1AC Plan VersionStatus quo welfare is not designed to help poor persons but to be an instrument of surveillance that disciplines and manages them. It renders them disposable, left only with the choice to work for exploitative employers or to die. Wacquant 9 [Loic, professor of Sociology at UC-Berkeley, Punishing the Poor, pp. 68-70]The deployment of this state policy of criminalization of the consequences of state-sponsored poverty operates according to two main modalities. Th fist and least visible oneexcept to those directly affected by itconsists in reorganizing social services into an instrument of surveillance and control of the categories indocile to the new economic and moral order. Witness the wave of reforms adopted between 1988 and 1995 in the wake of the Family Support Act by some three dozen states that have restricted access to public aid and made it conditional upon upholding certain behavioral norms (economic, sexual, familial, educational, etc.) and upon performing onerous and humiliating bureaucratic obligations. The most common of these requirements stipulate that the recipient must accept any job or assimilated activity offered to her, whatever the pay and working conditions, on pain of forsaking the right to assistance (workfare). Others index the amount of assistance received by the families to the school attendance record of their children or teenage recipient (learnfare), or peg them on enrollment in pseudo-training programs that offr few if any skills and job prospects.44 Yet others establish a ceiling on the cash value of aid or set a maximum duration after which no support will be accorded. In New Jersey in the mid-1990s, for instance, aFdC benefis were terminated if an unmarried teen mother did not reside with her parents (even in cases where the latter had thrown her out), and the amount she received was capped if she begat additional children. Th insuffiency and ineffiency of forced-work programs are as glaring as their punitive character. While such programs are periodically vaunted as the miracle cure for the epidemic of dependency said to afflt the American poor, none of them has ever allowed more than a handful of participants to escape destitution. Th reasons for their failure are several: the jobs proposed or imposed are too precarious and ill paid to offr a platform for economic autonomy; they do not provide medical coverage or child care assistance, making employment both risky and prohibitively costly for mothers with young offpring; the workplaces are physically and emotionally degrading; and a majority of welfare mothers already work while receiving aid in the fist place.45 At best, such programs replace dependency on means-tested state programs with dependency on superexploitative employers at the margins of the labor market, supplemented by fragile family networks, and illegal street commerce where accessible, a combination that nearly guarantees continued poverty. But precisely: it will be shown in the next chapter that workfare policy does not aim to reduce poverty but seeks only to diminish the visibility of the poor in the civic landscape and to dramatize the imperative of wage labor by issuing a warning to all Americans who were working more and earning less, if they were working at all. Thre is a fate worse, and a status lower, than hard and unrewarding work.46 The long train of welfare reform measures also extols and embodies the new paternalist conception of the role of the state in respect to the poor, according to which the conduct of dispossessed and dependent citizens must be closely supervised and, whenever necessary, corrected through rigorous protocols of surveillance, deterrence, and sanction, very much like those routinely applied to offnders under criminal justice supervision. The shift from carrots to sticks, from voluntary programs supplying resources to mandatory programs enforcing compliance with behavioral rules by means of fines, reductions of benefits, and termination of recipiency irrespective of need, that is, programs treating the poor as cultural similes of criminals who have violated the civic law of wage work, is meant to both dissuade the lower fractions of the working class from making claims on state resources and to forcibly instill conventional morality into their members.* And it is instrumental in embellishing the statistics of public aid offis by dressing up recipients as workers while trapping the assisted population in the urban wastelands set aside for them. This discipline is racialized, gendered, and hetero-normative. It targets marginalized populations with morality standards designed to humiliate and modify behavior, both producing and punishing deviant subjects. Henman 4 (Paul is the Director of the Research Higher Degree Program, and Associate Professor of Social Policy at the University of Queensland Australia, Targeted! Population Segmentation, Electronic Surveillance and Governing the Unemployed in Australia, International Sociology, June 2004, SAGE) */LEAIn order to understand targeted surveillance, this article has argued that surveillance needs to be conceptualized as governance. In doing so, the technologies, rationalities and practices that constitute and naturalize targeting need to be interrogated. The aforementioned case studies of targeting in Australian social security examined the differential distribution of surveillance and governmental burdens, and the rationalities that naturalize and justify these varied distributions. People are different, so they need to be treated differently. While discrimination in terms of gender, race, age, etc. has been increasingly outlawed and outmoded, these new forms of discrimination emerge on the basis of new rationalities that recast equality and difference. As we saw, risk discourses embody a calculative logic based on statistics, whereby populations can be endlessly and meaninglessly segmented and risk levels computed. Individuals are imputed to be in danger by this logic that predicts ones future reality according to abstract personal characteristics. Although reality is simulated, surveillance is not virtual. The moral discourses of welfare dependency and the deserving poor also cut through the barriers constraining discrimination (including the moral discourse of equality) by redefining the ways by which the social is to be fractured. In addition to justifying differential treatment, these mentalities of targeting thus denote the way in which subpopulations are constituted. Not only is it important that we make visible the rationalities that make targeting thinkable, practicable and justified, we need to give analytical attention to the ways they segment and classify populations. As Bowker and Leigh Star (1999; cf. Suchman, 1994) have recently reminded us, classifications are not neutral. The activity of classifying things into groups and the location of where divisions are put are highly political exercises. Such actions have considerable effects and reflect the distribution of power. The way in which categories are defined and who defines them tell a story of power. Just as surveillance studies have highlighted the power of those who are able to establish systems and technologies of surveillance, the creation of targeted forms of surveillance and governance results from the capacity of those to constitute a delineation between groups and their associated levels of governing. Surveillance studies have typically focused on the practices and technologies of surveillance. Yet, the deployment of targeted surveillance, or surveillance as social sorting, highlights the discursive elements of these practices. How we conceptually create our world and justify our actions on it is just as important as the technologies that make such thought and actions thinkable and achievable. Yet, as we have seen, advanced information technologies are also central to the growth in targeting. Their ability to generate and analyse statistics has led to the constitution of subpopulations and their dynamics. They also enable the administration of differential levels of service and surveillance. Technology too creates partitions. What are the effects of targeting? Does it reinforce already present fractures and divisions? Can it be used to undo these? While these broader issues cannot be considered here (but see Henman, 2004), it is worth noting the effects of targeting in Australias social security system. The targeted distribution of employment services and workfare is notable as an example of the use of targeting to reverse inequalities and divisions. The unemployed undoubtedly face significant exclusion and disadvantage, with variations within the unemployed population. The case studies in this article have, however, demonstrated that the programmes and services accompanying increasing graduations of disadvantage are associated with increasing levels of surveillance and coercion. The more disadvantaged, the more surveillance and coercion. It would seem from these few examples that targeting services to the disadvantaged in order to overcome such disadvantage necessarily entails a sting. Their discriminatory treatment, in terms of levels of surveillance and coercion vis--vis the wider population, comes to be the cost for overcoming disadvantage. Disadvantage begets further disadvantages. Whether this is always the case, or whether targeted services for the disadvantaged can avoid further disadvantages for subjects is a key