CRM 515: Gendering Justice Lecture 4 - Fall 2024 PDF

CRM 515 : Gendering Justice Fall 2024 Lecture 4 Criminalizing Poverty  essentially, in a capitalist society, if you make money you are good, if you are poor you are bad this trend is...

CRM 515 : Gendering Justice Fall 2024 Lecture 4 Criminalizing Poverty  essentially, in a capitalist society, if you make money you are good, if you are poor you are bad this trend is part of broad socio-economic dynamics in contemporary liberal capitalist societies such as Canada, as well as rooted in their histories, and how various groups have resisted this criminalization Theory and Theorists argue that one of the central recent developments in “advanced” liberal capitalist societies is the shift from a collective (or socialized) framework for risk and responsibility to ideas and practices Context: centred in individual (or individualized) risk and responsibility Neoliberalism The more socialized framework, often referred to as welfare liberalism, was enacted through mass industrial production and an economic partnership between and the capital and nation states associated with the ideas and strategies of economist John Maynard Keynes (Keynes 1936). Criminalization State social welfare and insurance provision were also developed to buffer the harm and unpredictability produced through capitalism. of Poverty What is termed neoliberalism (or advanced liberalism) has been increasingly produced over the past four decades by a range of state and non-state actors in the context of local and global capitalist dynamics. Under neoliberalism those framed as problematic have been increasingly governed through security, policing, and criminal justice ideas and practices  What is perhaps most striking about this set of dynamics is that neoliberalism itself — through various state and private actors, the imagined demands of competition, the devaluing of labour, the privatization of care, and so on — increasingly produces structural insecurity, vulnerability, and deprivation, and criminalizes its most extreme victims First, the criminalization of poverty fortifies market capitalism and the neoliberal policies that reflect and make it possible. This is enacted through the explicit criminalization of non-market activities and through the ways in which formal and informal criminalization are used to justify both state withdrawal from the provision and distribution of resources to ordinary people, and the state and private extension of Dynamics of policing and security against individuals and groups who somehow prove a problem with regard to the market. Second, the criminalization of poverty (and linked ideas and Neoliberalis practices) masks the structural sources of vulnerability produced by capitalism and linked forms of social inequality: institutionalized racism and colonialism, patriarchy, and so on. Vulnerability is reconfigured as individual (and at times family or community) failure, deception, and criminality. m Third, through this masking, the criminalization of poverty reframes the structural creation of vulnerable individuals and populations (and the refusal of collective risk and responsibility for the non-wealthy) into a neo-liberal vision of responsible and irresponsible (or simply bad) individuals in competitive markets. At the same time these stigmatized individuals carry, at a safe symbolic distance, the burden of social fears and anxieties inevitably produced in our structurally uncertain age. And finally, the criminalization of poverty empowers less vulnerable and insecure (and slightly more politically influential) groups and individuals — who are nonetheless either close to living in or at least surrounded by profound insecurity — to invest in this program for reality by imagining themselves as hard-working tax payers who should police, and who are victims of, the extreme poor as public menaces.  Punitive measures to manage issues of immigration and national security are also being adopted in the domestic context to deal with issues of welfare administration and poverty, highlighting the transformation of state practices in many different areas of governance. These practices are not unrelated, since many poor, The racialized people are also immigrants and refugees Criminalization Both provincial and federal governments in Canada have dramatically reduced benefits, restricted eligibility, and increased the levels of and surveil-lance and policing associated with obtaining and receiving welfare support. Racialization The expanded use of workfare programs, snitch lines, fingerprinting, and imprisonment for fraudulent behaviour highlights how disciplinary of Poverty systems have taken on a greater role in governing poverty. Patterns of penalization are also affected by the interplay of race and gender, since women and racialized minorities are more susceptible to being poor and are thus more likely to be subjected to disciplinary measures.  