From the Welfare State to the Carceral State: Whither Social Reproduction?

Abstract

Historical, feminist scholarship demonstrates that the welfare state underwrote the work of social reproduction, enabling procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Carried out by families and other public and private social institutions, social reproduction includes making food, clothing, and shelter available for immediate consumption; ensuring the health and productivity of the current and future labor force; providing for people too old, too young, or too sick to care for themselves; and socializing family members. Historically, social reproduction includes both women's unpaid labor in the home and low-paid labor in the market and converts the wages of paid workers into the means of subsistence for the entire household. The economic crisis of the mid-1970s marked the end of the “golden age” of capitalism, and yielded neoliberal politics that sought to undo the redistributive elements of the New Deal and the Great Society. It called for a smaller state, greater reliance on market forces, and reduced expenditure on family maintenance. This article, a reprint of a 2017 book chapter, explores the crisis in social reproduction in the United States that surfaced with the rise of neoliberalism and the “carceral state.”

Feminist scholarship has demonstrated that the welfare state underwrote the work of social reproduction; that is, it enabled activities that furthered procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Carried out by families as well as other public and private social institutions, social reproduction includes making food, clothing, and shelter available for immediate consumption; ensuring the health and productivity of the current and future labor force; providing for people too old, too young, or too sick to care for themselves; and socializing family members into the wider social order. Historically, social reproduction includes women's unpaid labor (even when they work outside the home) as well as women's low-paid labor in the market. Social reproductive labor converts the wages of paid workers into the means of subsistence for the entire household (Abramovitz, 2010).

State support for social reproduction has varied with each of the two major economic crises of the 20th century: the collapse of the economy in the 1930s, which gave rise to the U.S. welfare state, and the financial crisis of the mid-1970s, which gave rise to the neoliberal backlash against the welfare state. According to the Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) theory, such crises occur over several decades as major institutional arrangements, policies, and ideological paradigms assembled to address a prior crisis fail to sustain profits, economic growth, and social stability. The deterioration of existing arrangements undermines the social, economic, and political structures—including the institutions of social reproduction—that supported growth in the first place. The developing crisis further exposes fundamental contradictions built into the market economy, which regular fiscal-policy and monetary-policy tools cannot readily resolve. Instead, their resolution requires a major restructuring of the system, or a new SSA, which emerges only after protracted political struggle. For example, the economic crisis of the 1930s yielded a new SSA, marked by the New Deal and Keynesian economic policy. Its call for expanding the welfare state sought to correct problems associated with laissez-faire capitalism and consequently provided support for social reproduction. The economic crisis of the mid-1970s, however, yielded a neoliberal politics that sought to undo the redistributive elements of the New Deal and the Great Society. It called for a smaller state, greater reliance on market forces, and reduced expenditure on family maintenance (Abramovitz, 2014; Kotz, 2014).

This chapter explores the crisis in social reproduction in the United States that surfaced as the decline of the postwar Keynesian SSA exposed three contradictions in the welfare state, giving rise to neoliberalism and the “carceral state.”

Contradictions of the New Deal Welfare State

Successful social reproduction requires adequate wages, sufficient income support, and low unemployment. In contrast, successful capital accumulation depends on low wages, low benefits, and high unemployment. When the requirements of capital accumulation cause the standard of living to fall too low, the lack of income can undercut the capacity of families to carry out the socially assigned caretaking and reproductive tasks on which both businesses and families depend. Under these circumstances, a crisis ensues: the requirements for profitable economic production undercut the conditions necessary to carry out critical family maintenance.

Crises in social reproduction accompanied both the collapse of the economy in the 1930s and the financial crisis in the mid-1970s, but the response of the state to each differed dramatically. The collapse of the economy in the 1930s led to the first major crisis in social reproduction in the 20th century. Hidden beneath rapid economic growth, booming profits, and the giddy consumerism of the “roaring twenties,” the working classes suffered a falling standard of living, mounting social problems, and a breakdown in social reproduction. This failure of social reproduction, combined with demands for intervention from both business leaders and popular movements, made it clear that the federal government had to play a larger role in the economy to ensure both successful social reproduction and profitable economic production (Vaudagna, 2014). Born from political struggle, the new welfare-state programs effectively, if not equally, redistributed income downward, expanded the role of the state, and otherwise assumed some responsibility for social reproduction. From the New Deal to the Great Society, the U.S. welfare state (inadequate as it was) generated conditions for both high profits and family maintenance. A growing number of redistributive social-welfare programs, supported by high tax rates and deficit spending, shifted the costs of carework from the household to the state and to some extent deprivatized social reproduction. This benefitted many white women and some women of color, who are the majority of the nation's care workers inside the home and out, especially in the public sector. While carrying out new social functions, the expanded welfare state did not neglect the accumulation interests of business. Its cash-assistance programs created conditions for profitable economic activity by increasing private purchasing power, channeling low-wage women workers onto the bottom rungs of the labor market, and stabilizing the economy during recurrent downturns (Abramovitz, 2004, 2011).

Between 1945 and the mid-1970s—years of relative prosperity for many households—the economy grew, the middle class swelled, productivity and wages increased, the average standard of living improved, the gap between the rich and poor narrowed, and the overall poverty rate fell by half. The expanded welfare state provided the working class with a modicum of economic security, socialized more of the costs of social reproduction, and helped quiet unrest. In distributing income downward, the welfare state reduced chronic poverty but also obscured deep-seated inequality and legitimized the state as an institution that treated all groups fairly, if not equally (Abramovitz, 2010; O’Connor, 1973).