topic for further investigation. Briefly, what might be the public policy responses to targeting? It is first important to note that targeting does have a legitimate place, particularly in reversing disadvantage. However, targeting must respect the targeted person and have a view of wider implications. In particular, targeting government services need not adopt the coercive approach evident in Australian workfare. Furthermore, although targeting is necessarily based on dividing populations, carefully used, it need not reinforce divisions. This consideration underlies universal, yet tapered, benefits and bans on racial profiling. Governments also need to be more transparent when targeting, allowing public scrutiny of the analyses on which targeted policy is based, particularly to ensure their accuracy, relevance and effectiveness in producing minimal false positives and false negatives. A critical account of targeting must therefore take account of the practices, discourses, technologies, the dynamics and effects of targeting. To chart these various elements, to make them visible and open to scrutiny, is an urgent task if we are to understand our present.This managerial approach to welfare is not merely a microcosm of broader systems of violence but integral to their functioning. The control of disposable populations is crucial to managing the contradictions of structural oppressions. Wacquant 9 [Loic, professor of Sociology at UC-Berkeley, Punishing the Poor, pp. 103-109]Th material mission of welfare reform, moreover, does not stop at promoting labor flxibility. Indeed, the central thesis of this book is that, like the relentless growth and glorifiation of the penal apparatus after the mid-1970s that we are about to examine in the next two chapters, the shrinking of welfare and its paternalist conversion into workfare in the United States is not a mechanical response to economic changes so much as an exercise in state crafting aimed at producingand then adapting tothese very changes.* In other words, like its prisonfare counterpart, the workfare revolution is a specifcally political project aimed at remaking not only the market but also, and above all, the state itself. Th effct of PrWora in this regard is to recalibrate public authority at three levels: its internal organization (bureaucratic segmentation and diffrentiation through devolution), its external boundary (redrawing the division of labor between the public and private sectors), and its functional loading (via the penalization of welfare and the shift from the assistantial to the penal treatment of the more disruptive correlates of poverty). The 1996 workfare revolution has reshaped the internal makeup of the state by discursively decoupling the questions of welfare and work while practically remaking the former as an institutional support for the latter. It has elevated the notion that welfare dependency is a problem unto itself, unconnected to the (wretched) condition of unskilled labor, to the rank of doxic tenet of social policy. In so doing, it has accentuated the structural properties of the US bureaucratic fild (highlighted in the preceding chapter, pages 4448) that facilitate neoliberal restructuring by further curtailing the political capacity and mufflg the collective voice of the urban (sub)proletariat: namely, administrative fragmentation, the class dualism of aid programs and clienteles, the residual character of public assistance, and the racial fitering of policy. As for the devolution of welfare provision to states and counties, it has amputated the effctive citizenship of the poor by rendering this provision variable and contingent on local budgets and local balances of political and bureaucratic power. A second major material consequence of the law on Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity has been to redraw the state-market boundary by accelerating the commodifiation of public aid. Historian Michael Katz reminds us that Americas charitable state has a long tradition of contracting to the private and philanthropic sectors, going all the way back to the colonial period.70 Since its expansion of the 1960s, a majority share of the goods and services provided to the poor by the American state have been distributed through the mediation of nonprofi agencies and commercial outfis. In 1980 already, 40 percent of the social expenditures of states were allotted through the former and 20 percent through the latter, leaving only 40 percent to pass through the channels of public bureaucracies.71 Th 1996 reform has vastly expanded the market for social services, not so much out of an ideological commitment to privatization under the catchy slogan of reinventing government as for the simple reason that the US state does not possess the administrative capacities required to implement its new politics of social insecurity on the social welfare side. Indeed, we shall discover in chapter 5 that a similar bottleneck emerged on the penal side, leading to a similar outcome: the resurgence and stupendous growth of private correctional operators as adjuncts of the state. To enforce the five-year lifetime cap on assistance or to authorize the allocation of food stamps requires detailed and comprehensive data on the full welfare trajectory of applicants. To date, no state or county has all this information at its disposal. Th administrative records available at the onset of PrWra contained only dispersed and fragmentary data, which were typically erased after a few months. Moreover, these records were neither standardized nor compatible from one county to the next (in many rural areas, the fies of recipients were still being processed manually using paper forms). According to political scientist Henry Brady, who was commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to report on this thorny issue, creating the information systems needed to implement the new welfare law would require a colossal administrative and fiancial effrt over many years, on a scale comparable to that which accompanied the creation of Social Security during the New Deal. But the welfare reform of 1996 neither provided a budget nor assigned the federal government the task of coordinating state and county endeavors on this front.72 Short of a mammoth expansion of public bureaucracies that would visibly defeat the goal of shrinking the welfare state, there was only one solution to implement the revamping of public aid into a springboard toward low-wage work: to resort massively to private operators in both the for-profi and the nonprofi sectors. Th welfare revolution of 1996 thus opened a new era in the marketization of social services, as states and counties scrambled to outsource workfare activities in order to meet the mandated targets of placing one-quarter of their recipients into jobs by 1997 and one-half by 2002 on pain of losing federal funds. Within fie years of the passage of PrWora, all but one state had outsourced their tanF obligations, a market estimated at $1.5 billion with nearly one-third of state contracts going to commercial operators.73 As noted above, privatization of public goods and services is not a novel development in the United States. It has grown in spurts at each major stage in the historical trajectory of domestic policyduring the Progressive era and the New Deal, in the Great Society years, and under the Reagan presidencyand it has advanced during phases of both expansion and contraction in state activities.74 But welfare reform has reconfigured the landscape of privatization after 1996 in dramatic and unprecedented ways in terms of scale and dynamics. PrWora has hugely increased the size of the pie and the prospects for growth and profi-taking on the social welfare front, with a market potential estimated at $15 billion of the $30 billion in state and local services.75 It has extended the principle of competitive bidding to all contractors, including nonprofit providers who used to get government missions on account of their community standing. And it has authorized private operators to bid for the full gamut of services, including welfare intake and the determination of eligibility (two sensitive operations strictly reserved to public entities under aFdC).76 Ths has attracted for the first time large firms specializing in data systems and information management that possess the size and technological means to capture the more lucrative end of the spectrum of social services.