As a result, in most provinces, program entitlement has shifted from the principle of “guaranteed annual income” to the view of social support as temporary and needs-based, designed to encourage independence and self-sufficiency Current polices emphasize work ethics and Rolling personal responsibility, with blame and guilt placed squarely on poor people if they fail to meet the expectations of the marketplace. Back State This neo-liberal shift in the welfare system sees poverty as the failure of individuals to make good decisions for themselves, rather Support than the consequences of structural changes to the labour market or inadequate government support Many welfare systems have shrunk, following reforms that involved slashing programs as well as reducing the number of people entitled to benefits on the assumption that many recipients were either not worthy or morally suspect, and that welfare 22% of people who live in poverty are racialized - dependency is harmful largest group are especially racialized women look more into what welfare is A key feature of welfare disentitlement is the ideological construction of poor people as either “deserving” or “undeserving.” Welfare recipients are portrayed as individuals with moral or psychological deficiencies, to the extent that the term “welfare” generally connotes deeply held negative emotions and associations As a result, groups that are seen as the most deserving—children, disabled people, and the elderly—are given greater support than others who are on The social However, the “deserving” can easily fall into the ranks of the “undeserving” ‘Undeserving’ For example, lone mothers have been attacked and vilified for failing to be independent, responsible, and self-sufficient Poor People of colour have been similarly portrayed as predominantly undeserving. Racialized imagery of poor people continues to shape attitudes about welfare, and has promoted the belief that poor people of colour live in poverty because they prefer to live in a culture of dependency Racialized and feminized constructions of poverty emphasize the pathological nature of being poor. One of the most enduring myths about women of colour is that they are hypersexed and promiscuous, resulting in a belief that they have children in order to obtain welfare money marginalized people are more likely to be impacted by punitive welfare reforms Many Canadian municipalities have passed bylaws and legislation criminalizing the activities of poor people These policies, ironically named the Safe Streets Act Penalizing in BC and Ontario, are anything but “safe” for poor people. Activities such as panhandling, squeegeeing, sleeping in public, and loitering have been and reconstituted as “disorderly” activities that can result in criminal sanctions Despite evidence that the problem of welfare fraud is Criminalizin not significant, politicians have asserted that the problem is a major threat to the welfare system when justifying the implementation of harsh sanctions and the increased surveillance of g Poor The use of snitch lines, unannounced home visits, biometric surveillance, and criminal sanctions for repeat violations are just some of the current practices and penalties that welfare People recipients face Gustafson (2009) claims that recent welfare reforms have been rewritten in such a way as to assume a latent criminality among the poor. For street-involved people and those who are homeless, assumptions of criminality are even more prevalent  law-and-order policing promotes Understandi neoliberal economic and political aims. At the heart of the neoliberal project is ng the Role the re-imposition and expansion of market relations, including the wage relation as people’s principal means of of subsistence Policing is at the core of this project in Law-and-Ord so far as it responds to low income and poor peoples’ resistance to the er Policies in new neoliberal labour market. In social activist circles, law-and-order policing is often viewed as a bulwark Canadian for gentrification or as a response to the fear of the Other: the poor Cities represent an unsettling reminder, especially to the affluent, of the darker side of economic restructuring that needs to be removed from sight.  Law-and-order policing needs to be seen as one tactic in a gamut of policies, including cuts to social programs and the attack on workers’ rights, designed to impose a specific wage experience on the working class, particularly those at the lower end of the labour market. Locating the The aim of nineteenth-century moral reformers, police, industrialists, and politicians who crafted, supported, and executed these laws was not the criminalization of poverty; it was the able-bodied poor who avoided wage work, and their Emergence of activities, that such measures criminalized By the late 1970s and early 1980s in Britain and the United Law-and-Order States, and the mid- to late-1980s in Canada, police began consistent, targeted interventions in poorer, often racialized and immigrant, neighbourhoods that were hardest hit by Policing recession, unemployment, and government cutbacks It was also in the 1980s and 1990s that zero-tolerance policing began to be widely adopted in all three countries This meant the systematic deployment of greater numbers of police in poor neighbourhoods, often with large immigrant communities, the aggressive targeting of low-level signs of disorder, and an increase in reported violations of civil rights by police.  