The postwar welfare state contained a second contradiction, one grounded in its twin regulatory and liberatory powers. The regulatory welfare state controlled the lives of women, rewarding them for their compliance with prescribed work and gender roles and subjecting them to moralistic behavior rules that reinforced race, class, and gender hierarchies. The regulatory welfare state also promoted the political stability prerequisite for profitable capital accumulation by containing political conflicts over poverty and inequality. Simultaneously, the welfare state, as it emerged in practice, contained an unexpected liberatory potential that fostered political struggle. When welfare state benefits operate as an alternative to the market wage, they have the potential to decommodify labor, increase the bargaining power of marginalized groups, and promote political activism. Access to benefits encourages collective struggle to the extent that it shifts the balance of power between the individual and the state, labor and capital, women and men, and persons of color and white persons. Welfare creates conditions amenable to political struggle and democratic participation (Abramovitz, 1996; Piven & Cloward, 1982).

From 1935 to 1975, the expanding welfare state, combined with active and often militant popular movements, altered the balance of power in ways that benefitted many women. Social unrest in the 1930s fueled support for the New Deal, and the victories of the social movements of the 1960s further bolstered the liberatory potential of the welfare state. Gains made by the labor, civil rights, and women's liberation movements reduced economic insecurity, fears of unemployment, and discrimination, challenging white hegemony and patriarchal controls. The largely female welfare-rights movement shifted the balance of power further and won more respectful treatment and higher benefits from welfare departments around the country. The labor, civil rights, and gender “accords” the state negotiated in response to movement pressures improved standards of living, built solidarity, advanced democratic participation, expanded the state's capacity to support social reproduction, legitimized the system as fair to all, and otherwise created amenable conditions for resistance (Abramovitz, 1992; Piven & Cloward, 1977).

Finally, reproducing capitalism requires the state to establish appropriate conditions for accumulation while legitimating its actions to voters. But these two functions can, as James O’Connor has argued, contradict each other. For one, the state promotes capital accumulation by investing in projects and services that enhance labor productivity, lower the reproduction costs of labor, and increase profit. However, because market economies tend to reproduce inequality and introduce considerable instability into the lives of ordinary people, a capitalist class that helps itself at the expense of others appears unfair and loses legitimacy. Welfare programs limit political disruption among the most marginalized or dispossessed groups. If and when the state can no longer support the cost of both accumulation and legitimization, something has to give (O’Connor, 1973).

Between 1945 and 1975, the expanding welfare state contributed to both accumulation and legitimation. Welfare programs fueled accumulation by supplying business with a steady stream of consumers; ensuring a healthy, educated, and properly socialized workforce; easing the impact of economic downturns; and appeasing social movements. Modestly redistributing income, wealth, and power downward, the expanded welfare state also contained social despair, reduced distrust of the government, and legitimized state authority. In the mid-1970s, faced with a major economic crisis that undercut profits and growth, national leaders concluded that the economic and political costs of legitimation had become too high and called for dismantling the welfare state. In their view, rising welfare expenditures had created undue pressure to increase taxes and interest rates. Consequently, soaring interest rates discouraged the borrowing necessary for profitable investment. At the same time, deindustrialization and the export of jobs abroad reduced the reliance of business and industry on U.S. workers and consumers and weakened the power of the labor movement. Politically, elites concluded that welfare-state benefits and social movements had shifted the balance of power too far in favor of the working class, raising the cost of maintaining social peace (legitimization) beyond what they were willing to pay: the excessive democracy created by the postwar welfare state had to be reined in (Amott, 2003; Greenhouse, 1983; Huntington, 1975).

In response to the second major economic crisis of the 20th century, the nation's leaders targeted the expanded welfare state, which they now saw as a threat to the economic and political status quo. In contrast to the 1930s, when national elites begrudgingly called upon the government to bail them out, neoliberals in the 1970s blamed the crisis on “big government,” the gains of social movements, and the costs of the welfare state. Partnered with the religious Right, neoliberals also blamed the crisis on what they called the absence of “personal responsibility” among the poor. They condemned “deviant” sexual behavior and economic expenditures that violated mainstream family norms. To enforce compliance, they favored punitive behavior-modification policies and anticrime measures.

Proponents of neoliberalism in business and government called for a U-turn in public policy that would remake the nexus of the market, the state, and citizenship from above. Seeking to restore the primacy of the market, lower labor costs, and weaken the influence of social movements, they sought to undo the New Deal and the Great Society by redistributing income upward and downsizing government. Their well-known tactics included tax cuts, reduced social spending, privatization (shifting social-welfare responsibility from the public to the private sector), devolution (shifting social-welfare responsibility from federal to state government), and mounting an assault on the social movements best positioned to resist austerity. The neoliberal shift in public policy emphasized economic production over social reproduction and accumulation over legitimization. It reinvigorated the regulatory and punitive functions of the welfare state while constraining a liberatory potential that had briefly altered the balance of power between the haves and the have-nots. The retrenched and reprivatized welfare state fueled a new crisis in social reproduction. Given the gendered division of labor, women picked up the slack at home and at work (Abramovitz, 2004).

The Current Crisis in Social Reproduction

The current crisis in social reproduction arose from the neoliberal framework that reallocated social-welfare resources among the family, the market, and the state. A combination of social and market trends weakened each of these institutions, which over the prior 50 years had operated (albeit imperfectly) as the three pillars of support for social reproduction. Since the 1970s, heterosexual marriage, which mainstream observers hailed as central to successful social reproduction, became a less reliable site for carework among working-class women of all races. Fewer and later marriages and reduced (male) breadwinner support (due to job loss and stagnating wages) made it difficult for married, cohabitating, and otherwise partnered individuals to earn enough to maintain their households. Faced with economic insecurity, more white middle-class women followed women of color into the workforce: some by choice, some as resistance to homemaking, but most just to make ends meet (Ezquerra, 2014).

However, the labor market often failed women as well as men. Sex-segregated occupations channeled many women into low-paid jobs, where they also suffered persistent gender and race wage gaps, sexual harassment, and other forms of discrimination that undercut their earnings, morale, and capacity for carework. The increased employment of women outside the home also exacerbated the mounting care void within households, a burden that the state might have reduced with paid family leave, helping women balance work and family responsibilities.