* Th corporate giants Lockheed Information Services (a subsidiary of the military behemoth Lockheed Martin), Electronic Data Systems (run by Texas billionaire Ross Perot), Andersen Consulting, iBM, DynCorp, and Unisys have thus joined the fray to vie with historically established fims such as Maximus, Curtis & Associates, and America Works, and benevolent associations delivering services to the poor.77 Some companies active in the booming private incarceration market on the justice side have also jumped in to offr turnkey information systems and the administrative supervision necessary to enforce the workfare law. Yet expanded competitive contracting has not merely created new opportunities for profieering; it has profoundly altered the entire organizational ecology of welfare provision by changing the strategies of, and relations among, public, nonprofi, and for-profi operators. Accelerating commodifiation has signifiantly increased administrative complexity and unpredictability, deepening the fragmentation and opacity of the bureaucratic fild. It has destabilized nonprofi agencies by eroding their traditional role as self-professed protectors of the poor. And it has weakened government by draining experienced managers away from public bureaucracies just when the state needs to augment administrative oversight over contracts to guarantee basic accountability.78 For a fee, these companies take over the supervision of new-style welfare recipients who, much like (ex-)convicts, find themselves the object of extensive record-keeping, constant testing, and close-up surveillance, allowing for the multiplication of points of restraint and sanction. In so doing, they not only enlarge governmental capacity to train the urban poor for their appointed place in the new economic and civic division of labor, in Michel Foucaults expansive sense ofdressage, joining the notions of taming, enskilling, and inuring. Situated at the meeting point between the social and the penal strands of state activity, the workfare fims specializing in the oversight of the poor (as well as, for some of them, prisoners who were poor on the outside and will become so again upon release) are key agents knitting together an assistantial-correctional mesh without precedent or equivalent in the Western worldand not a corrections commercial complex as some criminologists have proposed.79 For the novel institutional nexus now constituting a single organizational contraption for the management of problem populations does not join the state and the market, and even less so prison and industry (as with the militant myth of the prisonindustrial complex). It spans the welfare and the correctional sectors of the bureaucratic field. In keeping with the American political tradition, this composite organizational ensemble in the making is characterized by the interpenetration of the public and private sectors as well as by the fusion of the state functions of cultural branding, moral amendment, and social control. In his book Th Poverty of Welfare Reform, published a year before the vote of PrWora, Joel Handler observed that criminal justice and welfare reform have an eerie similarity today.80 Th legislative developments of the summer of 1996 and policy deployments since have demonstrated that this similarity goes far beyond superfiial resemblance at the level of discourse and mood, to extend deep into bureaucratic philosophy, administrative structures, and managerial strategies. By shifting from an emphasis on economics and entitlement to effrts to control the lifestyle of the adult recipients of welfare,81 by making coercion, behavioral supervision, and deterrence central elements of public aid, and by accentuating the taint of welfare so as to drive (sub)proletarian women into the peripheral segments of the low-wage labor market (or into the crevices of the social structure so that they are made invisible), the 1996 legislation heralding the end of welfare as we know it has fostered the interweaving of social policy and penal policy at the bottom of the polarizing class structure. It has placed public aid programs under the same punitive ethos of administrative compulsion and punitive behaviorism that have traditionally organized criminal justice operations.* It would be a serious mistake, then, to see in the assent given by William Jeffrson Clinton to the overturning of US social policy toward the poor an electoralist decision, even if it was also thatat the time, the New York Times thought it discerned in it a masterful campaign move. Nor was it an accidental development provoked by the accumulation of tactical blunders followed by an unforeseen redrawing of the political landscape, as economist David Ellwood, the architect of the original Clinton reform plan, tried to convince himself after returning to his academic haunts at Harvard University to contemplate (at a distance) the human disaster that he had helped set off82 For the abolition of AFDC is part and parcel of a deep and broad movement of reconstruction of the American charitable state aimed at compressing and revamping the sphere of social citizenship in a paternalistic and punitive direction while expanding the prerogatives of private operators at the very heart of public action. Th penal revamping of welfare emerges as a core component of the new state apparatus joining workfare and prisonfare into a single institutional mesh entrusted with the double regulation of poverty on the work and crime fronts. A note of caution is in order here, as an echo of our methodological warning in the prologue: we must beware of exaggerating the coherence and functionality of workfare policy, as this summary analysis tends to do for reasons of analytic focus and space. Much like the criminal justice system, which is systematic only on paper, the emerging workfare apparatus is a loose assemblage of organizations, programs, and principles that do not form a fully coherent ensemble. Jamie Peck is right to insist that the landscape of workfare is a fluid one. . . . Workfare is not some deus ex machina lowered into place spontaneously to solve the contradictions of welfarism, flexible labor markets, and urban social dislocations. Rather, workfare ideologies and strategies have emerged unevenly and iteratively, as the outcome of years of institutional experimentation, policy reform, and political struggle, and so workfarism as a regime of regulation remains unstable and contradictory.83 The same can be said about the emerging nexus of workfare and prisonfare, since cultural instability and organizational looseness are redoubled by their coupling. Th aim of the latest avatar of welfare reformto discipline the poor and, failing this, to disappear themconforms well with the history of public assistance in the United States over the longue dure, as well as with the history of the prison at its birth.84 It must not, however, obfuscate the function that the transition from welfare to workfare also fulfils in the current conjuncture for more fortunate Americans. mile Durkheim taught us that punishment is a communicative device, a language delivering messages not so much to offnders as to the witnessing publicin this case the working citizenry.85 For the latter, the punitive makeover of social policy signifis without equivocation that nobody can opt out of wage labor without exposing themselves to a material and symbolic degradation worse than the most demeaning job. And it reminds all that you must count on no one but yourself in this war of all against all that is life in a society subordinated to the market. Throwing the poor to the wolves thus allows state elites to re-affirm1 the ideological primacy of meritocratic individualism at the very moment when the generalization of social insecurity, by reaching deep into the middle class, threatens to unsettle their practical belief in the national myth of the American dream.86 Conservative political scientist Lawrence Mead, who, as chief ideologist of US political paternalism, has his figer on the pulse of the new Leviathan in statu nascendi, was right when he proposed that todays welfare reform is an exercise, not in economic transfer, but in state building.87 Only, building the neoliberal state involves two construction sites, not just one: while it was converting welfare into workfare, the United States was also busy bolstering and broadening the carceral arm of the state. And so we must now turn to probing the dizzying ascent of the penal institution in America after the close of the FordistKeynesian era.Specifically, welfare emerges at a crucial intersection between sovereign, biopolitical, and disciplinary violence systems that enables mass violence on a vast scale. Dean, 2002 (Mitchell, Professor of Public Governance @ Copenhagen Business School, Powers of Life and Death Beyond Governmentality, Cultural Values, 6:1-2, 119-138)My first counter-premise, then, is the following. If we take seriously the postulate that power is heterogenous and multiform, then the field of power relations cannot be reduced to an analytics of government, where the latter is understood as the conduct of conduct. While there is no doubt that this analysis can help us understand the practices concerned with the direction of conduct for various ends, it is important not to telescope contemporary politics into questions of government. Transformations of governmentality need to be placed against contingent transformations of the exercise of sovereign and biopolitical powers of life and death. The work on governmentality is thus of a limited region within modern power relations, politics and forms of rule. The analytics of government, conceived as the multidimensional analysis of the different ways in which our conduct is guided and directed, and for various ends, exists within a broader field. This is a complex field of overlapping powers that has been partially mapped by Foucault. This field includes the powers of death, of punishment and of coercion that are usually associated with the idea of sovereignty. Sovereignty is indeed a complex of powers unto itself. Its terrioriality and its claims to a monopoly of legitimate violence were noticed by Weber (1948: 778). Its decisionistic character is emphasized in Schmitts epochal treatment of the sovereign as he who decides the state of exception (1985b: 5). It deductive character, grounded in the spectacular of the right of death, is analysed by Foucault (e.g. 1979: 13559). To