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Kerry Woodward, Review of Policing Welfare: Punitive Adversarialism in Public Assistance, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 3, March 2022, Page e4, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab094
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Policing Welfare: Punitive Adversarialism in Public Assistance contributes to the growing literature on poverty governance in the United States—or the ways state institutions (and others) manage, discipline, and shape the behaviors and subjectivities of poor populations through both provision and punishment. Spencer Headworth’s book is the first to critically examine fraud control within the welfare system, specifically within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. By studying welfare fraud departments in five geographically and politically diverse states, Headworth identifies broad trends and similarities as well as significant differences that exist due to the decentralized, federalist structure of the welfare system. Based mostly on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 42 investigators, administrators, and other welfare fraud workers, Policing Welfare is a vital contribution to literature on the US welfare system and how welfare agencies contribute to the over-surveillance, punitive disciplinary processes, and often, criminalization of poor communities.
Headworth argues that welfare fraud units exhibit “punitive adversarialism,” or the “institutionalization of surveillance, investigation, formal charging processes, and punishments” into the bureaucratic structure of the welfare system (3). The term captures the antagonistic relationship between the welfare bureaucracy and its low-income clients—a relationship built on the racialized perception of welfare recipients as undeserving, lazy, suspicious, and, ultimately, fraudulent. By drawing attention to how welfare recipients are perceived and how these assumptions are embedded in bureaucratic structures and processes, Headworth problematizes the very existence of units aimed at detecting fraud among individual clients, instead positing a variety of alternatives, including randomizing fraud audits, focusing only on professional and corporate fraud, and replacing means-tested welfare with a guaranteed minimum income.
