Sanctions as everyday resistance to welfare reform.

• Date: 22 December 2008
• Author: Shaw, Linda L.,Horton, John,Moreno, Manuel H.
• Published date: 22 December 2008
• Author: Shaw, Linda L.

THE PASSAGE BY CONGRESS OF THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND WORK Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 signaled the triumph of individual over collective responsibility for the nation s poorest families. In supporting welfare reform, a coalition of liberal and conservative advocates for abolishing the long-standing entitlement program for the poor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, capitalized on and fostered racist and sexist stereotypes of black and brown "welfare queens" living off of the hard work of the white working and middle classes. Moreover, as O'Connor (2001) argues, the writing of prominent social scientists, both liberal and conservative (Ellwood, 1988; Murray, 1984), legitimized PRWORA's emphasis on individual behavioral change, rather than poverty alleviation, as the solution to welfare dependency that was bred, in their view, by decades of safety-net entitlements. After passage of PRWORA, the Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) program was established in 1997 to implement welfare reform. Under TANF, work requirements, lifetime limits on the receipt of aid, and punishments for noncompliance, along with short-term childcare, transportation assistance, and services to overcome personal barriers to work, became the tools to instill the ethic of individual responsibility needed to leave welfare and become self-sufficient.

Sanctions are a centerpiece of PRWORA's tough-love approach to welfare dependency. In Los Angeles County, the love component consists of motivational messages about raising self-esteem to get off of aid and the provision of services to make it happen. The tough component is about sanctions--financial penalties for not complying with welfare-to-work requirements--the ultimate means of reducing welfare rolls (Horton and Shaw, 2002). (1) Although advocates for welfare reform cite the importance of PRWORA's combination of rewards and punishments in achieving welfare reform's widely touted reductions in the welfare rolls (Mead, 1997), sanction rates remain high across the country. (2) Thus, despite the price that sanctioned families pay, there is reason to believe that financial penalties, as a means of eliciting compliance, are not working as well as the architects of welfare reform intended (Caroll and Renwick, 2002; Hasenfeld and Weaver, 1996; Hasenfeld et al., 2002; Lee et al., 2004).

Why do some parents take sanctions rather than comply with welfare-to-work requirements? In seeking answers to this question, researchers have largely focused on personal barriers to compliance, showing that sanctioned parents are more likely to be African American, have significantly higher rates of material hardship, such as poor health, less education, fewer job skills and less work experience, and are also at higher risk for problems such as mental illness, substance abuse, domestic violence, hunger, and homelessness (Cherlin et al., 2002; Kalil et al., 2002; Pavetti et al., 2003, 2004; Reichman et al., 2005). Others cite local implementation and enforcement practices, as well as parents' lack of knowledge about participation requirements, as the primary sources of sanctions (Handler and Hasenfeld, 2007; Pavetti and Bloom, 2001). Critics, however, argue that such "barriers research" comes from a "poverty knowledge industry" made up of large private research organizations that are often contracted by welfare agencies to conduct evaluation research, which tacitly accept welfare reform's dependency framework. They do so by attributing noncompliance with program requirements to individual liabilities or personal circumstances (Marchevsky and Theoharis, 2006; O'Connor, 2001), rather than to the social conditions that underlie poverty. From a barriers perspective, more knowledge about personal obstacles may lead to measures for achieving higher rates of compliance and, in the long run, to further reductions in the numbers of parents on welfare (Riccio et al., 1996).

In this article, we challenge the limitations of the barriers thesis to argue that although parents have personal hardships such as health and childcare needs that make compliance difficult, the barriers thesis individualizes these difficulties in a way that puts the blame on the parents rather than on their poverty situations. Our findings from research on why parents took sanctions in GAIN (Greater Avenues of Independence), Los Angeles County's welfare-to-work program (Moreno et al., 2005, 2006), (3) reveal that parents view noncompliance and sanctions very differently from many welfare agencies and evaluation researchers who uncritically accept the barriers thesis. We learned that for many parents, the cause of their noncompliance was not an unwillingness to work and become self-sufficient. Nor was their noncompliance simply the unfortunate consequence of ignorance of the rules or personal barriers to compliance. Rather, our findings reveal that parents often choose noncompliance and sanctions based on assessments of their chances in the job market, their poor health, and the needs of their families. Following the ethnographic work of John Gilliom (2005) and David Wagner (1993) on welfare resistance, we argue that when these priorities and program requirements conflict, the choice to accept sanctions is an act of resistance to the requirements and control of welfare reform.

In explaining their personal decisions, parents did not use the word "resistance." Their immediate objective is to survive under existing conditions, not to challenge a federal program. From parents' perspectives, the welfare-to-work program adds at least 32 hours per week of work and other activities, such as meeting with caseworkers, to the time single parents spend working one or more jobs and meeting the needs of their families. In most cases, there is a conflict between the demands of the program and these values and priorities. Resistance is our theoretical concept that highlights the collective and potential political power of individual parents who simply say "no" to requirements that can exacerbate, rather than alleviate, their poverty situations. In this sense, noncompliance and sanctions are a form of resistance and a strategy for survival when participation in welfare-to-work activities conflict with their priorities, values, and their assessments of the long-term well-being of their families. Resistance is the result of parents' assessments of a conflict between the regulations of the welfare system, whose priority is the reduction of the welfare rolls, and the priorities and strategies of parents trying to survive and alleviate their socially structured situations of poverty, a problem not addressed by either current sanctions research or by welfare policies.

But, what difference can this new "poverty knowledge," based on what parents tell us about their situations and assessments of welfare reform, make in the face of PRWORA's stringent participation requirements and sanctions as a means for enforcing them? In the following sections, we discuss our research on sanctions and how the advocates for welfare families and Los Angeles County welfare agencies have made use of what parents told us about why they often resist compliance with PRWORA's requirements to challenge sanctions policy.

Sanctions Research in Los Angeles County

Our analysis evolved from research on parents sanctioned from 2002 to 2006 in the Los Angeles County GAIN program, which has the largest county welfare caseload in the country. (4) Only the total welfare caseloads in the states of California and New York exceed those of Los Angeles County. Like other regions, L.A. County was experiencing a rise in sanction rates, and the request for research to understand how to reverse this trend was supported by a broad range of stakeholders that included progressive citizens (including university professors and advocates of the poor) and members of the Commission of Public Social Services, a group appointed by the powerful five-member County Board of Supervisors to oversee the implementation of welfare reform in the county. These groups speculated that sanctions were due to an inadequacy of services that could enable parents to move from welfare to work.

Concerns expressed by these groups led the Department of Public Social Services (DPSS) to commission the county's Research and Evaluation Services unit to conduct research on sanctions. Also looming in the background was the imminent passage of PRWORA reauthorization. Although its implications were only fully realized after the study was initiated, this legislation later provided an additional reason for reducing the number of sanctioned parents, since they would now be included in the work participation rates on which block grant funding from the federal government is calculated. (5)

Since L.A. County needed a better understanding of why sanction rates were high, we were asked to conduct focus group research that, combined with administrative and survey data, would provide a comprehensive understanding of sanctioned parents. (6) Our data come from eight focus groups with 56 sanctioned parents and two focus groups with 13 GAIN caseworkers, plus many hours of ethnographic observations with parents, caseworkers, managers, DPSS officials, and community welfare advocates. We talked with parents that had varied sanction histories to determine why, in their own words and from their own experience, they failed to comply with welfare-to-work requirements.

Using quantitative data from county administrative records, we identified parents who were the most likely to be sanctioned (the poorest, predominately young mothers, mothers with large families, immigrants, and people of color)...