speak of sovereignty does not amount to a project of bringing the state back in . Indeed, sovereign powers could today be as dispersed as governmental powers. The phrase democratization of sovereignty , which gives rise to oxymoron, the sovereign subject , suggests occasions on which certain sovereign decision have been delegated to various personages and groups. The field of power also includes the powers of life, of the living, and of the processes of life, which have been previously assigned the title biopolitics. We cannot turn to contemporary issues of biomedicine, bioethics and bioscience without intellectual equipment that allows us to examine how the shaping of conduct and the exercise of choice concerns matters that deal with the organic and visceral materiality of bodies and the vitality, morbidity and mortality of the species body of the population. Such choices are biopolitical in that they concern powers of the fostering of life and letting die. An example of this is the removal of life support systems for an individual in a coma or one defined as brain dead . Another example is the termination of pregnancy consequent upon genetic and other forms of screening or risk assessment.5 These choices are often made by individualsfor example, relatives, carers, prospective parents, sometimes but less often by medical and health specialistsinformed by expertise through which we attempt to govern conduct. The first point to note is that, in each of these examples, there is not only governmental regulation of choice but biopolitical concerns with the fostering of life and with letting die. But we can push the analysis even further. The word choice is perhaps too redolent of both the market place and its shopping mall consumer culture. The choices involved, in these examples, are to introduce and accent a rather different word, decisions. They are decisions on bare life, to employ Giorgio Agambens phrase (1998). Drawing upon Aristotle, he finds two concepts of life at work in Western political thought: that of bios, the morally and politically qualified life of the community; and the zoe, bare life, or life stripped naked, symbolized by the naked human individual (Agamben 1998: 15). For Agam- ben (83), drawing upon Walter Benjamins account of the universal proscription against murder (1978: 2989), it is sovereign power that is at work in the making of such decisions on the life that can be terminated without the commission of homicide. These decisions are thus made as choices shaped by various kinds of expertise, embedded within practices that concern the enhancement of life. There is thus sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics. And while they might enter a zone of irreducible indistinction (Agamben 1998: 9), they are not reinscribed within one another in the sense that one dimension of power has privilege over the other. These decisions are sovereign decisions and not merely governmental or even biopolitical choices because they involve not merely a matter of letting die but a form of killing without the commission of homicide. Or at least they involve a point at which it is difficult to know whether we are letting die or exercising a right of death. This is what I meant when I suggested that sovereignty itself could be dispersed like other power relations onto individuals, parents, families and health experts. I call this a delegation of sovereignty which parallels the delegation of sovereign powers onto legislatures, state governments and so on. In the biomedical field, sovereign decisions of the continuation of life or its termination have, at least to some extent and in some cases, now been delegated onto individuals, parents and families. This delegation is caught with a network of forms of expertise of counsellors, bioethicists, institutional ethics committees, medical and legal professional bodies, as much as it is within the remit of legislatures, courts, judges and politicians. Another example of an equally heterogenous set of powers is found in the treatment of those groups variously called asylum seekers, illegal immigrants and refugees. While we can map fundamental transformations in the national and international government of refugees (Lippert 1998), these governmental regimes are incomplete without decisions on who is to be included and who is to excluded from the juridical-political order. Some are thought worthy of inclusion in the citizenry; others are placed in the paradoxical situation of being included through their exclusion. In Australia, for example, those awaiting processing are placed outside the political order within the perimeters of detention centers . These sovereign decisions on the value of populations are a condition for a government of such populations, which regulates their movements across national borders, assigns them particular statuses and treats them accordingly. There is also an unexpected biopolitical dimension to the treatment of refugees when we consider that their status depends upon forms of knowledge, policy and legislation associated with notions of human rights. Such rights are ascribed to individuals, under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, at the moment of their birth, as Agamben notes (1998: 127). All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights , reads its first article. Indeed, the refugee might stand as an example of bare life in the contemporary world (see Agamben 1998: 1313). We should note that Agamben so blurs the distinction between sovereignty and biopolitics as to erase the shifts and transformations proposed by Foucaults work on biopolitics and state biologisms of the nineteenth century and to prevent an analysis of the character of contemporary shifts. However, there are contexts in which it is well not to draw the boundaries between these contemporary formations of power too tightly or one is likely to miss the zones of indistinction. These are the regions in which these heterogenous powers act in such concert that it is difficult to know whether we are in the presence of biopolitical or sovereign powers. While an analytics decomposes the current regimes of power into their constituent elements, we should recognize that there are also key thresholds in which sovereignty. governmentality and biopolitics cease to exist as distinguish- able categories. The powers of life and death enter into a network of indistinction with each other and with government. Biopolitical powers for the medical care of life might also entail sovereign decisions about the termination of life. Providing counselling for those deciding whether to terminate a pregnancy after genetic testing is not simply about conducting conduct, of the shaping of choice through contractually negotiated expertise, but about the sovereign decision on the termination or continuation of bare life . As the current government of refugees demonstrates, or the history of indigenous peoples within lands of colonization, there is hardly a form of the liberal government of the state that does not rest upon domination, coercion, violence or the threat and symbolics of violence. It is impossible to examine the constitutional legitimacy of the founding of states such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, for example, without confronting the violent appropriation of land and extirpation of its inhabitants that this entailed. All this occurred with the blessing and active participation of the founding thinkers of modern constitutionalism such as John Locke, as James Tully (1995: 708) has shown, despite the apparent contradiction with the accepted principles of sovereignty and consent. A more recent example is the history of welfare reform in the United States in the 1990s, particularly after the passing of the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. This is partially a history of the forcible clearing off the welfare rolls those who would not conform to the requirements that they look and find paid employment or enter a training program (Mead 1997; Scram 2000, Peck 1998). This point about the multiform character of ensembles of rule can be quite easily made in relation to the ethos of welfare. In what does this ethos seek? From Foucault (1981, 2001), it is about an effort to maximize the security of the population and the independence of its members. This entails balancing the labor of forming a community of responsible, virtuous and autonomous citizens with a pastoral care of their health, their needs and their capacities and means to live. The ethos of welfare is a potent admixture of rights and obligations, freedom and coercion, liberty and life. It is formed through practices of freedom by which citizens are formed and form themselves. Yet these are located within a web of sovereign powers by which subjects are bound to do certain things. These include the use of deductive and coercive powers of taxation, of systems of punishment, detention, expulsion and disqualification, and of compulsion in drug rehabilitation, child support, immunization and workfare programs, etc., for the achievement of various goals of national government. More fundamentally, these sovereign powers consist in decisions as to what constitutes a normal frame of life, and hence of what constitutes public order and security, and when such a situation obtains (Schmitt 1985b: 9). Today there are various rationalities of the government of the state that attempt to provide a means