Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America

by Julilly Kohler-Hausmann

The politics and policies that led to America's expansion of the penal system and reduction of welfare programs

In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. Getting Tough sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period.

When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. Kohler-Hausmann rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the "underclass" could be managed only through coercion and force.

Getting Tough illuminates this narrative through three legislative cases: New York's adoption of the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, Illinois's and California's attempts to reform welfare through criminalization and work mandates, and California's passing of a 1976 sentencing law that abandoned rehabilitation as an aim of incarceration. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, Getting Tough offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.

Genres: History, Politics, American History, Nonfiction, Grad School, Economics, Social Justice

322 pages, Paperback

Published May 28, 2019

Reviews

[Andrew Knox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book. Connecting the anti-drug, anti-welfare, and sentencing reform moments of the '70s seems like such an obvious move once it's done, but it's not a connection that I've seen made much before. I suppose I knew this in the abstract, but the meanness of the US welfare state really stands out in this book. Some of the stories in this book are hair-raising: the Chicago Tribune printing the names of people charged with welfare fraud, along with the name of their illegal employers; or this story of a man sentenced in 1974 to two years' probation and $13,000 in restitution for working at a furniture store while receiving welfare: "I have a wife and three kids and I'm loaded with medical bills. That is all I can say." Or the story of a California prisoner who, after being denied parole on an indeterminate sentence for his alleged lack of "sincerity" in his rehabilitation activities, is faced with the catch-22 of whether to continue them (thus confirming the parole board's judgment the next year) or to stop (thus proving his lack of "sincerity").

If there's one political point to take from this book, it's that it's impossible to separate our conceptions of citizenship from social policy. Austerity politics doesn't just mean people going with less; in very real ways, it means an erosion of civic status for all different groups of people (welfare recipients, incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, etc.) It was especially disturbing to read this book as Cherelle Parker rolls out her "treatment or incarceration" program, which seems like an echo of Nelson Rockefeller's, as described in chapter one.

[Eric Bottorff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A much-needed synthesis/interweaving of the research on the various strands of punitive policy and politics which emerged in the late 60s and 70s, most dramatically resulting in the current plague of mass incarceration. As an historical analysis of How The Fuck We Got Here, it's quite edifying.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plus ça change, plus le même chose.

This is a linked set of 3 studies looking at "tough" policies implemented in the 1970s, aimed at drugs, welfare, and incarceration. In all 3 cases, politicians based their decision on morality--not on the needs of the people affected, but on the perceptions of them by other people. Government defined who was deserving, and of what.

The arguments used then are identical to those used now, and the public falls for them again.