Neoliberalism also weakened the third pillar of economic security, the welfare state, to which some women turned when family and market support faltered. Unlike the postwar welfare state, which socialized some of the costs of social reproduction, the neoliberal welfare state fueled the carework crisis by simultaneously gutting and “reprivatizing” state health, education, and welfare programs and shifting the cost of social reproduction back to women in their homes, a process that Maria Mies calls “re-housewifization” (Mies, 1986, p. 16).

Though less often noted, the hollowing out of the welfare state also affected the social-reproductive work of large numbers of women employed in public and nonprofit human-service jobs. The retrenchment of welfare-state programs cost many women workers their hard-won and union-protected jobs in both sectors and required remaining welfare-state workers to perform more public carework with fewer resources, less staff, reduced organizational capacity, and weaker unions. The diminished welfare state, combined with the ongoing attack on public-sector unions, deprived women of higher wages, better fringe benefits, and other important protections. This “war on the poor” has also been called a “war on women”: as the guardians of social reproduction, women faced triple jeopardy as the majority of welfare clients, workers, and public-sector union members (Abramovitz, 2012; Abramovitz & Zelnick, 2015).

Forty years after the U-turn in public policy, reams of evidence show that the end of the Fordist-Keynesian social compact—combined with deindustrialization and the exportation of production abroad—exacerbated the contradictions embedded in the welfare state. Proponents of neoliberalism promised that their promarket, antistate strategy would generate economic growth and that the benefits would trickle down to the average person. However, the data show that while the upward redistribution of income and wealth benefited large corporations and already wealthy individuals (women among them), the promised prosperity failed to materialize among the working class. Instead, neoliberalism promoted profitable capital accumulation for those at the top but job loss, poverty, inequality, and punishment for those at the bottom, especially for women over the age of 18, who comprise 60% of all poor persons in the United States (Abramovitz, 2014; US Census Bureau & US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015).

Many ask how “the people” were convinced to accept a U-turn in public policy that undermined their well-being, self-interest, and political power. Neoliberals built support for policies that harmed the lives of the average household by resorting to what Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine,” or the creation or exploitation of a crisis and the manipulation of resulting fears to impose policies that people would not otherwise support. In this case, welfare-state opponents played to five prevailing panics that blinded people to their own self-interest: economic panic among an anxious middle-class suffering falling wages and disappearing jobs; racial panic among white people as persons of color and immigrants institutionalized their hard-won gains; moral panic induced by changes in women's roles, family structure, and the advance of women's and gay rights; political panic among elites who feared the dispossessed would blame them for the nation's mounting social and economic problems; and crime panic created by officials seeking more authority, who stoked fears of rising crime rates and the incapacity of the state to control uprisings and social movements, in the hope that a worried public would accept more policing, social control, and punishment instead of mediation as the way to manage the poor and working classes (Abramovitz, 2014; Klein, 2007).

The Carceral State

Instead of supporting the welfare state, neoliberalism exacerbated its contradictions. It supplemented the diminished welfare state with punitive programs that favored economic production over social reproduction, accumulation over legitimization, and regulation over liberation, fueling an attack on women. By the mid-1970s, an abandoned commitment to the Keynesian welfare state had weakened both social reproduction and the authority of the state. The state sought new arrangements to manage widespread economic insecurity as it spread from the poor and working classes to the middle class and from people of color to the white population; the state's deficit of legitimacy; and potential political resistance in the legislature, the voting booth, and the streets. Drawing on the shock doctrine and public fears of crime and disorder, the state adopted a more punitive mindset and redirected vast fiscal and administrative resources toward the criminal-justice system. The result, often called the “carceral state,” compromised the conditions necessary for successful social reproduction (Wacquant, 2009).

The extended reach of the carceral state marks a major milestone in American political development, rivaling in significance the expansion and contraction of the welfare state in the postwar period. Carceral state policies tightened the traditional tough-on-crime pathway to prison. They also created and/or enlarged noncriminal pathways to punishment and jail, known variously as the double regulation of the poor, governing through crime, the shadow carceral state, and carceral debt. These policies targeted the same populations devastated by the evisceration of public resources, ensnared millions of people in the penal system, exacerbated the crisis of social reproduction in ways that affected women in particular, and threatened the nation's democratic institutions.

The Traditional Pathway to Punishment: Tough on Crime

The staggering growth in the state's capacity to police, punish, and imprison—what Michelle Alexander has termed the “New Jim Crow” because of its racial disparities—began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the increasingly neoliberal state got “tough on crime” and enacted mandatory minimum sentences, stiffer drug laws, and “three strikes and you’re out” and other harsh policies that encouraged quick court decisions and prolonged sentences in place of the prior emphases on services, rehabilitation, and prevention (Alexander, 2012).

Despite falling crime rates, more than 2.2 million individuals are currently behind bars, a 500% increase over the past 30 years. In the United States more than any other country, the number reflects a deliberate increase in the number and type of offenders sent to prison and the deliberate imposition of longer sentences. African Americans are disproportionately represented in the incarcerated population, and since 1980 women have comprised its fastest growing group, their rate of incarceration increasing at nearly double the rate of men. With more than one million women behind bars or under the control of the criminal-justice system, the female prison population is eight times larger now than it was in 1980. In 2014, prisons held twice as many African American and 1.2 times as many Latino women as white women. In addition, the number of adults sentenced to probation has ballooned from 816,525 in 1977 to 3,826,209 in 2000 and to more than four million in 2010. In 2014, women comprised about 25% of all probationers and 12% of all parolees, statuses that regulate where they live, with whom they associate, and whether they can own a car. Probationers also face random drug tests and warrantless searches and are forced to pay excessive court fees at risk of imprisonment. ¹