In key respects law-and-order policing is a response to socio-economic resistance at the bottom end of the labour market, when people seek to avoid the worst paying and most dead-end, unsatisfying, “Get a Job!”: and insecure forms of market work. This is expressed, for example, in Policing and the policing of vagrancy and panhandling Resistance Police and law-and-order advocates suggest that they are targeting criminals or criminal hotspots, as they have in to the New Toronto under the Community Action Policing program (also known as Labour targeted policing). However, the targets of such Market crusades actually represent low-level public disorder: they are predominantly the poor, pan-handlers, squeegeers, youth hanging out in parks, and sex trade workers.  In Canada and elsewhere, attacks on the policies and practices of the Keynesian welfare state since the late twentieth century have led to the dismantling and massive restructuring of social security programs for the poor. These sweeping welfare reforms, which intensified through the 1990s — aptly characterized by some as a war on the poor — have a From Welfare disproportionate impact on poor women Two Ontario women convicted of welfare fraud offer Fraud to case studies of the culpable poor in the early period of neo-liberal welfare reform. Welfare as In 1994 Donna Bond, a single mother of two teenage children, was charged with welfare fraud in the amount of $16,477.84 over a sixteen-month period — Fraud she had not disclosed a bank account in her annual update report. In the spring of 2001, Kimberly Rogers pleaded guilty to welfare fraud that involved receiving a student loan and welfare assistance at the same time (previously but no longer permitted by Ontario’s legislation). Because she was pregnant, and had no prior criminal record, the judge sentenced her to six months of house arrest.  Stuart Hall’s early work on law, state, and moral regulation; specifically, his analysis of the reformist sixties era of the “legislation of consent” in Britain, when laws relating to divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and prostitution were liberalized (Hall 1980). The Double In identifying the double taxonomy of control and penalty Taxonomy of and freedom and leniency, or simultaneous deregulation and increased regulation, Hall reminds us of the complexity of the unity of the 1960s reforms. Moral Regulation: The state was pulled back and reinserted in different ways in the same pieces of legislation; its invisibility in Compulsion and one area was reinforced by its visibility in the other. Thus, “self-regulation” was inextricably related to Self-Regulation increased “public” regulation. The lines between unacceptable public and permissible private conduct were more sharply drawn. In this way, two modalities of moral regulation, legal compulsion and self-regulation, one neither displacing nor transcending the other, co-existed in a complex unity.  Here we focus primarily on Ontario reforms to illustrate the shift from welfare fraud to welfare as fraud. A pivotal moment in the welfare history of Ontario occurred in 1988, when the Social Assistance Review Committee (SARC) released Transitions, a six-hundred-page report with 274 recommendations on Ontario’s social assistance system Reforming Martin (1992: 93) pointed out that the most reliable indicator (conviction rate) placed the incidence rate of welfare fraud in Ontario at less than 1 percent. She was particularly concerned about the disproportional Welfare in the criminalization and punitive treatment of women on welfare Statistics from the Municipality of Toronto for 2001 provide a similar 1990s picture: 80 percent of 11,800 allegations made against recipients were found to be untrue, in 19 percent of the remaining allegations there was no intent to defraud, 117 cases were referred to the Fraud Review unit, of these 116 were reviewed by a special review committee, 95 were referred on to the police and charges were laid or pending in 91 (less than one percent of the total allegations) For instance, the previous legislation permitted a welfare recipient to receive social assistance as well as an income-based student loan in order to attend college or university..  