A network of systems exists to educate, protect, heal, punish, and support individuals in a shared society. These systems shape our lives differently depending on our socioeconomic status, gender, and race. Scholars and activists alike have raised critical questions about how public systems surveil, manage, and punish the most marginalized individuals, families, and communities. This phenomenon has been referred to as poverty governance. Poverty governance literature explores how an array of systems – from poverty alleviation programs to schools – coercively intervene in the lives of the poor. This microsyllabus offers an entry point into the rich scholarship on poverty governance, demonstrating how the logic of poverty governance illuminates a broad range of systems that entangle poor individuals and families, particularly within communities of color.
Academics and activists have explored a range of ways poverty governance shapes the lives of the poor; from consignment to low-wage work to surveillance of the personal lives of poor mothers. Scholars have also outlined how these systems construct public perception of the poor. Experts identify patterns across systems governing the poor. One recurring theme builds upon sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the “left hand” and “right hand” of the state. The “left hand” includes therapeutic services (education, healthcare, public assistance, etc.) and the “right hand” encompasses the punitive and regulatory aspects of the state (law enforcement, courts, and prison). Poverty governance literature asks: how do the services traditionally associated with the “left hand” of the state employ strategies akin to the “right hand” of the state? How do some systems function at the nexus of support and discipline? Another persistent theme is the importance of neoliberalism in fortifying systems of poverty governance. Poverty governance does not just impact individuals, it functions to preserve the current racialized and gendered social order through stigmatization, coercion, and exclusion.
Foundational Pieces
These frequently cited and referenced pieces discuss regulating, disciplining, and punishing the poor. These texts critically engage with the role of the welfare system (and in one, its replacement by the carceral system) in maintaining and strengthening the current social order based upon race, class, and gender subjugation.
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Public Function of Welfare (1971)
Regulating the Poor inspired the modern study of poverty governance. In Regulating the Poor, Piven and Cloward focus on two key ideas. First, welfare relief policies serve to pacify poor workers to prevent or respond to social unrest. Second, those who cannot be integrated into the labor market and remain dependent upon poverty relief programs are culturally degraded. This degradation reinforces the importance of work, even work that has the poorest conditions and the most marginal pay. As they put it, “To demean and punish those who do not work is to exalt by contrast even the meanest labor at the meanest wages” (Piven and Cloward 1993, 396). This book provides an important foundation for understanding the relationship between poverty alleviation policies and social control of the poor.
Along with their tremendous scholarly contributions, Piven and Cloward engaged in activism. They articulated an influential political strategy to strengthen public assistance “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” (1966). This theory contributed to the formation and demands of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) – an activist group that advocated for welfare rights primarily for women and children.
J. Soss, R. C. Fording, & S. F. Schram (2011). Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race.
Published 40 years after Regulating the Poor, this landmark contribution examines the historical evolution of poverty governance in the US. The authors find that welfare programs continue to act as labor-disciplining tools, albeit differently in modern neoliberal economies. The authors emphasize how neoliberal trends towards market principles like privatization, individual responsibility, and decentralization are reflected in modern poverty governance. One striking example is their study of the Florida Welfare Transition (WT) program, heralded as a “model” neoliberal welfare system that is widely privatized, has limited state oversight, and emulates market logic through intensive performance measurement and the frequent use of sanctions. This “ideal” system is riddled with fraud and impropriety that goes unnoticed and unaddressed; a stark difference from the swift punishment faced by welfare beneficiaries that exhibit even the slightest noncompliance. Additionally, the authors demonstrate that the particular ways in which welfare programs are administered create and reinforce racial inequality. Strikingly, Soss et al find that the racial composition of welfare caseloads is the most important predictor of state and local policy choices regarding welfare governance strategies.
Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009)
In this highly influential work, Wacquant asserts that as neoliberalism undermined the welfare state (the left hand), the carceral state (the right hand) has come to replace it as the primary system for governing the lives of poor people of color.
Punishing the Poor has four overarching arguments:
● As social policies have been degraded, we have seen the rise of a more punitive welfare state.
● The carceral state (mass incarceration, aggressive policing and sentencing) was expanded as a response to the gains of the civil rights movement, rather than as a response to crime.
● Governments have disseminated the message that the carceral state is the appropriate system for governing the poor.
● A comparative examination of European nations, specifically France, and the US reveals that European nations have begun to emulate the United States’ punitive model of poverty governance.
M. Lipsky, Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services (1980)
While this work is not primarily focused on poverty governance, Street-level bureaucracy introduces the idea of “street level bureaucrats” who are core to the modern administration of poverty governance. Lipsky defines street-level bureaucrats as public services workers (teachers, police officers, social workers, etc.) who play an important role in policy implementation. Lipsky theorizes that these individuals are responsible for day-to-day policy interpretation and therefore have a profound impact on poor people maneuvering public systems. As decentralization of public services continues to be a hallmark of US social policy, the role of street-level bureaucrats continues to grow, suggesting their key role in modern poverty governance.
