No Unnecessary Burden: Taxpayers and the Politics of Work, Family, and Welfare

The history of the Social Security Amendments of 1967 illuminates the contours of fiscal citizenship. This watershed law created both work requirements for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients and new policy instruments, including federal child support enforcement, to compel poor men to fulfill their financial obligations to their families. Welfare reformers claimed that such changes were necessary to protect the rights of taxpayers against the “criminal” predations of welfare recipients. These policy changes initiated in 1967 redefined poor women's non-work, as well as their sexual and reproductive decisions, as crimes against taxpayers. Welfare recipients contested this logic and the policies that flowed from it by insisting on the value of their own domestic labor and rejecting a narrow view of taxpaying citizenship. The resolution of these questions played a critical role in revising the American social contract.

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

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.

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

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.