WHEN SURVIVING IS ILLEGAL: BLACK WOMEN AND THE ENTRAPMENT OF U.S. INCARCERATION AND WELFARE

Abstract

The institutions of welfare and incarceration are central in poverty governance. My dissertation builds on the work of scholars who deem the relationship between these two systems to work in a coordinated effort through discourse, policy, and practice under a penal-welfare regime. My research considers the following questions: (1) What realities and vulnerabilities does a contemporary understanding of this regime produce for Black women (2) What kinds of violence do Black women become vulnerable to under this current landscape? (3) How are Black women navigating daily vulnerabilities that lead to or perpetuate their risk of state-sponsored entrapment? This research finds that the state uses the penal-welfare regime to script Black women for erasure by creating conditions of suffering and punishing those who attempt to survive. However, Black women create and locate resources that simultaneously aid in their survival and help them resist the ways the state renders them disposable.

My project examines poverty governance to re-think state-sponsored violence against Black women—on both macro- and micro-levels. I explore oppressive systems, the barriers they create, and individual responses to them. My project begins at the macro level with a review of shifts in US welfare policies and prison reform—specifically the 1996 welfare-to-workfare shift and the skyrocketing rates of female incarceration—to understand the vulnerabilities these shifts created for Black working-class women. It then moves to legal case-study analyses of Black women accused of welfare fraud and arrests made in welfare offices to understand how the two distinct systems operate co-dependently.

I conducted life-history interviews with twenty Black single mothers currently using welfare or formerly incarcerated. These participants, from Prince George’s County, Maryland, illuminate vulnerabilities experienced in the wealthiest African American county in the nation. Focusing on Black women in this county emphasizes the production of class fluidity within this terrain as participants with middle-class backgrounds—who believe themselves exceptional—found themselves unexpectedly navigating poverty. Overall, my research illuminates the disposability of U.S. Black women whose experiences can be described as a slow death once they are entrapped by the penal-welfare regime, but it also emphasizes their multifaceted tools of survival.