Public Systems and Poverty Governance
How do everyday public systems and services – such as child protective services, public housing, and public education – impact the lives of poor individuals and families?
Dorothy Roberts is an award-winning scholar whose groundbreaking work on race, gender, and the law has had a profound influence on feminist research. In this interview in Dissent, Roberts explains her analysis of child protective systems as institutions that surveil, regulate, and punish Black families. Roberts powerfully traces the modern child welfare system’s origins within the United States system of chattel slavery and why “the foster-care-industrial complex” or the “family policing system” should be considered as an arm of the carceral state. She provides an abolitionist account of how the child protection system effectively governs poor families and why it threatens the wellbeing of Black families in the United States.
Kerry C. Woodward, “Race, gender, and poverty governance: The case of the U.S. child welfare system,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 28 (2) 2019, 428–450
Woodward is part of a growing cohort of scholars who are studying child protective services as a tool of poverty governance. Woodward argues that the child protection system is an indisputable “institution of poverty governance.” Woodward suggests that the child protection system functions to transform “bad citizens” or “bad mothers” into good parents through intensive scrutiny, regulation of parenting practices, and punishment through child removal. This article highlights the importance of examining the child welfare system and poverty governance more broadly via the “matrix of domination” or the intersection of race, gender, and poverty.
Kelley Fong, “Getting eyes in the home: Child protective services investigations and state surveillance of Family Life,” American Sociological Review, 85 (4), 2020, 610–638
How do child protection systems investigate poor families of color in the United States? Fong adeptly maps out how child protection systems are tasked with the dual responsibilities of a therapeutic and coercive force in low-income, racialized communities (referencing the “right” and “left” hands of the state). Fong suggests that marginalized communities become “hyper-visible” to the state via the network of mandated reporters responsible for monitoring families for signs of abuse or neglect. Mandated reporters are the professionals most likely to come in contact with abused or neglected children. In the US, medical professionals, school administrators and teachers, and law enforcement file the most child welfare reports. Fong argues that because child protection is perceived as fulfilling a therapeutic service provider role, mandated reporters fail to recognize the invasive scrutiny of a child maltreatment investigation. Hyper-visibility within a child welfare investigation exposes primarily poor families, and particularly mothers of color, to coercive governance by the state.
Melinda D Anderson, “When School Feels Like Prison” The Atlantic, September 12, 2016
There is growing scholarly attention to the “school-to-prison nexus” in which schools are adopting security and surveillance techniques akin to the carceral system. Anderson finds that widely reported school shootings have prompted many schools to invest in surveillance technology, including installing metal detectors, locks, cameras, and police. However, her research reveals that these techniques were most prevalent at the poorest schools serving majority children of color. “Schools with higher concentrations of [students of color] are more inclined to rely on heavy-handed measures to maintain order than other schools facing similar crime and discipline issues.” Schools are a ubiquitous system in the lives of most families and therefore are an important venue for studying the logics of poverty governance.
Lynne Haney, “Incarcerated fatherhood: The entanglements of child support debt and mass imprisonment,” American Journal of Sociology, 124 (1), 2018, 1–48
In this piece, Haney develops the concept of “incarcerated fatherhood” to discuss the laws, policies, and institutional practices that govern the lives of formerly incarcerated men and their relationship to parenting. Haney juxtaposes the “debt of imprisonment,” or the impact of physical confinement, with the “imprisonment of debt,” the financial confinement that accompanies economic debt. She argues that through this relationship, men are pushed to “be the kind of parent this system is designed to govern; bitter, absentee fathers in need of discipline and punishment.” This article offers a powerful illustration of how poverty governance not only shapes self-perceptions, but also the ways in which families relate to one another.
Noah D. Zatz, “Get to work or go to jail: State violence and the racialized production of precarious work,” Law & Social Inquiry, 45 (2), 2019, 304–338
Zatz discusses how child support enforcement and criminal legal debt courts place work requirements enforced by threats of incarceration. He argues that these institutions effectively compel the poorest individuals to take as Piven & Cloward (1993) suggest “the meanest labor at the meanest wages.” Zatz argues that work mandated by carceral threats creates a new labor market outside of the legal protections that exist for workers.
“Policing Tenants in Rental Assistance Programs,” Gender Policy Report, 7/5/2023
The Housing Choice Voucher program is the major federal assistance program for low-income renters. Kurwa analyzes how authorities in this program regulate the lives of voucher tenants. Kurwa offers the example of the “one-strike” eviction rule that mandates authorities evict tenants if they, a family member, or even a guest, were convicted or suspected of a crime. The author highlights a particular scenario in which a mother was told she needed to evict her 13-year-old who had been caught shoplifting or she would lose her voucher. Kurwa recommends federal and local policy changes to more effectively “treat tenants with dignity, minimize inspections of their units, respect tenant privacy, and see evictions as failures rather than successes.”
