Lost Childhoods

Poverty, Trauma, and Violent Crime in the Post-Welfare Era

Michaela Soyer

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780520969087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Lost Childhoods focuses on the life-course histories of thirty young men serving time in the Pennsylvania adult prison system for crimes they committed when they were minors. The narratives of these young men, their friends, and relatives reveal the invisible yet deep-seated connection between the childhood traumas they suffered and the violent criminal behavior they committed during adolescence. By living through domestic violence, poverty, the crack epidemic, and other circumstances, these men were forced to grow up fast all while familial ties that should have sustained them were broken at each turn. The book goes on to connect large-scale social policy decisions and their effects on family dynamics and demonstrates the limits of punitive justice.
 

1.

Punishment and the Welfare State

Welfare and punishment have been intimately connected from the moment prisons and poor houses took shape over 150 years ago (Rothman 1971). The distribution of welfare has always been an occasion to discipline those deviating from whatever the majority has deemed acceptable behavior (Platt 1977; Fox-Piven and Cloward 1993).¹ In the twenty-first century the entanglement of welfare provision and punishment remains relevant for two reasons.

Firstly, the population served by both institutions continues to overlap significantly. Those who are punished for criminal behavior often struggle with socioeconomic disadvantage. Children who grow up poor are more likely to be exposed to multiple adverse factors, peer influences, unstable homes, and substandard schooling that in aggregate increase their susceptibility to criminal behavior (Fergusson, Swain-Campbell, and Horwood 2004). The poor also tend to live in highly policed neighborhoods (Harcourt 2013). Although evidence is mixed, some research has shown that low SES (socioeconomic status) individuals face harsher sentences than wealthier defendants (Chambliss 1969; Thornberry 1973; Chiricos and Waldo 1975; Stolzenberg and D’Alessio 1994).

Secondly, the provision of centralized social services by the government outside of criminal justice institutions has ceased to exist. The criminal justice system is the only state bureaucracy present in the lives of those who suffer extreme poverty. It has fallen to prisons and jails to tend to their inmates’ physical and mental health, as well as their educational needs that have been neglected on the outside (Sufrin 2017; Stuart 2016).

As a result, the growth of the criminal justice system and the decline of the welfare state cannot be understood independently from one another. The 1970s marked the decline of the Keynesian economy and the beginnings of the punitive turn in the United States and the United Kingdom. As memories of large-scale unemployment receded into the background and the working class experienced unprecedented prosperity, welfare bureaucracy seemed to create rather than solve problems. Welfare, its critics argued, disincentivized entering the labor force and encouraged government dependency (Garland 2001).

In the United States the decades-long process of undermining the welfare state pivoted in 1996 when President Clinton, with the stroke of a pen, ended one of the most significant legislative components of the New Deal, Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). As welfare was dismantled, fighting crime became an issue of national importance. The federal “Three Strikes Law,” enacted in 1994, would drive incarceration rates to unprecedented levels (Western 2006). Roughly a year later Dilulio (1995) coined the term “super-predators.” In his now infamous essay he wrote about young offenders with “vacant stares” and “remorseless eyes” who were too frightening to study. Today, mass incarceration and the decline of the welfare state have left the criminal justice system as the only government institution legitimately able to provide educational and health services to those who have fallen through the cracks.

The organizational restructuring of both systems defined the life-course of the thirty original respondents. They were born after welfare had ended but are still old enough to experience the full force of the punitive turn. What we rather abstractly describe as “mass incarceration” and “welfare reform” brackets the individual narratives of the young men I met at SCI Pine Grove. It is this specific contraction of welfare, the simultaneous expansion of incarceration, and eventual incorporation of welfare provision into criminal justice institutions that have shaped the young men’s pathways into crime.

“THE END OF WELFARE AS WE KNOW IT”

Dismantling welfare received strong support across party lines. Voices of dissent were reserved for old-timers such as long-serving senators Edward Kennedy and Patrick Moynihan. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) cleared the House and the Senate without a challenge (Toner 1995). In August 1996, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was official replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). “Temporary” may well be the most important aspect of the AFDC replacement. The federal government mandated that states are not allowed to use TANF block grants to aid families for longer than 60 months. Limiting lifetime eligibility for government support to five years obliterated welfare as a permanent safety net and converted it into a temporary “back-to-work” program (Edin and Shaefer 2015; Wacquant 2008b; Moffitt 2008).