Tough-on-crime policies play havoc with the work of social reproduction, given the family responsibilities of both women in prison and women with an incarcerated family member. Some 25% of women, and 44% of all Black women, in the United States have a family member in prison. More than 60% of women in state prisons have a child under the age of 18, and the parent(s) of more than three million children are imprisoned or on probation. The economic consequences of incarceration compromise family stability, the foundation of social reproduction. Nearly half of incarcerated parents contributed financial support prior to incarceration. If incarceration rates had not increased during a 24-year period, the U.S. poverty rate would have fallen by 20% rather than remaining relatively steady. When fathers are incarcerated, family income drops by an average of 22%. When no parent remains to care for a child, extended family members frequently step in, often without proper support. An estimated 65% of families with an incarcerated member cannot meet basic needs. In addition to poverty's well-known outcomes, children with an imprisoned parent suffer stigma, the loss of family ties, traumatic separation, and mental-health issues, and they often live in communities disrupted by the high concentration of adults in prison. The economic hardship women and men released from prison face further undercuts social reproduction, making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to get back on their feet, develop enduring adult relationships, and care for their children properly. ²

Noncriminal Pathways to Punishment

The carceral state supplemented traditional tough-on-crime policies with a growing reliance on noncriminal pathways to punishment. The latter expanded the reach of the carceral state beyond the estimated 2.2 million imprisoned persons to include more than 8 million people (1 in 23 adults) under some form of state control (jail, prison, probation, parole, community sanctions, drug courts, and immigrant detention); nearly 12 million people jailed annually; and the estimated 7.5% of all adults who are felons or ex-felons. The noncriminal pathways to punishment include the double regulation of the poor (punishing single motherhood), governing through crime (criminalizing single motherhood), and the shadow carceral state (criminalizing noncriminal behavior). All have major consequences for women and the work of social reproduction on which individuals, families, and the wider society depend. ³

The Double Regulation of the Poor

During the past 30 to 40 years, the neoliberal state gradually integrated social welfare and penal polices into a combined poverty policy, punishing welfare-state recipients, most of them women, who did not comply with prescribed work and gender roles. Wacquant argues that downsizing the welfare state and upsizing the penal state represent two sides of the same coin, which together effect the “double regulation” of poverty in an age of deepening economic inequality and diffusing social insecurity. The same moral behaviorism guides both the welfare state and the penal state, both of which employ similar techniques of control (stigma, surveillance, punitive restrictions, and graduated sanctions) to “correct” client conduct. Among other outcomes, this double regulation undermines public support for the welfare state, limits its capacity to underwrite the costs of social reproduction, and opens the door to criminalizing poor women and especially single mothers (Kohler-Hausmann, 2015; Wacquant, 2010).

The double regulation of the poor is not altogether new. The welfare and carceral states share a long and intertwined history and similar logics about the causes and appropriate remedies for social problems. Since at least the 1950s, the two systems have worked together to punish the poor. Southern conservatives regularly opposed major civil-rights legislation in criminological terms, arguing, for example, that “integration breeds crime.” Dixiecrats also inserted into civil-rights bills policies such as stiff mandatory minimums, a denial of federal benefits to convicted felons, and sentencing enhancements for vaguely defined violations, which served as policy models for major crime bills in the 1980s and 1990s. President Johnson framed the urban crisis as a breakdown of law and order, criminalized the period's rebellions and civil disobedience, and spent War on Poverty funds on his War on Crime, targeting Black youth to prevent “future crimes.” In 1994, Clinton signed a historic criminal-justice bill that mandated harsher sentences, provided states with financial incentives to adopt tougher crime laws, and eliminated federal funding for inmate education. By accelerating incarceration and spending on prisons, the now controversial legislation spawned the era of mass incarceration. At the same time, some local urban police forces began to militarize. ⁴

The double regulation of the poor grew as welfare-state policies became more punitive, if not immediately carceral. Postwar public assistance and child-welfare programs subsidized the cost of social reproduction, however begrudgingly. At the same time, they embraced a deep distrust of the caretaking capacity of single mothers, especially those who were women of color. Like other welfare-state policies, the programs rewarded women who complied with prescribed gender roles but penalized those who could not or chose not to, defining them as “irresponsible” and “undeserving.” In the 1960s, as more women of color joined the rolls, these views hardened, making the always-harsh welfare state even more punitive. The rules hardened again in the 1980s and 1990s to build public support for the ongoing effort to dismantle the welfare state. Playing to racial tensions, Clinton's 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act added new measures that directly punished single motherhood by lowering benefits, stiffening work requirements, intensifying surveillance, and denying aid to children born to a mother “on welfare.” If the 1996 welfare reform penalized single mothers by rescinding benefits, the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act penalized single mothers by taking away their children. The 1997 child welfare law shifted the program's goals from “family preservation,” or helping children remain at home, to “child protection,” which placed children in foster care or adoptive homes after a mere 15 months in state custody to protect them from “abusive” mothers. Some children genuinely benefitted from protection, but state officials unnecessarily removed others from the care of their mothers, especially single mothers of color, confusing poverty with neglect. The state justified these welfare penalties by labeling all recipients “welfare queens,” unfit mothers who had kids for money, lived high on the hog, and cheated the system. The child-welfare system justified child removal by stigmatizing women in the child-welfare system as “bad mothers” (Abramovitz, 1996; Swift, 2010).

Governing Through Crime

As social-welfare policy increasingly operated in tandem with law enforcement, “governing through crime” became more common. According to Simon (2006), governing through crime makes crime and the fear of crime the rationale for inserting penal policies into noncriminal domains. Incorporating penal policies into social programs, public schools, public housing, and other venues accelerated mass incarceration. Manipulating the fear of crime helped justify practices previously deemed unacceptable, such as bringing the police into welfare investigations, denying public benefits to convicted drug felons, imposing zero-tolerance disciplinary rules in public schools, and otherwise criminalizing women responsible for the work of social reproduction at home. From punishing single mothers, the state began to criminalize their behavior.

