Common Cause? Policymaking Discourse and the Prison/Welfare Trade-Off*

• DOI: 10.1177/0032329220942080
• Date: 01 September 2020
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Author: Josh Guetzkow
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220942080

Politics & Society

2020, Vol. 48(3) 321 –356

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329220942080

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Article

Common Cause?

Policymaking Discourse

and the Prison/Welfare

Trade-Off*

Josh Guetzkow

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Abstract

This article advances our understanding of the well-documented trade-off between

welfare and prisons by analyzing US congressional hearings on welfare and criminal

justice policies in two periods: the “Great Society” of 1961–67 and the “neoliberal”

era of 1981–96. Comparing policymakers’ conceptions about the causes of poverty

and crime, about poor and criminal populations, and about the proper role of

government, the findings show that conceptions across policy domains are similar in

each period and have changed in similar ways over time. These changes correspond to

markedly different policy responses to poverty and crime in the two periods, favoring

welfare over prisons in the earlier period and prisons over welfare in the later period.

The article discusses the implications for an understanding of the punitive turn in

public policies, for theories of social control, and for research on the role of ideas in

policymaking.

Keywords

prisons, welfare, policy trade-offs, target populations, discourse

Corresponding Author:

Josh Guetzkow, Department of Sociology & Anthropology and Institute of Criminology, Hebrew

University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel.

Email: joshua.guetzkow@mail.huji.ac.il

*This special issue of Politics & Society titled “Societies under Stress” features an introduction by David

Garland and four articles that were presented as part of the workshop series held at the University of

Southern Denmark, December 2017, organized by Marianne Ulriksen and Peter Starke, and at The Ohio

State University, November 2018, organized by Sarah Brooks, Sarah Berens, and Georg Wenzelburger

and partly funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Ref 30.18.0.134.PO.

942080PASXXX10.1177/0032329220942080Politics & SocietyGuetzkow

research-article2020

322 Politics & Society 48(3)

Two public policy developments had a profound impact on American class and race

relations at the end of the twentieth century: welfare retrenchment and prison expan-

sion. In 1972, per capita benefits of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)

peaked, and President Nixon nearly pushed a guaranteed annual income plan through

Congress.1 At the same time, the criminal justice system was experimenting with alter-

native sentencing schemes in a drive to minimize the use of incarceration.2 Since then,

welfare expenditures have dropped by over 60 percent. The number of prison inmates

has increased from about 200,000 in 1970 to over 1.5 million in 2016, with an addi-

tional 4.5 million people on probation or parole.3 A great deal of research has been

devoted to examining these changes separately, but only a handful of studies have

demonstrated a connection between the two policy areas: when governments invest

more in public welfare, they also tend to put fewer people in prison—regardless of

crime and poverty rates.4

Some researchers have theorized that welfare and prisons serve as alternative

means of social control, aimed at maintaining labor discipline and governing socially

marginal populations.5 Although these studies make a significant contribution to our

understanding of welfare and criminal justice policies, they leave us in the dark regard-

ing the policymaking process. The reason is that they focus on policy outcomes, such

as the number of people on welfare and behind bars, and view them as a function of

social control prerogatives. But policymakers, after all, do not talk about these policies

in terms of the need to control the population—there is no congressional subcommit-

tee on social control. They also do not discuss welfare and prisons as substitutable

alternatives. Criminal justice and welfare policymaking take place in separate and

distinct arenas, handled by separate committees with different sets of lawmakers,

agencies, and stakeholders who develop policy independently in each sphere, at both

the state and federal levels.6

In this article, I seek to shed new light on the penal/welfare nexus—and the prison/

welfare trade-off—by focusing on policymaking discourse. Decades of research have

shown that social problems are socially constructed and that the way problems are

constructed influences the policies developed to solve them.7 More specifically,

research on the role of ideas in policymaking, including research on framing,8 govern-

mentality,9 and the construction of target populations,10 shows how different elements

of policymaking discourse influence policy outcomes. I synthesize these literatures to

argue that conceptions about the causes of a problem, the target population, and the

proper role of government articulate with one another and affect policy outcomes by

limiting and channeling the range of policy solutions that will appear relevant, sensi-

ble, and appropriate. In the conclusion I discuss how policymaking discourse may

intersect with institutional, political, and other aspects of “societies under stress”

raised by other contributors to this special issue to help produce—or not—a prison/

welfare trade-off.

My analysis compares congressional hearings on welfare and criminal justice poli-

cymaking to map the surrounding discourse during two periods of significant policy

development in both areas: the “Great Society” period of 1961–67 and the “Neoliberal

Paternalist” era of 1981–96.11 Evidence of discursive commonalities between these

Guetzkow 323

policy domains will further our understanding of the policymaking process in general

and the connection between welfare and criminal justice policies in particular. In the

next section, I discuss research on the relationship between welfare and prisons. I then

turn to a discussion of how research on the relationship between ideas and public

policy informs my analysis before describing the methodology and results.

Understanding the Welfare/Prison Trade-Off

Although welfare and criminal justice policies are typically studied in isolation from

one another, several studies have pointed to a trade-off between prisons and welfare.

Research on US states and other countries has generally found that governments that

spend less on social welfare have higher incarceration rates and prison spending.12

One explanation for this apparent trade-off, which would be consistent with the find-

ings of other articles in this special issue, is that disinvestment in welfare leads to

higher social insecurity and crime rates and, thereby, higher incarceration rates. But

the trade-off holds even after controlling for crime and poverty rates, suggesting that

the connection between welfare and criminal justice policies runs deeper.

Scholarly attempts to understand the connection between prisons and welfare have

mainly viewed them as operating as functionally equivalent means of social control,

with high welfare spending acting as a placative strategy seeking to “buy off” the

poor and imprisonment acting as a coercive strategy that threatens punishment for

disobedience.13 From that perspective, the negative correlation between welfare and

prisons can be taken as evidence that governments will tend to privilege one approach

over the other for achieving social control. Along similar lines, Katherine Beckett and

Bruce Western propose that welfare and criminal justice “comprise a single policy

regime aimed at the governance of social marginality,” which varies in its “commit-

ment to including or excluding marginal groups.”14 More inclusive regimes are char-

acterized by a larger, more generous, welfare system and a smaller, less punitive,

criminal justice apparatus. Exclusionary regimes have smaller, more miserly, welfare

programs and a larger, more punitive, criminal justice system. For them, the United

States witnessed a shift from a more inclusive to a more exclusive regime since the

1960s. Loïc Wacquant sees this shift toward “welfare turned workfare and an aggres-

sive penal bureaucracy” as a means to enforce labor market discipline in the face of

the rise of neoliberalism and the collapse of the Keynesian-Fordist social compact.15

Whether welfare and prisons are viewed as tools for enforcing labor market disci-

pline, maintaining social control of the poor, or governing social marginality, existing

accounts leave central puzzles unsolved: how are criminal justice and welfare policies

connected in the policymaking process and how does that connection lead to the

observed trade-off between welfare generosity and incarceration rates? Current theo-

rizing rests on the assumption that welfare and crime policies react mechanistically to

serve social control needs. Beckett and Western move away from a deterministic

account, but they, too, do not examine how policy regimes come about.16 To gain a

better understanding of the processes that lead to a trade-off between these two poli-

cies, we need to develop a deeper understanding of the policymaking process and