The entry of both married and single women into the labour market altered the prevalent norm about the legitimacy of women’s unemployment. After the welfare reforms of the 1990s, the necessity of the functions performed by mothers and housewives was no longer considered a reason for women to fail to attain economic self-sufficiency (Benshalom 2008). During the 1990s, Ontario and other governments began divesting themselves of public servants, including “welfare moms,” and placed Moral the emphasis on creating choices to work and become self-sufficient. Now work is strictly confined to the (private) market, and mother work no longer receives even the tacit recognition that it was accorded by Keynesian states. Regulation )Defining work as paid employment means that women who do unpaid work can no longer be dependent on the state, but they can work for welfare or be dependent on an individually responsible, self-reliant, employed spouse. Revisited The Harris government underscored this point by refining and expanding the “spouse in the house” rule on the ground that “no one deserves higher benefits just because they are not married.” In the decade or more after Mike Harris left power, the Liberal government refused to narrow the definition of spouse that was legislated by the previous government. Thus, while “welfare dependency” became a form of personality disorder signifying inadequacy, and was “diagnosed more frequently in females” The “spouse in the house” rule also implicitly suggests that if a mother appears to be partnered with a male outside of legal marriage, she is not perceived as conforming with the moral code of the mother as caretaker  Women, lone-parent mothers who historically were more likely to be deemed “deserving” than were childless men and women are now no longer so “privileged” Welfare, “the statistics unequivocally demonstrate that both women and single mothers are disproportionately adversely affected by the definition of spouse” in welfare law. and the Studies found that welfare reforms have made women more vulnerable than ever to abusive men “Never Deep cuts to benefits increase women’s dependence on material assistance from others to supplement their welfare cheques, and that assistance most often goes unreported. Deserving” The expanded definition of spouse also makes it more likely that women will violate the “spouse in the house” rule. Abusive men take advantage of women’s heightened Poor vulnerability by reporting or threatening to report their current or past partners to welfare authorities, alleging fraud. As a result, women are trapped in abusive relationships south asian population being heavily targeted now target people on the margins and make them a scapegoat for everything else  The ideological and discursive shifts from welfare liberalism to neo-liberalism have also had a drastic material impact. They have “A Bad exacerbated the poverty of all welfare recipients, but particularly lone-parent women who historically were among Time to Be the most “deserving.” The Commission also called for Poor” changes to the definition of spouse, stating that the spousal relationship definition should be altered to include two people who have lived together for at least one year as soon as you make money, benefits decrease - really hard for those with disabilities cause do not know when flare up may happen and benefits hard to get back  In 2001, Nova Scotia’s Employment Support and Income Assistance Act (ESIA 2001) eliminated single motherhood as a discrete rationale for social assistance. Regulating, The Nova Scotia Family Benefits Act (1977), Punishing, and which created a distinct assistance program for single mothers and persons with disabilities, intended to remove the stigma of receiving aid, Excluding was repealed with adoption of the ESIA. Single Mothers Single mothers are now recipients on par with the single, able-bodied, two-parent families and on Social persons with disabilities. This change posed immediate financial consequences for single mothers: an average of 10 percent less income Assistance assistance, a higher wage deduction rate, further restricted funding for transportation, dental coverage, and child-care expenses, and the deletion of children’s allowances from mothers’ monthly allowances  investigations in Nova Scotia occur most often when the provincial Department of Community Services (hereafter the Current Department) believes someone has not reported income or there is evidence of a man in the house. Applicatio The term “penis police” signifies the bundle of punitive and coercive regulations, including the man-in-the-house rule, that n of the discipline the sexual and social relations of single mothers The ESIA regulates single mother recipients Man-in-th by requiring the cancellation of assistance in any of the following circumstances: a man and woman represent e-House themselves to others as husband and wife, or the Department believes that they are spouses; a man and a woman separate for the purposes of one or both Rule qualifying for benefits; a woman is allegedly living with a man without disclosing that to the Department; or a woman is unable or unwilling to name the father(s) of her child(ren) and sue no presumption of innocence in accuser fraud for child support.  