“Welfare queens” and welfare fraud became national obsessions during the early 1970s. While the original welfare queen was criminally sentenced for large-scale and sophisticated welfare fraud, her story sparked sweeping antifraud campaigns that painted many innocent women as lazy, sexually promiscuous welfare cheats. Welfare departments enlisted law-enforcement agencies to conduct antifraud campaigns that relied on random home visits to recheck eligibility, imposed criminal penalties, and required fingerprinting of all recipients. Relentless media attention to welfare-fraud convictions subjected many women to surveillance and the risk of arrest and jail. Police officers began to accompany child-welfare workers on home investigations, ostensibly to protect them from possible harm. The highly visible presence of law enforcement helped criminalize single mothers in the eyes of family, friends, and neighbors, undercutting community ties. Anonymous tip lines turned neighbors into informants who reported recipient “welfare cheats” for earning wages, sexual impropriety, or owning “inappropriate” consumer goods, often just to settle petty disputes (Kohler-Haussmann, 2007, 2015; Roberts, 2008).

Welfare policy also continues to punish convicted drug felons after their release from prison. The 1996 welfare reform imposed a lifetime ban on welfare and food stamps, used mostly by women, for this population. Between 1996 and 2011, 180,100 women in the 12 states that implemented a full ban lost benefits (the count is greater when it includes partial state bans). Public-housing policy banned drug felons and allowed evictions for drug use by a visiting child or grandchild. These restrictions heavily burdened women (25.1%), who in 2011 were more likely than men (16.2%) to be incarcerated for minor drug offenses. Indeed, 31.5% of all female offenders in 2013 were arrested for drug trafficking. Upon release from prison or in the absence of incarcerated family members, women pick up most of the work of social reproduction with diminished resources, which increases the risk of recidivism and reduces their capacity for family care. Perhaps this is why women are more likely than men to be arrested for minor property crimes. Since the mid-1970s, some 30% to 40% of women have been arrested for shoplifting, “bad checks,” and welfare and credit fraud. Reflecting women's economic inequality and vulnerability, poverty-driven crimes aim to support the work of social reproduction. ⁵

Like the family, the church, and the welfare state, schools are also institutions of social reproduction, enforcing norms and reproducing social hierarchies, including those of race and gender. With the rise of violence in urban schools, elites manipulated reasonable fears in ways that criminalized and marginalized Black youth. After high-profile school shootings in the early 1990s, schools joined forces with the police to monitor student conduct, which led to record rates of arrest, expulsion, and even jail for minor offenses such as smoking, talking back, and having a cell phone in the classroom. The zero-tolerance policies schools adopted relied heavily on surveillance cameras, security guards, and metal detectors, causing schools to resemble prisons and transforming them from sites of democratic education to sites of social control. Between 1974 and 2010, the number of suspended students doubled annually, from 1.7 to 3.7 million (Kaba & Meiners, 2014; Morris, 2012).

Zero-tolerance policies facilitated the school-to-prison pipeline for Black boys, viewed as violent, as well as Black girls, perceived as promiscuous, loud, profane, and unruly. Girls of color, especially African American girls, face harsher and more frequent discipline than their white peers and are six times more likely to be suspended than white girls (even for defending themselves against sexual harassment, bullying, or other threats). In contrast, Black boys are only three times more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts. Pushed-out students are three times more likely than their peers to drop out by the 10th grade and to get into trouble with the law. For girls, such outcomes ensure psychological distress but also low-wage work, economic insecurity, and other hardships that diminish their chances to develop the relationships and secure the resources necessary to support the work of social reproduction as adult women and mothers (Bates, 2015; Gottschalk, 2009; Katz & Rose, 2013; Morris, 2012).

The Shadow Carceral State

Beckett and Murakawa define the “shadow” carceral state as the often-invisible expansion of the state's traditional punitive laws to a wide range of low-profile criminal and noncriminal procedures that punish and detain people who have not violated the law. These civil, administrative, and legally hybrid pathways to punishment mimic traditional ones but exist outside the official criminal-justice system. Without officially recognizing these mechanisms as penal, the state uses them to criminalize ordinary behavior, detain immigrants without due process, create new crimes, and generally presume rather than prove the guilt of persons involved. Examples include civility codes, minor misdemeanors, and the compulsory detention of immigrants. In these and other ways, the shadow carceral state places an ever-larger share of the population on a broad but invisible noncriminal pathway to punishment that compromises their economic status, well-being, and capacity for effective social reproduction (Beckett & Murakawa, 2012).

Faced with a sagging economy and retrenched welfare state, the poorest often turn to panhandling, selling drugs, or other nonmarket activities to make ends meet. Women arrested for disorderly conduct, vagrancy, prostitution, drug trafficking, and other minor offenses typically engage in this behavior to compensate for economic hardship and, in many cases, to provide for their children. In the 1990s, the Supreme Court outlawed general vagrancy and loitering laws, forcing cities to devise other ways to prohibit these behaviors. Influenced by the broken-windows theory, officials criminalized such noncriminal acts and banished people from contested urban spaces in order to prevent more serious future crimes and restore “order” and “civility.” These practices did little to address the underlying causes of homelessness, prostitution, or poverty. However, they broadened the range of behaviors subjected to police monitoring and increased law enforcement's power to charge, arrest, and jail those viewed as disorderly. ⁶

Since the mid-2000s, local governments have also criminalized minor misdemeanors. They have subjected a greater number of behaviors to fees, fines, and arrest, including driving with an expired license, putting one's feet up on a subway seat, jaywalking, and driving with a broken taillight. A focus on truancy is especially important to mothers, who are responsible for social reproduction. In many urban schools, truancy now incurs criminal sanctions, including fines, shackling students, and sending both child and parent to jail. In Jacksonville, Florida, for example, antitruancy police arrested parents and charged them with a first-degree misdemeanor for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and a second-degree offense for failing to require school attendance. In Berks County, Pennsylvania, more than 1,600 parents—most of them mothers—have been jailed since 2000 for the failure to pay truancy fines of $300 per each unexcused absence after three. As will be noted below, such minor offenses and the resulting fines often pull people into the criminal-justice system for years at a time (Goldstein, 2015; Katz & Rose, 2013; Norris, 2016).