Twenty years later, the results of cutting back support for the poorest American citizens are mixed. Caseloads have been significantly reduced. Single mothers have seen an increase in workforce participation and a rise in household income. Programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EIC) have also provided important work incentives. Dependency on traditional welfare programs has been reduced to such an extent that TANF expenditure ranks behind the costs for EIC, food stamps, and subsidized housing (Moffitt 2008).

While the numbers appear to prove scenarios of large-scale deprivation wrong, there is a wrinkle in these seemingly positive developments. Life for the poorest bracket of single mothers, for example, has become harder post–welfare reform. The new programs encouraged those who could work to enter the workforce but left few options for people who, for one reason or another, cannot remain employed over the long term. Finally, welfare reform left almost no provision for the childless, unmarried, and unskilled segment of the population (Moffitt 2008).

In their recent work Edin and Shaefer have taken a closer look at this forgotten population. In $2 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America they describe the life of those “1.5 millions households with 3 million children” who have to make do on two dollars per day per person (Edin and Shaefer 2015). Describing the lives of eighteen families in depth, they show that desperation and disaster are these families’ constant companions. Residential instability, job insecurity, and little to no access to government support programs created a “web of exploration” that was impossible to escape (ibid.).

The sociodemographic background of the families Edin and Shaefer followed is very similar to the families of the young men I interviewed. Most of the respondents grew up in households headed by single mothers. The African American and Latino youths grew up in segregated, resource-poor neighborhoods (Massey and Denton 1993). The white youths lived in families that were left behind by mechanization and globalization. Growing up in a post-welfare society meant the young men had the odds stacked against them from early childhood on. The political priorities of the late 1990s, a time of economic growth and prosperity, left childhood poverty largely unaddressed. Instead government funds were allocated to ever-expanding criminal and juvenile justice systems.

PENAL WELFARISM AND MASS INCARCERATION

Social scientists have written extensively about this dual institutional upheaval during the mid-1990s. David Garland argues that the era of rehabilitation-centered criminal justice policies came to an end during the mid-1970s. “Penal welfarism” was replaced with a highly punitive system of mass incarceration. Garland (2001) observes that the utility of rehabilitative approaches to crime that had dominated the previous decades came under intense scrutiny by the mid-1970s. Martinson’s famous article “What Works? Questions and Answers about Prison Reform,” offered a scathing view of rehabilitative programs. “With few and isolated exceptions,” he wrote, “the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism” (1974: 25). Following Martinson’s assessment, the U.S. and U.K. criminal justice systems began to abandon the rehabilitative ideal and instead focused on segregation and control of those deemed incorrigible and too dangerous to be a part of modern society (Garland 2001: 102).

In Punishing the Poor Wacquant observes that the U.S. government has lumped welfare recipients and criminals together as the “undesirable poor.” He maintains, “welfare revamped as workfare and prison stripped of its rehabilitative pretension now form a single organizational mesh” (2009: 288). The growing carceral state in combination with a deconstructed welfare regime subdues those who have been rendered obsolete in the neoliberal economy. With the marginalized population under control, globalized and deregulated capitalism has free rein and continues to expand its reach (ibid., 304f).

Like Wacquant, Soss, Fording, and Schram (2011) perceive neoliberalism and paternalism as the defining aspects of contemporary poverty governance. They suggest that neoliberals have not abolished but rather hijacked political and civic institutions. While operational strategies may have been altered, these political and social entities retain their authority and neoliberalism has developed into a disciplinary regime in its own right.

In contrast to Wacquant, Soss et al. affirm historical continuity between the different forms of welfare governance. Contemporary restrictions and stigma related to receiving welfare, they argue, resonate with traditional strategies of managing the poor. While welfare may take the form of tax incentives like the Earned Income Tax Credit, generating economic pressure to force people into low-paying jobs is a historically tested form of social and behavioral control.

