Abstract

Since the early 1970s, the U.S. has experienced welfare retrenchment in the face of an unprecedented expansion of the criminal justice system. Are these two developments are related? Standard accounts tend to focus on either welfare or criminal justice, ignoring the possibility of a link between them. I investigate the relationship between welfare and criminal justice policy in the U.S. over the last forty years, examining whether and how these policies are connected.

In Chapter 1, I combine theoretical treatments of welfare and criminal justice policy to develop an understanding of both of them as forms of social control aimed at controlling threats to social order posed by groups marginal to the labor force. I then argue that governments tend to adopt “incorporative” or “exclusionary” policy regimes: more generous governments tend to be less punitive, while less generous ones tend to be more punitive. Whether governments adopt incorporative or exclusionary policies partly depends, I argue, on the causes attributed to poverty and crime. In particular, policies will be more exclusionary when the poor and criminals are blamed for the problems of poverty and crime; they will be more incorporative when the poor and criminals are not considered blameworthy.

In Chapter 2, I examine more rigorously whether governments tend to adopt “incorporative” or “exclusionary” regimes using annual longitudinal data on U.S. states from 1970–1996. I find strong support for this argument. I also examine the effect of a variety of demographic, political and economic factors on whether states adopt more incorporative or exclusionary policies.

In Chapter 3,1 compare Congressional hearings in the 1960s to hearings in the 1980s and 1990s, finding that the understanding of the relationship between poverty and crime changed over this period. I show how changing conceptions about the causes of poverty and crime, about the poor and criminals and about the legitimate role of the government articulated with incorporative policies in the 1960s and exclusionary policies in the 1980s and 1990s. This analysis indicates that similar conceptions across these two policy domains constitute a common source of variation in welfare and criminal justice policy.