The policing and punishment of noncriminal behavior also involves immigration control. The United States has a long history of criminalizing, denying entry, and deporting immigrants. However, since the 1990s, the federal government increased deportations, built numerous immigration prisons, and imprisoned immigrants never convicted of a crime. Today, the federal government routinely applies compulsory detention—a criminal penalty—in cases involving noncriminal immigrants and asylum seekers awaiting adjudication. More than half of the detained were never convicted of a crime, and existing convictions often involved immigration-specific behavior, such as illegal entry. Ten percent of the 32,000 detained every day by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are women who become permanently separated from their children. ICE often transfers the women to facilities hundreds or thousands of miles from their communities and then denies them access to telephones and the legal materials necessary to locate their children, coordinate childcare, and liaison with family courts to preserve parental rights (Beckett & Murakawa, 2012; Gottschalk, 2009).

Despite decades-old Supreme Court rulings that incarceration for nonpayment of debt is unconstitutional, in many states “carceral debt” (also known as “criminal-justice debt”) has become another pathway to punishment and prison. In 36 states the prison population more than tripled as a share of population since 1978, in spite of falling crime rates in the 1990s. Overall, criminal-justice costs have increased over 650%, from $35 billion in 1982 to more than $265 billion in 2012. Faced with ballooning costs and budget deficits and politically unable to raise taxes, cities and states around the country have created new revenue sources to cover the cost of the carceral state's policing, jails, prisons, and courts. States increasingly transfer costs to defendants, offenders, and prisoners, imposing fees at every step of the way, from the courtroom to prison to probation. In effect, the state charges defendants simply for being in the criminal-justice system (Eisen, 2015; Patel & Philip, 2012).

Unlike fines designed to punish or to provide restitution to crime victims, these new fines and fees cover state correctional-system costs and even supplement general revenues unrelated to the administration of criminal law. In Ferguson, Missouri, the poster child for such practices, a 95% white police force raised 20% of its budget by imposing exorbitant fees, fines, and court costs on a 70% Black population. However, Ferguson is not alone. The percentage of inmates nationwide reporting such court-imposed costs rose from 25% in 1991 to 66% in 2004 and to 80.8% today. Police departments also fund themselves with civic asset forfeiture, seizing private property such as a car or a home without a warrant when law enforcement suspects the property was implicated in the commission of a crime. Civic asset forfeiture creates powerful incentives to police for profit instead of justice. Paige and Soss refer to carceral debt as the “financialization” of government functions. They described the trend as a new version of a long-standing “predatory system of government,” in which the normal workings of the welfare state, the criminal-justice system, and other public institutions generate new fields of profitable economic activity. Following neoliberal principles, carceral debt benefits the affluent by expropriating and exploiting subordinate groups. Developed alongside the privatization of prisons and probation services, carceral debt disproportionately burdens female prisoners and women who support incarcerated family members. As noted above, about one in four U.S. women, and 44% of Black women, have a family member in prison, and women frequently assume responsibility for at least part of a relative's legal and prison costs. In one study, women made up 83% of family members paying incarceration-related costs, on average more than $13,000 a year. The resulting financial hardship, combined with emotional wear and tear, disrupts the social-reproductive work women perform, including raising children and earning an income to support other family members (deVouno-Powell et al., 2015; Paige & Soss, 2015).

Courts across the country require people charged with minor misdemeanors to pay a wide range of fees and fines at numerous points in the criminal-justice system. Court charges include: bail fees of usually 10% of the total bail amount (more if the fee goes unpaid); pre-conviction fees, including for submitting a public-defender application, pretrial incarceration, and electronic monitoring devices; sentencing fees, including for restitution orders, administrative costs, and reimbursement of the public defender and prosecution; and other court fees, including jury fees, warrants for failing to appear, and crime-lab analyses. In Rhode Island, the most common reason for imprisonment is court debt, which comprises 17% of all jailings and almost 2,500 incidents a year. In Michigan, after Frederick Cunningham pleaded guilty to forging a prescription for pain medication, he paid $1,000 in court costs. One Ohio town of 60 residents collected more than $400,000 in 1 year in fines assessed in its “mayor's court.” ⁷

Offender funding also targets probationers who cannot afford their entire court debt and pay for the “privilege” of being put on probation instead of being imprisoned for nonpayment. In other words, the court sentences people to probation simply because they need time to pay down their fines and court costs. Under this “pay-only” probation, the longer it takes offenders to pay their debts, the longer they remain on probation and the greater their supervisory fees. Over one thousand courts nationwide place several hundred thousand adults under probation every year by for-profit companies that require payment for their services or risk fines, arrest, or imprisonment. Increasingly privatized probation programs have effectively repurposed probation into a muscular debt-collection tool, with all costs billed to the debtor. While most courts do not track how much probation companies collect, Human Rights Watch estimates that for-profit probation companies in Georgia alone earn at least $40 million in revenues from such fees (Albin-Lackey, 2014).

Mass incarceration is extraordinarily expensive. The fiscal costs of corrections alone amount to more than $80 billion annually, a budget approximately the size of the federal Department of Education. Correction costs represent the third-largest category of spending in most states, after education and health care (Eisen, 2015). To cover costs, many states and cities charge inmates “pay-to-stay” fees. Justifications include decreasing the cost to taxpayers, teaching inmates a lesson for their criminal acts, and reducing frivolous requests for services by inmates. One official stated, “You do the crime, you will serve the time, and now you will also pay the dime” (Medina, 2011 p. 1).

