Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Home
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

4 results

Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care
  • Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care
  • Wendy A. Bach
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date: September 2022
  • Print publication: 30 September 2022
  • View description
    At the height of the opiate epidemic, Tennessee lawmakers made it a crime for a pregnant woman to transmit narcotics to a fetus. They promised that charging new mothers with this crime would help them receive the treatment and support they often desperately need. In Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care, Wendy Bach describes the law's actual effect through meticulous examination of the cases of 120 women who were prosecuted for this crime. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, Bach demonstrates that both prosecuting 'fetal assault', and institutionalizing the all-too-common idea that criminalization is a road to care, lead at best to clinically dangerous and corrupt treatment, and at worst, and far more often, to an insidious smokescreen obscuring harsh punishment. Urgent, instructive, and humane, this retelling demands we stop criminalizing care and instead move towards robust and respectful systems that meet the real needs of families in poor communities.
  • 1 - Federalism, Entitlement, and Punishment across the US Social Welfare State
  • from Part I - Welfare and Federalism
  • Edited by Ezra Rosser
  • Book: Holes in the Safety Net
  • Published online: 05 September 2019
  • Print publication: 01 August 2019, pp 21-39
  • View extract

    Summary

    This chapter argues that federalism-based controversies in the social welfare field over legal structures, legal rules, and the location of governance are best understood as arguments about both deservingness and control played out through controversies about administrative structure. In short, programs are called “welfare,” or are urged by some to be more like “welfare,” when what is really meant is that we wish to use the administrative mechanisms of federalism to control, stigmatize, punish, and deter recipients. In contrast, when we perceive recipients as entitled, these mechanisms fall away to be replaced by purely federally controlled, far less visible, and far more inviting administrative structures. To make this process visible, the chapter describes the administrative tools of benefit programs across the economic spectrum, as well as the corresponding cultural assumptions tied to programs across this spectrum, and then contextualizes a debate like the one over Medicaid work rules in this context.