Prior to Nova Scotia’s adoption of the Mother’s Allowance Act in 1930, single mothers were considered paupers if they had no private means of support This punitive attitude toward people in poverty can be traced to the British new poor laws (1834), which helped usher in industrial capitalism by legally encoding the principle of “less eligibility.” Mothers’ The charity and social reform work of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped to shift the Allowance: The moral ground toward defining widows with small children as worthy of some public assistance Female reformers perceived that family instability, Genesis of the juvenile delinquency, and single mothers living in poverty posed a threat to national security and social order Penis Police The Nova Scotia Mothers’ Allowance Act first entitled poor widows to assistance in 1930; however, not every widow in need was deemed eligible. Annual Mothers’ Allowance reports from the 1930s bristle with moral language, particularly concerning the distinction between virtuous mothers and women perceived to have fallen into moral delinquencies, or to have low mental and moral qualities, and thus believed unable to provide a proper home for their children Unmarried Reformers did not deem unwed mothers to be worthy of pubic assistance because they did not want to encourage Mothers having children out of wedlock, especially among immigrant women This view of maternal poverty created a hierarchy of and the motherhood with “ladies” (deserving widows and blameless, deserted wives) on the top and “tramps” (single women with babies) on the bottom Hierarchy In the 1970 Provincial Social Assistance Act, the hierarchy of motherhood was just about complete: of Single mothers were listed in descending order of worthiness: widow, deserted wife, husband in sanatorium, husband imprisoned, divorced woman, unmarried mother. Motherhoo Divorced women and unmarried mothers were presumably the least worthy because they were thought responsible for their own situation and therefore were morally suspect. Teen mothers were added to the bottom of this list through d changes to the act in 1974  The man-in-the-house rule was explicitly encoded for the first time in a 1975 change to Nova Scotia assistance regulations: “dependent mothers” were formally barred from cohabiting with a man This formal inscription of what earlier legislation implied by “suitable, fit and proper to raise children” transformed the man-in-the-house rule from a moral is-sue to an economic one as well In 1977 the Liberal provincial government of Gerald Regan The Family introduced the Family Benefits Act and regulations, including the man-in-the-house rule. The act changed Nova Scotia welfare policy by separating those who were not expected to work but were eligible for assistance — Benefits persons with disabilities and single mothers — from those deemed employable (the allegedly unworthy poor). This attempt to legally make single mothers deserving did Act not translate into changed regulations concerning surveillance of their intimate relations with men. The hierarchy of mothers entitled to assistance was transferred to the regulations of the Family Benefits Act, with the rule designed to regulate deserted or divorced wives and unmarried mothers Politicians of the day also expressed uneasiness about the morality of people in poverty. Specifically, they feared that assisting unmarried mothers would undermine the legitimacy of marriage29 and might encourage couples to collude by presenting themselves as separated in order for the women and children to collect benefits  The rule gives modern expression to A Class middle-class bias against the common-law marital arrangements of people in poverty. It also produces the material deprivation and Analysis of the social exclusion of low-income families, and single mothers specifically. Man-in-the-Ho In order for women and children to qualify for benefits, couples are forced to separate. In order to continue benefits, women have to use Rule hide relationships with men. The rule excluded and criminalized couples with children in poverty when it was introduced in 1975  surprisingly little attention has been paid to the ways that women’s concerns for safety, and concerns for women’s safety, have been mobilized as part of the Women, Fear anti-squeegee campaigns. the intersections between gender, safety, and crime control as these were played out in public debates of Crime, and about squeegee kids in Toronto between 1998 and 2000. the women’s fear of criminal victimization acts as a form of social control, so that, in order to avoid troublesome encounters, women limit their mobility to certain areas Criminalization of the city, activities, and times of day These self-imposed limits restrict women’s exercise of their broader citizenship right of Poverty in But what happens when women’s voices about urban safety contribute to the criminalization of poverty? How Toronto do women’s anxieties about violence in the public sphere — a concern that feminists have struggled to get lawmakers to deal with — become a conduit for a neoliberal agenda that includes the coercive regulation of the poor? In what ways do discourses about gendered fears of public dangers work alongside the classed nature of urban neoliberalism?  