Michigan passed the first correctional-fee law in 1846 (authorizing counties to charge inmates for medical care), but the growth of this practice has a recent vintage in the War on Crime in the 1970s and the War on Drugs in the 1980s. By 2004, approximately one-third of county jails and more than 50% of state correctional systems had instituted pay-to-stay fees. Today, all 50 states defray prison costs in this manner, often by docking the inmate's commissary account (which a female family member, who is also poor, typically funds). Fees include per-diem charges (often higher than those of local hotels); charges for specific items like toilet paper and clothing; and charges for health and social services such as medical copayments, dental visits, DNA tests, work release, physicals, medication, prescriptions, nurse sick calls, and hospital medical treatment. For-profit companies such as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group provide most of the services; they also manage prisons, detention, and deportation facilities. For these private corporations, higher prison censuses yield higher profits. In 2015, the CCA, the country's largest for-profit prison operator, made a profit of $3,356 per prisoner, at the taxpayers’ expense. Prisoners rely on family members, often women, to pay “criminal-justice fees.” Family members absorb the cost despite the loss of income that the imprisoned family member previously provided; nearly half of the prisoners had contributed 50% or more to their family's total household income prior to incarceration. Tasked with the work of social reproduction, women also struggle to sustain family contact despite the odds. Along the way, they incur debt to pay for the exorbitant cost of phone calls operated by the for-profit prison communications industry, travel to distant prisons, and background-check fees prisons require of many visitors. Although staying in touch is critical for family stability and re-entry, an inability to pay bills limits contact and causes families to fall apart (Bozelko, 2016; deVouno-Powell et al., 2015).

Last but not least, large numbers of the poor end up behind bars because they cannot afford to pay household debts. Just as neoliberal economic policies send the poorest of the poor into the informal labor market to make ends meet, so austerity policies have forced 80% of all U.S. households to finance privately the cost of social reproduction by incurring debt. The growing use of credit (mortgages, car loans, credit cards, and student loans) to cover basic needs represents one of the biggest shifts in the balance sheets of U.S. families over the past 30 years. Many households use second mortgages not to buy a house or build home equity but to meet daily needs. The privatization of household debt is particularly problematic for working-class households trying to build a normal life. Debt among these households comprised half of their income in 2013, up from one-fifth in 2007. High debt can encourage the use of shaky financial products like payday loans, car-title loans, and predatory or subprime mortgage loans. Fringe banks that charge high fees and interest rates target low-income women, especially women of color, who are trying to keep their families together, and they incur major debts that put them at high risk for jail time for nonpayment (Checco, 2015; LeBaron & Roberts, 2010; Pew Charitable Trust, 2015).

Growing incarceration for nonpayment of court, prison, or household debts has led to the resurgence of “debtors’ prison,” trapping borrowers in a web of fines and multiyear prison sentences. Although U.S. courts outlawed prison terms for nonpayment of debt, officials sidestep these legal constraints by charging people with civil contempt of court or failure to comply with a court order to pay their debt instead of nonpayment. Authorities typically enlist for-profit companies who use aggressive tactics such as threatening jail and flouting procedural safeguards to collect court-imposed fines and fees. ⁸

The consequences are severe. In one state, the average felony debt added up to $2,500. Interest on the debt continues to accrue, so that even after 4 years of faithful payments, a debt of $2,500 would grow to $3,000. The American Civil Liberties Union found former inmates with debts ranging from several hundred dollars up to $35,000. Estimates suggest that carceral debt represents 60 of the income of former inmates and that more than 10 million people owe more than $50 billion in debt. Carceral debt operates as a regressive tax that falls heaviest on the poor and people of color, who are overrepresented among those arrested and less able than affluent offenders to pay court costs. Unlike European “day-fines,” U.S. fees and fines do not consider ability to pay. ⁹

Once again, women pick up the slack. The wife of an inmate at Florida's Marin County Correctional Institute told a reporter, “It's like [families] are a private ATM for the corrections department and they know there's nothing we can do about it.” The chief justice of the Washington State Supreme Court shed light on this dynamic, observing of usage fees, “the spouses, who are mostly women, must then dig deep again if they are to offset the State's cut. In doing so they undoubtedly deprive themselves of funds that could be devoted to the purchase of necessities for them and their children. Such a scheme strikes me as not only unwise but unfair” (Levingston, 2007, p. 67).

Weakening Democratic Institutions

The decline of the U.S. welfare state and the simultaneous political, economic, and social disenfranchisement associated with the carceral state has weakened the nation's democratic institutions. Laws banning convicted felons from voting have politically disenfranchized an estimated 5.85 million, or 2.5%, of all voting-age Americans and disproportionately influenced election outcomes in communities of color. Ex-felons often must satisfy the payment of all criminal-justice debts in order to resume voting privileges. Debts assessed to recoup the operating costs of the justice system act as a modern-day poll tax and pose an insurmountable obstacle to the resumption of voting rights and broader civic participation. Only those who pay their debts regain voting rights after a criminal conviction, and those who cannot become permanently disenfranchized. The United States not only disenfranchizes most of its prisoners; it is also the only democracy that routinely rescinds the vote of large numbers of people on parole or probation, as well as of ex-offenders who have completed their sentences but remain subject to carceral debt. ¹⁰

The U.S. policies also subject felons to economic disenfranchisement by erecting substantial barriers to an individual's post prison economic advancement. Former felons, as well as those with unpaid carceral debts, are generally restricted from employment, public housing, and student loans and denied access to pension, food-stamp, welfare, disability, and veteran benefits. States often prohibit former offenders from working in certain professions, including plumbing, catering, and even haircutting. Low-income communities further suffer community disenfranchisement. When tallying the population for congressional reapportionment and for local redistricting, the U.S. Census counts disenfranchized prisoners where they are imprisoned instead of at their prior residence. Many former felons must also forfeit their right to serve on a jury. Finally, mass incarceration generates fear and silences dissent (Legal Action Center, 2004).

The enlarged carceral state described in this chapter has transformed the democratic promise of equal social, economic, and political opportunity for all by shifting authority toward law enforcement and corrections at the local, state, and federal levels. The expansion of the carceral state poses a threat to democracy among not only the marginalized but also within the wider society. Its policies legitimate separate political and legal universes for whole categories of people, routinely denying them a range of rights and access to state resources. Threats to fair elections, accurate and representative censuses, and core civil liberties and social benefits have condemned millions to civil death, creating a large and permanent group of social outcasts (Legal Action Center, 2004).

