Chapter 1. The Strings Attached

Abstract

Chapter One introduces the study, overviewing the fraud control system, summarizing the book’s major arguments, and explaining the data and methods. This chapter details the concept of punitive adversarialism—referring to the institutionalization of surveillance, investigation, formal charging processes, and punishments within bureaucratic structure—and tracks the historical development of punitiveness in public assistance systems. Under punitive adversarialism, organizational structures and norms functionally treat administrative problems as crime problems and deviance within bureaucratic systems as crime or crime-adjacent. Punitive adversarialism within welfare bureaucracies tracks with the increased punitiveness of the criminal legal system in recent decades. Like these changes in conventional policing, prosecution, and sentencing, legal and administrative interventions that position agencies and clients antagonistically create circumstances conducive to de jure and de facto criminalization of individuals, groups, and statuses, such as poverty. As Chapter One explains, to study welfare fraud control units, I began with a national overview of the U.S. welfare fraud control system, followed by in-depth interviews with fraud unit representatives in five regionally, demographically, and politically diverse U.S. states. Based on these data, this chapter argues that fraud units constitute a governance choice with substantive and symbolic consequences that are impactful, but also irregular.