Policing Welfare

Spencer Headworth is assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University.

• List of AbbreviationsChapter 1. The Strings AttachedChapter 2. One Nation, Finding FraudChapter 3. The Mill and the GristChapter 4. The Welfare PoliceChapter 5. Occupational Frames and Identities in Fraud Control WorkChapter 6. Fraud Control as PerformanceChapter 7. The Blame GameChapter 8. Finding Welfare Rule ViolatorsChapter 9. ConclusionAcknowledgmentsAppendixNotesReferencesIndex

“This highly original, insightful, and carefully researched book takes us into the inner workings of welfare fraud investigation units, revealing how the obsessions of policymakers with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse are expressed in ways that at once ‘police welfare’ and the people who count on it to feed and house their children and extend the logics of policing into the administration of poverty policy in the United States. The analysis of the ‘welfare police’ and theory of ‘punitive adversarialism’ Headworth advances in these pages will shape political and urban sociology, the broad and interdisciplinary punishment and society literature, and work in legal theory and the life of the law for decades to come. This is precisely the book we’ve needed to grasp the work of the administrative state in what is shaping up to be the long twenty-first century.”