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This chapter examines how welfare recipients engaged with welfare rules and negotiated compliance with the rules. More specifically, it considers the variation in welfare recipients' rule engagement by describing three types of welfare recipients: informed recipients, misinformed recipients, and preoccupied/disengaged recipients. It shows that adult heads of households tend to break the rules and outlines some of the factors influencing the type of rule breaking that occurred, including knowledge of the system, the availability of financial support from resources other than the welfare system, human capital (for example, education, self-confidence, age, and race), attitudes about fairness of the rules, and degree of financial desperation. The chapter also highlights the problematic nature of some of the assumptions about rule compliance and rule breaking. Finally, it explains how welfare recipients understand the normative pull of complex rules.

This chapter examines welfare recipients' resistance to, and investment in, law's legitimacy when their formal compliance with the law was often tenuous. Drawing on interviews with thirty-four welfare recipients in a Northern California county, it considers how welfare recipients reacted to the criminalization of poverty and the ways resistance can maintain and reinforce systems of domination, along with the recipients' limited capacity to mobilize for political change. It also explains how recipients become entangled in welfare fraud and the target of welfare fraud investigations and criminal prosecutions, and why they do not comply with welfare laws. Finally, it analyzes existing notions of political resistance and noncompliance with welfare rules.

This chapter traces the history of welfare policies and welfare politics in the United States, with particular emphasis on the genealogy of the complex, sometimes contradictory, and increasingly punitive welfare rules and regulations. It begins with an overview of how welfare made the transition from charitable aid to government-sponsored relief before turning to the Social Security Act of 1935 and its early years. It then considers the growth of aid to dependent children before discussing the War on Poverty mobilized by the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. It also examines the rise of the welfare rights movement and its effects on the welfare system, along with the increase in concerns about welfare cheating and the emergence of the symbol of the welfare queen under the Reagan administration, Finally, it explores welfare reform and the convergence of the welfare and criminal justice systems during the 1990s.

This chapter focuses on women's interactions with caseworkers in the welfare office. It is through caseworkers that women learn welfare rules and access welfare benefits. The nature of a woman's relationship with her caseworker determines in part her understanding of welfare rules and whether she believes they will be followed reliably. Most women interviewed for this study described caseworkers who paid inadequate attention to their needs and treated them with hostility. As a result of these difficult interactions, many women in both time periods either did not know official welfare rules or suspected that caseworkers honored only the rules that were not in a recipient's favor. Both the lack of communication of welfare rules and the distrust that they would be properly implemented undermined voluntary incentives designed to entice recipients into the labor market. Distrust thus inhibited women's positive response to voluntary incentives.

This chapter focuses on welfare recipients' compliance and noncompliance with welfare rules and regulations based on the results of interviews with thirty-four individuals in a Northern California county. It first assesses the financial needs that went unmet in interviewee households and how the interviewees attempted to meet their needs. It then examines the interviewees' difficulties understanding the rules and seeing them as logical. It shows that in some cases, or at least to some extent, the interviewees complied with many of the welfare rules, fulfilling work requirements and reporting earnings to the welfare office. In other cases, however, the interviewees went outside the rules—taking “side jobs” that paid cash and that they did not report to the welfare office, or receiving undeclared support from friends or family.

This chapter examines the legitimacy of welfare law by proposing frameworks other than the governing frame of criminal regulation to guide welfare policies. It suggests that the U.S. welfare system undermines rather than promotes legality and that many welfare recipients lack basic knowledge of the rules. The recipients interviewed for this book reported receiving wrong information about the rules and requirements from welfare officials. There was a gap between the rules as they were announced and their actual implementation, and some of the elements of federal welfare reform contradicted each other. As a result, welfare recipients had difficulty orienting their actions to the welfare rules. Since the penalties were not clear to those subject to them, the get-tough penalties for welfare cheating could not deter rule breaking. This chapter outlines the basics of procedurally fair and just welfare laws that adhere to the fundamental principles of legality, are not contradictory or too complicated, can be effectively communicated to the public, and can be followed.