of deciding this normal frame. Among communitarians, such as Etzioni (1996), this normal frame is decided upon by the shared moral values of communities. Among sociologists such as Anthony Giddens (1998) and Ulrich Beck (2000), this normal frame is defined by the processes that lead to a new kind of institutionally negotiated individualization and cosmopolitanism. Among new paternalists, such as Lawrence Mead and his associates (1986, 1997), it is decided by the views of the citizenry made known by their representatives in the Congress. There is an agreement between all three groups that, however we decide the content of this normal, everyday frame of life, at least certain populations can be invited, expected and, indeed, obligated,to follow it. As Giddens puts it (1998: 37), We need more actively to accept responsibilities for the consequences of what we do and lifestyle habits we adopt. The theme of responsibility, or mutual obligation, was there in old-style social democracy, but was largely dormant, since it was submerged within the concept of collective provision. We have to find a new balance between individual and collective responsibilities today. Fifty years ago, T. H. Marshall smuggled in sovereign notions of rights to justify the pastoral character of the welfare state in his classic essay, Citizenship and Social Class (1963). Today, welfare reform, and its instruments of workfare, emphasizes the converse of rights, obligations, when it demands the transformation of the individual as a condition of the exercise of a pastoral--and indeed paternalist--care. Both cross the threshold between the political-juridical order of sovereignty and pastoral government of conduct. For Marshall, pastoral care is a function of social rights; for new paternalists, communitarians and Third Way social democrats, sovereign instruments bind those receiving pastoral care to paternally defined collective obligations. Summing up this part of the argument, government, understood as the conduct of conduct, is one zone or field of contemporary power relations. To understand those relations we need to take into account heterogenous powers such as those of sovereignty and biopolitics. The exercise of power in contemporary liberal democracies entails matters of life and death as much as ones of the direction of conduct, of obligation as much as rights, as decisions on the fostering or abandonment of life, on the right to kill without committing homicide, as well as of the shaping of freedom and the exercise of choice. Nevertheless, having distinguished this heterogenous field of power, there are key thresholds that are crossed in which these distinctions begin to collapse. Sovereign violence, its symbols and its threat, is woven into the most mundane forms of government. The unemployed, for example, are to transform themselves into active job-seekers or participate in workfare programs under the sanction of the removal of the sustenance of life. In contemporary genetic politics and ethics, too, we enter thresholds where it becomes unclear whether we are in the presence of the powers to foster life or the right to take it. The biopolitical, the sovereign, the governmental, begin to enter into zones of indistinction.

This violence is not a high theory abstraction; rather, it materially impacts the lives of welfare recipients. This slow violence becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty and dispossession. Gilman, 2012 (Michele Estrin, Professor of Law @ University of Baltimore, The Class Differential in Privacy Law, Brooklyn Law Review, Vol. 77, No. 4, Summer 2012)Poor individuals, families, and communities suffer tangible harms--psychological, material, and physical--as a result of the class differential in privacy policies and law. These harms are disproportionate to the justifications underlying privacy intrusions, and yet they remain invisible to many Americans. One privacy scholar has criticized other privacy theorists for failing to show how "privacy violations can negatively impact the lives of living, breathing human beings beyond simply provoking feelings of unease." She argues that if we do not identify the harms of privacy invasions, privacy will continue to deteriorate. Part of the apathy may be that privacy theorists have neglected the poor. Indeed, one privacy scholar admits that "privacy is seldom a matter of life and death;" rather, "[m]ost of the injuries caused by the misuse of data in modern society are not particularly embarrassing or emotionally disturbing."99 This is not true for the poor. For the poor, the injuries are concrete. Recent studies within the public health field show that when the state treats marginalized people with a lack of dignity, the results can include "loss of respect, loss of self worth, ego, sense of self, and soul, loss of status, social standing, and moral standing, loss of confidence and determination."10o There are long-term effects as well, such as "social isolation or marginalization, a reluctance to seek help or access resources, passivity or 'learned helplessness,' a 'small' life of constrained choices, chronically poor physical and mental health, and a cycle of victimization and abuse, in which the violated individual turns to violating others."101 These are psychological attributes that undermine the odds that poor families will become self-sufficient, 102 which is the goal of the welfare system and, indeed, our liberal society. 1. Welfare The welfare The welfare system of surveillance causes recipients to suffer psychological injuries including stress, fear, and feelings of degradation.103 While procedures such as drug tests and finger imaging may have instrumental purposes, they also send a degrading message to and about welfare recipients.104 This is because these procedures have symbolic meaning within our cultural traditions-"drug testing challenges traditions that urination is a private affair; and finger-imaging conjures up an image of criminality."105 These procedures "freeze a moment in time while ignoring the ongoing context of inequality and structural violence."106 Not only is the subject's dignity degraded by these procedures, but society also receives a message that "reinforce[s] negative stereotypes of the targets."101 In turn, these stereotypes drive punitive laws directed at the poor. Not surprisingly, the privacy deprivations and humiliations associated with welfare discourage many needy women from seeking assistance.1os Without state assistance, these nonentrants to the TANF system and their children often lack adequate resources for food, shelter, and other basic needs-even if they are working. Studies have shown that nonentrants struggle to make ends meet by juggling a shifting array of nonpublic resources and that this hardship negatively impacts their health.109 In short, accepting welfare can subject one to humiliation, but refusing it can result in hunger. This "choice" hardly promotes autonomy or dignity. Further, mandatory child support cooperation policies can result in the unintentional perpetuation of domestic violence.no Battered women are overrepresented in the TANF population. 111 To reduce the dangers of exacerbating domestic violence through reporting requirements, TANF attempts to protect victims by allowing states to grant these victims an exemption from the cooperation requirement.112 Yet many eligible women are not claiming the exemption for a variety of reasons, including the public setting of the welfare office, fear that child welfare authorities may take their children, stringent requirements for independent corroboration, and feelings of humiliation and embarrassment.us As a result, the paternity disclosure required by the child support system poses a substantial risk to domestic violence victims for very little benefit. After all, these mothers do not receive any of the child support checks that are collected; rather, the state keeps the money to repay itself for the costs of welfare.114 Notably, TANF recipients lack the decisional autonomy of nonpoor single mothers, who are "not forced to identify, marry, live with, seek support from, or interact with the biological father."115Our impacts outweigh on probability and magnitude risk assessment is epistemologically biased towards white male elites who discount the severity of everyday localized violence in destroying marginalized populations.Verchick 96 [Robert, Assistant Professor, University of Missouri -- Kansas City School of Law. J.D., Harvard Law School, 1989, IN A GREENER VOICE: FEMINIST THEORY AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE 19 Harv. Women's L.J. 23]Because risk assessment is based on statistical measures of risk, policymakers view it as an accurate and objective tool in establishing environmental standards. n275 The scientific process used to assess risk purports to focus single-mindedly on only one feature of a potential injury: the objective probability of its occurrence. n276 Risk assessors, who consider most value judgments irrelevant in determining statistical risk, seek to banish them at every stage. n277 As a result, the language of risk assessment -- and of related environmental safety standards -- often carry an air of irrebuttable precision and certainty. The EPA, for example, defines the standard acceptable level of risk under Superfund as "10" -- that is, the probability that one person in a million would develop cancer due to exposure to site contamination. n278 [*76] Feminism challenges this model of scientific risk assessment on at least three levels. First, feminism questions the assumption that scientific inquiry is value-neutral, that is, free of societal bias or prejudice. n279 Indeed, as many have pointed out, one's perspective unavoidably influences the practice of science. n280 Western science may be infused with its own ideology, perpetuating, in the view of the ecofeminists, cycles of discrimination, domination, and exploitation. n281 Second, even if scientific inquiry by itself were value-neutral, environmental regulation based on such inquiry would still contain subjective elements. Environmental regulation, like any other product of democracy, inevitably reflects elements of subjectivity, compromise, and self-interest. The technocratic language of regulation serves only to "mask, not eliminate, political and social considerations." n282 We have already seen how the subjective decision to prefer white men as subjects for epidemiological study can skew risk assessments against the interests of women and people of color. The focus of many assessments on the risk of cancer deaths, but not, say, the risks of birth defects or miscarriages, is yet another example of how a policymaker's subjective decision of what to look for can influence what is ultimately seen. n283 Once risk data are collected and placed in a statistical form, the ultimate translation of that information into rules and standards of conduct once again reflects value judgments. A safety threshold of one in a million or a preference for "best conventional technology" does not spring from the periodic table, but rather evolves from the application [*77] of human experience and judgment to scientific information. Whose experience? Whose judgment? Which information? These are the questions that feminism prompts, and they will be discussed shortly. Finally, feminists would argue that questions involving the risk of death and disease should not even aspire to value neutrality. Such decisions -- which affect not only today's generations, but those of the future -- should be made with all related political and moral considerations plainly on the table. n284 In addition, policymakers should look to all perspectives, especially those of society's most vulnerable members, to develop as complete a picture of the moral issues as possible. Debates about scientific risk assessment and public values often appear as a tug of war between the "technicians," who would apply only value-neutral criteria to set regulatory standards, and the "public," who demand that psychological perceptions and contextual factors also be considered. n285 Environmental justice advocates, strongly concerned with the practical experiences of threatened communities, argue convincingly for the latter position. n286 A feminist critique of the issue, however, suggests that the debate is much richer and more complicated than a bipolar view allows. For feminists, the notion of value neutrality simply does not exist. The debate between technicians and the public, according to feminists, is not merely a contest between science and feelings, but a broader discussion about the sets of methods, values, and attitudes to which each group subscribes. Furthermore, feminists might argue, the parties to this discussion divide into more than two categories. Because one's world view is premised on many things, including personal experience, one might expect that subgroups within either category might differ in significant ways from other subgroups. Therefore, feminists would anticipate a broad spectrum of views concerning scientific risk assessment and public values. Intuitively, this makes sense. Certainly scientists disagree among themselves about the hazards of nuclear waste, ozone depletion, and global warming. n287 Many critics have argued that scientists, despite their allegiance [*78] to rational method, are nonetheless influenced by personal and political views. n288 Similarly, members of the public are a widely divergent group. One would not be surprised to see politicians, land developers, and blue-collar workers disagreeing about environmental standards for essentially non-scientific reasons. Politicians and bureaucrats are two sets of the non-scientific community that affect environmental standards in fundamental ways. Their adherence to vocal, though not always broadly representative, constituencies may lead them to disfavor less advantaged socioeconomic groups when addressing environmental concerns. n289 In order to understand a diversity of risk perception and to see how attitudes and social status affect the risk assessment process, we must return to the feminist inquiry that explores the relationship between attitudes and identity. 1. The Diversity of Risk Perception A recent national survey, conducted by James Flynn, Paul Slovic, and C.K. Mertz, measured the risk perceptions of a group of 1512 people that included numbers of men, women, whites, and non-whites proportional to their ratios in society. n290 Respondents answered questions about the health risks of twenty-five environmental, technological, and "life-style" hazards, including such hazards as ozone depletion, chemical waste, and cigarette smoking. n291 The researchers asked them to rate each hazard as posing "almost no health risk," a "slight health risk," a "moderate health risk," or a "high health risk." The researchers then analyzed [*79] the responses to determine whether the randomly selected groups of white men, white women, non-white men, and non-white women differed in any way. The researchers found that perceptions of risk generally differed on the lines of gender and race. Women, for instance, perceived greater risk from most hazards than did men. n292 Furthermore, non-whites as a group perceived greater risk from most hazards than did whites. n293 Yet the most striking results appeared when the researchers considered differences in gender and race together. They found that "white males tended to differ from everyone else in their attitudes and perceptions -- on average, they perceived risks as much smaller and much more acceptable than did other people." n294 Indeed, without exception, the pool of white men perceived each of the twenty-five hazards as less risky than did non-white men, white women, or non-white women. n295 Wary that other factors associated with gender or race could be influencing their findings, the researchers later conducted several multiple regression analyses to correct for differences in income, education, political orientation, the presence of children in the home, and age, among others. Yet even after all corrections, "gender, race, and 'white male' [status] remained highly significant predictors" of perceptions of risk. n296 2. Explaining the Diversity From a feminist perspective, these findings are important because they suggest that risk assessors, politicians, and bureaucrats -- the large majority of whom are white men n297 -- may be acting on attitudes about security and risk that women and people of color do not widely share. If this is so, white men, as the "measurers of all things," have crafted a system of environmental protection that is biased toward their subjective understandings of the world. n298 [*80] Flynn, Slovic, and Mertz speculate that white men's perceptions of risk may differ from those of others because in many ways women and people of color are "more vulnerable, because they benefit less from many of [society's] technologies and institutions, and because they have less power and control." n299 Although Flynn, Slovic, and Mertz are careful to acknowledge that they have not yet tested this hypothesis empirically, their explanation appears consistent with the life experiences of less empowered groups and comports with previous understandings about the roles of control and risk perception. n300 Women and people of color, for instance, are more vulnerable to environmental threat in several ways. Such groups are sometimes more biologically vulnerable than are white men. n301 People of color are more likely to live near hazardous waste sites, to breathe dirty air in urban communities, and to be otherwise exposed to environmental harm. n302 Women, because of their traditional role as primary caretakers, are more likely to be aware of the vulnerabilities of their children. n303 It makes sense that such vulnerabilities would give rise to increased fear about risk. It is also very likely that women and people of color believe they benefit less from the technical institutions that create toxic byproducts. n304 Further, people may be more likely to discount risk if they feel somehow compensated for the activity. n305 For this reason, Americans worry relatively little about driving automobiles, an activity with enormous advantages in our large country but one that claims tens of thousands of lives per year. The researchers' final hypothesis -- that differences in perception can be explained by the lack of "power and control" exercised by women and people of color -- suggests the importance that such factors as voluntariness and control over risk play in shaping perceptions. [*81] Risk perception research frequently emphasizes the significance of voluntariness in evaluating risk. Thus, a person may view water-skiing as less risky than breathing polluted air because the former is accepted voluntarily. n306 Voluntary risks are viewed as more acceptable in part