“I Ain’t No Fucking Check, I’m a Father”

It's a Setup ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 86-124
Author(s):  
Timothy Black ◽  
Sky Keyes
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Child Support ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
Child Support Enforcement ◽  
Racial Experiences ◽  
The Family ◽  
State Welfare ◽  
Class Hierarchies

In this chapter, the authors turn their attention to child support policies that were central to 1996 welfare reform, to the organization of Child Support Enforcement in Connecticut, and to Fatherhood Initiative programs that proliferated across the nation after 1998. They explore how low-income fathers made sense of and responded to this changing landscape, paying particular attention to their gendered locations in the family but also to their different racial experiences. Further, they examine how the reorganization of state welfare and child support enforcement was about “getting the money” in an era of state austerity but also about the institutionalization of symbolic power, through which the courts defined, stigmatized, and managed the lives of a marginalized population, reaffirming racial and class hierarchies.

scholarly journals Leprosy and the Plague: State Surveillance of Low-Income Fathers

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-139
Author(s):  
Monika Jean Ulrich Myers ◽  
Michael Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Child Support ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Benefits ◽  
Child Support Enforcement ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Surveillance

Foucault’s theory of state social control contrasts societal responses to leprosy, where deviants are exiled from society but promised freedom from social demands, and the plague, where deviants are controlled and surveyed within society but receive some state assistance in exchange for their cooperation.In this paper, I analyze how low-income fathers in the United States simultaneously experience social control consistent with leprosy and social control consistent with the plague but do not receive the social benefits that Foucault associates with either status.Through interviews with 57 low-income fathers, I investigate the role of state surveillance in their family lives through child support enforcement, the criminal justice system, and child protective services.Because they did not receive any benefits from compliance with this surveillance, they resisted it, primarily by dropping “off the radar.”Men justified their resistance in four ways: they had their own material needs, they did not want the child, they did not want to separate from their child’s mother or compliance was unnecessary.This resistance is consistent with Foucault’s distinction between leprosy and the plague.They believed that they did not receive the social benefits accorded to plague victims, so they attempted to be treated like lepers, excluded from social benefits but with no social demands or surveillance.

Response to Kathleen R. Arnold's review of Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation

2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 815-816
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Child Support ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Child Support Enforcement ◽  
Sexual Regulation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
Specific Complex ◽  
Antonio Negri ◽  
Late Modern

Let me begin by thanking Kathleen R. Arnold for her comments and Jeffrey Isaac for the invitation to participate in this exchange. Clearly, Kathleen and I are both indebted to the Marxist and Foucauldian traditions. For my part, however, I find the Gramscian insistence on the historically specific, complex, and contradictory character of every historical bloc and hegemonic institution more compelling than the social theories that envision the social structure as a closed totality (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) or construct state power in an ahistorical and one-dimensional manner (Giorgio Agamben). Contemporary welfare reform, for example, resembles the racially exclusionary “substitute father” rule of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But welfare reform, with its workfare requirement, child support enforcement, family cap, fatherhood programming, abstinence education, and marriage promotion dimensions, is also somewhat unique. The Gramscian paradigm encourages us to be skeptical when it appears as if the state in a late-modern developed society is becoming either a simple instrument of capital that is obediently shrinking into irrelevance, or an omnipotent machine whose seamless coherence and unbroken continuity leaves democratic forces absolutely no strategic opportunity for constructing a counterhegemonic bloc and fighting back.

Punishing Our Way Out of Poverty: The Prosecution of Child-Support Debt in Alberta, Canada

2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Millar
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Child Support ◽  
Child Poverty ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Legal Environment ◽  
Post Secondary Education ◽  
Child Support Enforcement ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
The Unemployed

AbstractThis article describes the emergence of imprisonment as part of the collection of child-support debt in Alberta, Canada. This approach to child poverty arose in the context of political conservatism, a shift in the feminist movement, and changes in the legal environment. Findings indicate that incarceration for support debt is increasing and that Blacks, Aboriginals, the unemployed, and those without post-secondary education are over-represented among those imprisoned for support debt. It is argued that child-support enforcement as an implement of social policy has limits, especially among low-income payors.

The Fight to Save Welfare for Low-Income Older Asian Immigrants: The Role of National Asian American Organizations

2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace Yoo
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Bill Clinton ◽  
Asian Immigrants ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Welfare Reform Law ◽  
Selection Of

The welfare reform law of August 1996 signed by President Bill Clinton put an end to immigrants’ eligibility of federal means tested entitlements. The rollbacks on welfare are the most drastic for older, low-income Asian immigrants who are on Supplemental Security Income. The article’s focus is in on national Asian American organizations who are involved in this political debate. The central question discuss is how did national Asian American organizations characterize and affect the 1996 federal welfare reform and immigrant debate. The selection of organizations that was studied and the findings of that investigation, along with the assessment of its effectiveness and the resources barriers they face are discussed.

Welfare Reform and the Delivery of Welfare-to-Work Programs to AAPIs: What Works?

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Chow ◽  
Grace Yoo ◽  
Catherine Vu
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Welfare To Work ◽  
Work Program ◽  
What Works ◽  
One Stop ◽  
The Impact

The passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA) of 1996 has major implications for low-income Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) populations. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the research currently examining the impact of welfare reform on AAPI recipients and the welfare-to-work services available to this population. This article highlights AAPI participation and their timing-out rates in California’s CalWORKs program and their barriers to transitioning to work. Four welfare-to-work program models and recommendations are presented to illustrate strategies that can be used to address the unique needs of AAPI in order to alleviate their high risk for timing-out: one-stop-shops, transitional jobs programs, providing comprehensive and family focused services, and additional research and evaluation of programs specific to assisting the AAPI population on CalWORKs.

scholarly journals Uneasy partnerships: Prisoner re-entry, family problems and state coercion in the era of neoliberalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 146247452110061
Author(s):  
Leonidas K Cheliotis ◽  
Tasseli McKay
Keyword(s):  
Child Support ◽  
Family Study ◽  
Child Protective Services ◽  
Protective Services ◽  
Parental Violence ◽  
Child Support Enforcement ◽  
Former Prisoners ◽  
State Coercion ◽  
Coercive Intervention

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are released from prison every year. Drawing on interviews conducted in the mid-2010s in the context of the Multi-site Family Study on Parenting, Partnering and Incarceration, this article explores how the strains of prisoner re-entry interact with those of poverty and family life, and how these combined strains condition proactive engagement with the legal system among re-entering individuals and their intimate and co-parenting partners. We focus our analysis on problems, tensions and struggles for control in parenting and partnership, including inter-parental violence, as these often led to calls or actions that clearly allowed for coercive intervention by parole authorities, courts, child support enforcement, or child protective services. We identify the precise circumstances and motives that lay behind such requests or allowances, and explain how these related to the cynical regard in which former prisoners and their partners typically held the coercive apparatus of the state. Through bringing our empirical findings into an interplay with scholarship on the role of punishment in the governance of poverty under neoliberalism, we examine how the strains faced by former prisoners' households and the tactics they used to deal with them pertain to broader politico-economic arrangements.

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