for work in order to be eligible for livelihood support, echoing restrictive welfare policy changes in the United States.

Of particular concern for increasing inequalities, welfare cuts, and punitive policies are their impact on immigrants and their descendants. Pratt and McLean (2015) have highlighted that claims about the end of Swedish penal exceptionalism are greatly overstated, arguing, however, that it has been “reconfigured” to include “legitimate” Swedes and exclude immigrants and ethnic minorities. Referring to a system of “bifurcation” (Pratt and McLean 2015), penal-welfarism persists; but at its margins, a decidedly punitive turn has eroded welfare and penal policies for Sweden’s growing population of immigrants and asylum seekers. Barker (2012b) argues that the Swedish model has exclusionary mechanisms, which can make certain categories of its population, such as immigrants, vulnerable to exclusion from social protections. The unemployment rate for those born abroad is about 15 percent, compared with around 6 percent for those born in Sweden. The unemployment rate for the foreign-born without secondary education is around 31 percent. The tightening of the qualifying conditions for welfare benefits has also disproportionately impacted immigrants. More than half the households receiving means-tested income support from the social services, the bottom-tier benefit, had at least one family member born abroad (National Board of Health and Welfare 2015).

This bifurcation also describes Sweden’s crime policy. A person born abroad is twice as likely to be registered for criminal offenses compared with persons born in Sweden to two Swedish born parents (National Council for Crime Prevention 2005). Around 31 percent of those in Swedish prisons are foreign citizens (National Council for Crime Prevention 2014) in a country in which 7.6 percent of the Swedish population are foreign citizens (Statistics Sweden 2015).³ While racial classification is prohibited in Sweden, negative symbolic associations attached to a growing non-European immigrant population appear to be increasingly influential in the contemporary context.

Scholars have long studied trends within crime and welfare policies. Criminologists and welfare state scholars have formulated similar arguments, for instance, in regards to the “convergence” or “divergence” of European policies. Historically, these studies have been carried out in distinct academic fields. It was not until very recently that comparative research has started investigating the link between these two policy domains.

What then is the relationship between crime policy and welfare policy? While comparisons across time and national borders make this a difficult question to answer, emerging perspectives on these relationships coalesce around two tendencies. The first attempts to provide a more global analysis oriented toward distinctions based on welfare regimes and the level of commitment to economic and social policies favoring equality. The second focuses on an analysis of the punitive turn largely characterized by the experience of the United States. The former tends to view crime policy and its impacts through the lens of the welfare state; the latter tends to take crime control as a starting point, constructing an analysis of welfare policy through the viewpoint of criminalization. While empirical data largely upholds a positive relationship between generous welfare policies and lower incarceration rates, trends over time suggest more global shifts that raise questions about the impact of welfare policies on crime policies and vice versa.

The question of convergence versus divergence of European policies, generally, and among Nordic social democracies, in particular, underscores the contributions of scholarship based upon the reversal of penal-welfarism in the United States and the punitive turn of both crime and welfare policies. The United States remains exceptional in its extraordinarily high rates of criminalization and its willingness to sacrifice welfare and social policies to the realm of crime control. While the data for Sweden and other Northern European countries confirm a continued commitment to social democratic ideals, a punitive turn, particularly with respect to Europe’s growing immigrant population, suggests the need for concern.

Evidence supporting convergence has been seen in Northern European countries (e.g., Andersson 2002; Estrada 2004; Harrikari 2008; Hörnqvist 2004), which have been regarded as bastions of welfare capitalism and rehabilitative penal-welfare policies. What Pratt and McLean (2015) call “bifurcation” in Sweden and Shammas (2015) refers to as “dualization” in the context of Norway may indicate future trends. A strong welfare state and penal exceptionalism may persist for “legitimate” citizens; a differentiated set of punitive policies may aim toward the management of Europe’s marginalized and stigmatized populations.

At the same time, the United States has begun to seriously question the outcomes of its 40-year trend of mass incarceration. During recent years, demands for prison reform have been coming from the political left and right in the United States. For the first time since 1973, the US prison rate of incarceration began to decrease slightly, from 506 per 100,000 in 2008 to 471 in 2014 (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2015). In 2011, California, which initiated many of the “get tough” policies of the 1980s and 1990s, passed the historic Prison Realignment bill, which aims to reduce the number of inmates in the state’s prisons. One year later, in 2012, California legislators amended its three strikes policy, by eliminating life sentences for nonviolent crimes. In 2014, California’s historic Proposition 47 reversed former crime policy to reduce several nonviolent drug-related offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, earmarking a portion of public savings to finance treatment rather than crime control.

While such reversals in the United States do not yet indicate a significant shift in neoliberal patterns of welfare retrenchment and mass incarceration, they do demonstrate the level to which public awareness now recognizes the urgent need to reexamine the relationship between crime and welfare policy. Furthermore, a more nuanced analysis of differential effects of policy on the economically and socially marginalized with a focus on class, race, gender, and their intersections has moved from an examination of general trends alone to those highlighting disproportionate impacts on the most marginalized sectors of the population.

Further analysis of the relationship between crime and welfare policy could interrogate where these policy domains meet and contradict. Research can also focus on the most recent areas of policy change. For social democratic countries, new areas of research can include an examination of what areas and for what populations’ universal welfare measures and welfarist crime policies may be receding. For those countries undergoing a shift toward less punitive welfare or crime policies, a deeper analysis of the actual short-run and longer-run outcomes will help guide future policy.

Focus on aggressive drug- and sex-related crime policy in both the United States and Sweden also reveals productive areas for comparative research. Scholarship on the effects of victim-related crime policy has shed light on the ways in which progressive social movements and demands for policies addressing issues such as gender violence have supported more punitive crime policies (Halley et al. 2006; Kim 2013; Ljungwald 2010).

Comparative research has focused on quantitative aspects of crime, punishment, and welfare measures, such as imprisonment rates and narrow economic indicators (Olsen 2008; Snacken and Dumortier 2012). Historical and qualitative focus on policies related to crime and welfare, for example, investigating the introduction of new laws or changes in public opinion, could yield fruitful lines of inquiry.

Once the subject of distinct domains of scholarship, the intersections and relationships between crime and welfare policy are now being examined. Economic and social conditions of crisis, the upheavals of war and accompanying migration, and the fragility of climate present challenges and opportunities for future policy development. Having a clearer understanding of how the discourses, practices, and policies of crime and welfare are shaped by and further shape fundamental notions of democracy, citizenship, security, and rights can benefit our ability to achieve these aims.