More recent scholarship addressing the entanglement of welfare and punishment tries to find alternatives to the mass incarceration paradigm. In her ethnography about women’s health care in a California jail, Carolyn Sufrin (2017) notes the careful balance that nurses and doctors strike as they manage the health problems of vulnerable populations. As Sufrin summarizes poignantly: “[Jail] . . . routinely provides them [inmates] respite from the danger of the streets, in ways public assistance, free clinics, and nonprofit social service agencies have failed to” (47). In A Dream Denied I also observe that the juvenile justice systems in Boston and Chicago are the only government institutions providing desperately needed support for disadvantaged families (Soyer 2016). As Phelps (2011) points out, the U.S. criminal justice system never completely ceased providing rehabilitative services. Criminal justice institutions maintained at least a limited commitment to rehabilitation of offenders even as the official rhetoric overwhelmingly adhered to a “lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key” approach.²

During those decades that have seen a dramatic increase in incarceration rates, the U.S. Supreme Court also continued to affirm prisoners’ right to health care under the Eighth Amendment.³ As a result, prisons and jails are able to offer health services that are not universally accessible on the outside. The Young Adult Offender Program at SCI Pine Grove is no exception. It at once symbolizes the misguided moral panic about “super-predators” and the attempt to address the young men’s educational deficits and therapeutic needs.

Dylan, for example, realized for the first time that he could be suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) when he talked to a counselor on his unit. Others are able to work toward their GED and may even be able to learn a trade. The inmates can enroll in carpentry or custodial maintenance programs. The program, however, remains punitive at its core. The pains of incarceration were especially acute for those who had to serve long sentences. Robert was sentenced to fifteen to thirty years for transferring illegal firearms when he was seventeen. He knows that life will be very different by the time he will be eligible for parole. He is afraid that he won’t be able to find his place in society after he has spent his formative years in prison. Robert also wonders whether or not he will be able to handle being free again. He does not know if he is able to exercise self-control without the constant supervision of a carceral institution. Most devastating for him, however, is that he will have nobody to return to: “Once my grandma dies,” he says, “I don’t really got much.”

Isaac, on the other hand, does want to dwell on the long-term implications of his sentence. When I interviewed him, he had only served one year of his twenty-to-thirty-year sentence for third-degree murder. “I ain’t trying to sit here and think about it and keep thinking about it and drive myself crazy about it,” he says. Dylan, who is serving a sentence of twenty-five to fifty years, is more solemn. Even though he has only been in Pine Grove for two years, he has already lost touch with almost everybody on the outside. “I got a lot of time,” he says, and adds: “When I was out there, I was doing stuff for everybody, but like everybody forget what you did.” He is trying to appeal his case. “I’m trying to get some time back . . . ’Cause I got twenty-five. I got twenty-five to fifty. Twenty-five to fifty years. That’s so fucking long.” Dylan will be forty-two by the time he becomes parole eligible. The inmates who are serving long-term sentences, like Robert, profit far less from the rehabilitative programs SCI Pine Grove offers to its underage inmates. Knowing that he still has to spend at least a decade in prison makes it difficult for Robert to take programs seriously that are supposed to prepare him for reentry.

The young men I interviewed symbolize the paradox of a criminal justice system that almost inevitably continues to fulfill caretaking functions. As an institution SCI Pine Grove recognizes the vulnerability of teenage offenders and thus segregates them from the adult population. Nevertheless, the prison still has to enforce punishment according to the rules of the adult criminal justice system.

CRIMINALIZING YOUTHS

For the majority of recorded human history children and adults were conside...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Punishment and the Welfare State
• 2. The Making of Life-Course-Persistent Offenders
• 3. The End of Childhood: Parental Drug Addiction and Violence
• 4. The Weakness of Strong Ties: Extreme Poverty and the Fracture of Close Kinship Ties
• 5. Masculinity and Violence: Physical and Emotional Abuse at Home and in the Juvenile Justice System
• 6. Losing Children
• Conclusion and Policy Implications
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Notes
• References
• Index