Strengthened state capacity to control the lives of millions has further reshaped the distribution of power in ways that affect everyone, not just the marginalized (Gottschalk, 2008). As the carceral state reaches ever-greater sectors of society, if we do not find ways to challenge the trends that gave rise to the carceral state in the first place, the current reconfiguration of citizenship more broadly will continue. A weakened sense of community, combined with economic and political malaise, could be politically explosive. As Tocqueville and Beaumont warned, “While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism” (de Beaumont & de Tocqueville, 1833, p. 79, as cited in Gottschalk, 2008, p. 236).

A Deeper Crisis in Social Reproduction

The standard argument for a penal system is the need to achieve retribution, deter crime, and ensure public safety. However, Dollovitch argues that the primary function of the U.S. penal system is not public safety but instead the exclusion and control of persons officially labeled as criminal. Gilmore adds an economic rationale: faced with a crisis of profit in the mid-1970s, capital turned to prison construction as a private-investment opportunity. Prisons also warehouse those pushed out of the market economy. By excluding prisoners from the jobless count, mass incarceration lowers the nation's official unemployment rate. Other scholars highlight political factors. The criminalization of poverty was not a response to rising crime rates, which actually dropped during the late-20th century. Nor was the carceral state simply an attempt to shrink “big government.” Rather, the criminalization of the poor rationalized a renewed emphasis on the accumulative function of the welfare state and its traditional regulatory role and attempted to rein in its liberatory potential. That is, the neoliberal state needed new mechanisms to manage marginalized populations and reassert its authority and legitimacy, given the reduced support for social reproduction. Piven and Cloward argue that the postwar welfare state expanded and contracted public relief to regulate marginal labor and maintain social order. Wacquant suggests that the state has replaced this central regulatory mechanism with a more vigorous deployment of the police, courts, and prisons. ¹¹

Few scholars mention the deepening crisis in social reproduction generated by the expanded carceral state. More than 77 million Americans have a criminal record. Almost one in three adults is or has been involved with the criminal-justice system. Indeed, the rise of the carceral state has exacerbated the already deep crisis in social reproduction created by slow economic growth, stagnant wages, the gender wage gap, and a 40-year attack on the U.S. welfare state. Eleven states spend more on prison than education. The costs of mass incarceration, the third-largest item in the federal budget behind health and education, compete with social-welfare programs that underwrite the cost of social reproduction (Eisen, 2015).

To the extent that incarceration tears families and communities apart, it disrupts social reproduction. Most directly, the large-scale imprisonment of mothers and fathers undermines family stability, the foundation of social reproduction. It deprives children of a known caretaker, increases the likelihood of divorce and child removal, and breaks family and community ties. Incarcerated parents increase the risk that their children will become homeless, drop out of school, suffer health and psychological problems, and become incarcerated themselves. Incarceration intensifies a family's economic hardship with joblessness; loss of access to public assistance, housing, food stamps and other government benefits; and seemingly endless carceral debt. Former prisoners find that their prison records pose significant and at times insurmountable barriers to re-entry as productive individuals, reliable providers, and integrated family members. The many fees and fines former prisoners incur force their households to forgo basic necessities to avoid arrest and jail for nonpayment of debt (deVouno-Powell et al., 2015; Eckholm, 2009).

In brief, incarceration disrupts the lives of low-income families, depletes their communities, and weighs heavily on family members who manage social-reproductive tasks in the face of emotional pain and diminished resources. Given the gendered division of labor, women typically take the lead in struggles to sustain family relationships, access housing and jobs, address health challenges, and maintain contact with incarcerated family members. Yet there is virtually no public discussion about the human toll of a carceral state that deprives thousands of families of resources needed to carry out the work of social reproduction. This structural violence, in turn, reduces resistance among the oppressed (American Civil Liberties Union, 2010).

What is to be done when the demise of the welfare state and the rise of the carceral state have undercut democratic institutions as well as social reproduction? If incarceration continues to break up families, if the carceral poll tax continues to bridge public budget deficits, and if the state no longer adequately supports social reproduction and continues to block civic engagement, what social institution will support the critical work that underpins capital accumulation, family well-being, and social solidarity? Much of the academic literature is silent on this question, despite the fact that the carceral state undermines democratic institutions and abandons marginalized persons to a frighteningly uncertain fate.

Rather sudden and recent changes in prison policies, initiated at the end of the Obama presidency, had the potential, if developed further, to restore some of the state's lost legitimacy. Overcrowded prisons and rising prison costs have sparked a bipartisan movement to lessen charges for drug possession and release minor offenders from prison, despite protests by the for-profit-prison industry. The spread of opioid and heroin use to predominantly white suburbs has also encouraged a reconsideration of rehabilitation in place of incarceration for addicts (Chase, 2015).

These few prison reforms under discussion prior to the Trump administration might have made some small difference. However, they did not address the underlying factors that led to the rise of the carceral state in the first place. A more powerful answer may lie in new social movements. The good news is that the most recent attacks on basic human and legal rights, welfare-state programs, and democratic institutions have sparked a new and massive outpouring of resistance among people from all walks of life, not seen since the 1960s. Led initially by Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Fight for Fifteen, and immigrant-rights organizations, recently the newly reconfigured women's movement and the local town meetings where people are rising up angry to let Donald Trump know his policies cannot stand, have both expanded and intensified the fight back. If unified and sustained, these collective demands for a more just and democratic social order hold out hope for change. Mass action worked in the past to secure basic rights and right basic wrongs. For now, the resistance may only contain the worst of the wars on welfare, women, persons of color, immigrants, and the poor. For the future, it suggests the promise of the well-known Chilean song and widespread protest chant, which declares: “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” from Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity, Edited by Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna. Copyright © 2017, Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of Columbia University Press.