because they are products of autonomous choice. n307 A risk accepted voluntarily is also one from which a person is more likely to derive an individual benefit and one over which a person is more likely to retain some kind of control. n308 Some studies have found that people prefer voluntary risks to involuntary risks by a factor of 1000 to 1. n309 Although environmental risks are generally viewed as involuntary risks to a certain degree, choice plays a role in assuming risks. White men are still more likely to exercise some degree of choice in assuming environmental risks than other groups. Communities of color face greater difficulty in avoiding the placement of hazardous facilities in their neighborhoods and are more likely to live in areas with polluted air and lead contamination. n310 Families of color wishing to buy their way out of such polluted neighborhoods often find their mobility limited by housing discrimination, redlining by banks, and residential segregation. n311 The workplace similarly presents workers exposed to toxic hazards (a disproportionate number of whom are minorities) n312 with impossible choices between health and work, or between sterilization and demotion. n313 Just as marginalized groups have less choice in determining the degree of risk they will assume, they may feel less control over the risks they face. "Whether or not the risk is assumed voluntarily, people have greater [*82] fear of activities with risks that appear to be outside their individual control." n314 For this reason, people often fear flying in an airplane more than driving a car, even though flying is statistically safer. n315 If white men are more complacent about public risks, it is perhaps because they are more likely to have their hands on the steering wheel when such risks are imposed. White men still control the major political and business institutions in this country. n316 They also dominate the sciences n317 and make up the vast majority of management staff at environmental agencies. n318 Women and people of color see this disparity and often lament their back-seat role in shaping environmental policy. n319 Thus, many people of color in the environmental justice movement believe that environmental laws work to their disadvantage by design. n320 [*83] The toxic rivers of Mississippi's "Cancer Alley," n321 the extensive poisoning of rural Indian land, n322 and the mismanaged cleanup of the weapons manufacturing site in Hanford, Washington n323 only promote the feeling that environmental policy in the United States sacrifices the weak for the benefit of the strong. In addition, the catastrophic potential that groups other than white men associate with a risk may explain the perception gap between those groups and white males. Studies of risk perception show that, in general, individuals harbor particularly great fears of catastrophe. n324 For this reason, earthquakes, terrorist bombings, and other disasters in which high concentrations of people are killed or injured prove particularly disturbing to the lay public. Local environmental threats involving toxic dumps, aging smelters, or poisoned wells also produce high concentrations of localized harm that can appear catastrophic to those involved. n325 Some commentators contend that the catastrophic potential of a risk should influence risk assessment in only minimal ways. n326 Considering public fear of catastrophes, they argue, will irrationally lead policymakers to battle more dramatic but statistically less threatening hazards, while accepting more harmful but more mundane hazards. n327 [*84] At least two reasons explain why the catastrophic potential of environmental hazards must be given weight in risk assessment. First, concentrated and localized environmental hazards do not simply harm individuals, they erode family ties and community relationships. An onslaught of miscarriages or birth defects in a neighborhood, for instance, will create community-wide stress that will debilitate the neighborhood in emotional, sociological, and economic ways. n328 To ignore this communal harm is to underestimate severely the true risk involved. n329 Second, because concentrated and localized environmental hazards tend to be unevenly distributed on the basis of race and income level, any resulting mass injury to a threatened population takes on profound moral character. For this reason, Native Americans often characterize the military's poisoning of Indian land as genocide. n330 [*85] 3. Understanding Through Diversity Flynn, Slovic, and Mertz challenge the traditional, static view of statistical risk with a richer, more vibrant image involving relationships of power, status, and trust. n331 "In short, 'riskiness' means more to people than 'expected number of fatalities.'" n332 These findings affirm the feminist claim that public policy must consider both logic and local experience in addressing a problem. n333 Current attempts to "re-educate" fearful communities with only risk assessments and scientific seminars are, therefore, destined to fail. n334 By the same token, even dual approaches that combine science and experience will fall short if the appeal to experience does not track local priorities and values. Cynthia Hamilton illustrates these points in her inspiring account of how a South Central Los Angeles community group, consisting mainly of working-class women, battled a proposed solid waste incinerator. n335 At one point, the state sent out consultants and environmental experts to put the community's fears into perspective. The consultants first appealed to the community's practical, experience-based side, by explaining how the new incinerator would bring needed employment to the area and by offering $ 2 million in community development. n336 But the community group found the promise of "real development" unrealistic and the cash gift insulting. n337 When experts then turned to quantifying the risks "scientifically" their attempts backfired again. Hamilton reports that "expert assurance that health risks associated with dioxin exposure were less than those associated with 'eating peanut butter' unleashed a flurry of dissent. All of the women, young and old, working-class and professional, had made peanut butter sandwiches for years." n338 The sandwich analogy, even assuming its statistical validity, could not convince the women because it did not consider other valid risk factors (voluntariness, dread, and so on) and because it did not appear plausible in the group members' experience. In the end, Hamilton explains that the superficial explanations and sarcastic responses of the male "experts" left the women even more united and convinced that "working-class women's [*86] concerns cannot be dismissed." n339 Thus even the "science" of risk assessment, if it is to serve effectively, must include the voices of those typically excluded from its practice.

The United States federal government should curtail its surveillance by ruling that the receipt of means-tested public benefits does not constitute a waiver of privacy.

Plan reverses the legal doctrine that welfare is an undeserved subsidy to the deviant poor that justifies surveillance. It challenges the moral distinction between deserving and undeserving welfare recipients - a distinction that creates a two-tier system of political existence targeting poor Black populations. Roberts 96 [Dorothy, Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania, where she holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology, Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship, 105 Yale Law Journal 1563 -1602, 1576-1584]The stratification of our welfare system that distributes benefits according to race and gender also differentiates between two classes of inhabitants -- citizens and subjects. Citizens receive welfare as an entitlement: Government has an obligation to support citizens as compensation for their social contribution or as a prerequisite to their full participation in political and economic life. For example, the government pays citizens Social Security benefits that are unencumbered by behavioral conditions, caseworker investigations, or social stigma. Subjects, on the other hand, receive inferior, inadequate, and stigmatizing relief at the government's discretion. Poor mothers who receive AFDC, for example, are considered unworthy of government assistance; their benefits, set below the poverty level, are conditioned on conformance to behavioral rules and submission to government inspection. This surveillance of welfare recipients' everyday lives is so contrary to the government's respect for citizens that it unmistakably marks these families as government subjects. Black organizers who agitated for relief entitlements during the Depression suggested that the investigation of applicants' morals was a violation of citizenship rights. One complained: "Your Administrators here in Baltimore take it upon themselves to inquire into the morals of the applicant. . . . The writer does not believe that the letter of the Relief law, or even its spirit gives the Administrators that authority. May I mention that in France, to hold a moral inquest upon the applicant for aid is forbidden by law." Given this connection between citizenship and entitlement to welfare, it is not surprising that current welfare reform proposals include the elimination of public assistance for undocumented immigrants. The critical difference between these two