on January 31, 2000, the Ontario Safe Streets Act came into effect the act created new provincial offences for what it named “aggressive solicitation,” which included “obstructing the path of the person solicited” (s. 2(3)(2)), “continuing to solicit a person in a persistent manner” (s. 2(3)(6)), and The Ontario the solicitation of a “captive audience,” which included persons at an automated teller machine, a pay telephone or public toilet, a taxi or public transit stop, and “while on a roadway… a person who is in or on a stopped, standing or Safe Streets parked vehicle” (s. 3). Although technically a province-wide regulation, the ossa in fact targeted street people in urban centres, mainly in Toronto. Act, 2000 In particular, the Ontario Safe Streets Act was largely aimed at eliminating squeegee kids, who earned money by washing windshields while cars were stopped at downtown intersections. The OSSA effected what Sue Ruddick terms a “metamorphosis of civic life” (Ruddick 2002: 55) by transforming public space, once celebrated as a site for democratic engagements, into a privatized, class-based, commodified urban zone Protective To constitute soliciting as unlawful, the Ontario Safe Streets Act focused not only on acts that were deemed to be intrinsically harmful, such as asking for money from a Men and “captive audience,” but also on acts that were considered aggressive Victimized As a result, throughout these debates, there was an often-repeated refrain, especially from Conservative Members of Provincial Parliament (MPP), that women were Women: especially prone to intimidation and, thus, victimization This gendered representation of urban danger likely Men’s resonated with his colleagues and supporters because it fit within a broader pattern identified by Kristen Day, whose Concerns for survey of men’s understanding of women’s fears shows that men perceive such fearfulness “in terms of women’s weakness Female and small stature, or women’s physical inferiority to men” (Day 2001:109–27). Such explanations, however, mask the degree to which fear and vulnerability are Safety socially constructed, especially through gendered tropes of innocence imperiled  more often men talk about these experiences instead of women talking about their experiences “Speaking on a Although men comprised a clear majority of those making Personal public claims about women’s vulnerability — in large part, no doubt, because MPPs and media spokespeople tend to be men — women invoked similar themes when they Level”: voiced support for anti-squeegee legislation In addition to framing women’s anxieties as central to the determination of “aggressive” solicitation, Margaret Women’s Knowles’ portrayal of women as people “who never say no” to requests for money from street youth reveals something about the role that gender plays in Concerns neoliberalism more generally the dismantling of the welfare state elevates women’s for “labours of love” to the status of social policy, women’s presumed compassion, at least in the instance of squeegeers, was presented as a problematic quality from Women’s which they were to be protected Safety  fearmongering The safety promised by the Safe Streets Act involved a clear Conclusion: act of division intended to render some citizens and uses of public space safe from other citizens and from what was constituted as illegitimate use of that space. Feminism, Most research to date on the act demonstrates the ways in which safety was a tool used to discipline the poor and to narrow participation and citizenship rights in the public domain to law-abiding, tax-paying, middle-class consumers Safety, and It is all the more notable then that the appropriation of feminist demands for safety evident here occurred in a context in which women are being made less secure. the At the same time that Conservative voices used women’s insecurity as a basis for criminalizing the poor, they also engaged in a systematic attack on welfare, unions, the minimum wage, affordable childcare, employment and pay equity, legal aid, and services for abused women and children Criminalization Viewing women as victimized and intimidated allowed men to assert them-selves as women’s natural protectors. These hierarchical gendered relations became part of the working of of Poverty the state. Normative gender ideals were not only a tool in producing “safe” streets but, further, the Safe Streets Act was constitutive of a new kind of gender order in which feminized citizenship was subordinated to a masculinized and authoritarian security state