forms of welfare lies in their relation to individuals' autonomy. While welfare for citizens enables them to be self-ruling persons, welfare for subjects enables the government to rule them. Gordon makes this distinction in her defense of welfare entitlements: "Citizens have rights to which they are entitled by law, and losing this understanding endangers the republic. . . . Moreover, the feeling of entitlement is also vital to the republic. It is the attitude of citizenship, the essence of independence; without it we would have subjects, not citizens." The very relegation of subjects to inferior programs that supervise and humiliate them reinforces their lack of citizenship qualities while bolstering the virtues of the citizens who receive dignified entitlements. Citizens' compensation by social insurance makes them appear independent and self- sufficient; subjects' receipt of charity makes them appear dependent and irresponsible. Current welfare reform rhetoric condemns mothers who receive AFDC for transmitting a pathology of "welfare dependency" to their children. According to this view, reliance on this form of welfare reflects a lack of work ethic and leads to a myriad of social problems, including crime, unwed motherhood, and long-term poverty. Yet Americans do not view reliance on Social Security as "dependency" at all, despite the program's strong redistributive effects and the millions of nonworking wives and children who in fact depend on its benefits for subsistence. Gordon gives the following example of the downward-spiraling process that results from stigmatizing welfare recipients: The stigmas of "welfare" and of single motherhood intersect; hostility to the poor and hostility to deviant family forms reinforce each other. The resentment undercuts political support for the program, and benefits fall farther and farther behind inflation. The resulting immiseration makes poor single mothers even more needy and less politically attractive. The economic downturn of the last decade has deepened both the poverty and the resentment, and created the impression that we are experiencing a new, unprecedented, and primarily minority social problem. Thus, Black single mothers' inferior status in the welfare state has intensified their political and economic marginalization, making them even less worthy of citizenship rights. By casting their need for public assistance as "dependency," welfare reform rhetoric suggests that these women lack the independence required to be citizens, entitled to dignified government support. B. Welfare as a Waiver of Privacy One of the key differences between welfare extended to citizens and welfare extended to subjects is the degree to which each conditions its benefits on government intrusion into recipients' privacy. Public relief for single mothers is structured to permit bureaucratic supervision of clients in order to determine their eligibility based on both means and morals testing. Citizens avoid these impositions because they receive their benefits in the form of entitlements that are not subject to the discretion of caseworkers, supervisors, or administrators. Since welfare's inception, states have conditioned payments on mothers' compliance with standards of sexual and reproductive morality, such as "suitable home" or "man in the house" rules. More recently, welfare mothers have been required to undergo mandatory paternity proceedings involving state scrutiny of their intimate lives. Over the last three years, at least thirty states have applied for federal waivers allowing them to change their welfare programs to incorporate a form of behavior modification. Means testing and morals testing allow welfare bureaucrats to place recipients under surveillance to check for cheating or lapses in eligibility. Such testing also forces recipients to assume a submissive stance lest offended caseworkers cut them from the rolls. A Black domestic's experience with poor relief in the 1930s remains typical of welfare recipients today: "The investigators, they were like detectives, like I had committed a crime. . . . I had to tell them about my life, more than if I was on trial . . . the investigator searched my icebox . . . I was ashamed of my life . . . that's how you're made to feel when you're down and out like you're nothing better than a criminal." Privacy doctrine does not shield from state intrusion people who receive welfare as subjects; rather, their acceptance of government benefits constitutes a waiver of privacy. Because families are not entitled to government support, the Supreme Court has reasoned, the government may force them to open up for inspection, shrink, rearrange, or break up in order to qualify for benefits. Courts sometimes find egregious invasions of poor families' privacy to be unconstitutional, but most of the day-to-day decisions of family life remain vulnerable to legitimate state supervision. While poor single mothers (subjects) must endure government surveillance for their paltry benefits, "self-sufficient" traditional families (citizens) receive huge public subsidies -- Social Security, tax breaks, and government-backed mortgages -- without any loss of privacy. The Supreme Court invalidated early welfare eligibility requirements, such as AFDC's "man in the house" rule, designed to "legislate morality" of recipients. Other precedents, however, affirm the state's power to condition eligibility for benefits on conformity with majoritarian family norms. In Dandridge v. Williams, for example, the Court upheld Maryland's regulation that placed an absolute cap of $250 monthly per family, regardless of the family's size or financial need. The Court found that the state's interest in encouraging employment was a sufficiently rational reason to defeat recipients' equal protection challenge. The Court rejected the objection that some families had no employable member on the ground that "the Equal Protection Clause does not require that a State must choose between attacking every aspect of a problem or not attacking the problem at all." Nor do welfare recipients fare well under the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, which provides that the government may not condition the conferral of a benefit on the beneficiary's surrender of a constitutional right, although the government may choose not to provide the benefit altogether. The Court has avoided the unconstitutional conditions problem in cases involving public assistance to the poor by distinguishing between direct state interference with a protected activity and the state's mere refusal to subsidize a protected activity. The former, the Court concedes, raises a constitutional issue because it involves state action, whereas the latter is a constitutionally insignificant failure to act. For example, the Court refused to require the state or federal governments to pay the cost of abortion services for poor women, even though they pay for the expenses incident to childbirth, reasoning that "[a]lthough government may not place obstacles in the path of a woman's exercise of her freedom of choice, it need not remove those not of its own creation." By regarding welfare benefits as an undeserved subsidy, the Court allows the state to treat recipients as subjects whose behavior may be modified to fit current social policy. Welfare and Conditions on Reproduction The goal of some welfare reform proposals is to discourage poor women from having children. These measures include both "family cap" legislation, which denies additional benefits for children born to women already on welfare, and proposals for cash bonuses to encourage these women to use Norplant. This degree of government control over reproductive decisionmaking would surely amount to a violation of citizens' procreative liberty if imposed directly by law. Protection of such deeply personal matters from government intrusion is "[a]t the heart of liberty." I have described government restrictions on procreation as a form of dehumanization: The right to bear children goes to the heart of what it means to be human. The value we place on individuals determines whether we see them as entitled to perpetuate themselves in their children. Denying someone the right to bear children -- or punishing her for exercising that right -- deprives her of a basic part of her humanity. When this denial is based on race, it also functions to preserve a racial hierarchy that essentially disregards Black humanity. In thinking about welfare's relationship to citizenship, I have come to view provisions designed to deter welfare recipients from having children as another denial of citizenship rights. One of the privileges of citizenship is the ability to contribute one's children to the next generation of citizens. Subjects, on the other hand, are considered unworthy of adding their offspring to the national community. This aspect of citizenship explains, as well, the present campaign to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States of undocumented immigrant parents. D. Welfare and Forced Labor Welfare work policies also reflect the distinction between citizens and subjects. Welfare for citizens addresses defects in the economic structure in order to protect citizens' economic security. Welfare for subjects, on the other hand, attempts to change the individual's character in order to improve her motivation or ability to work. The most popular welfare reform provisions are those that attempt to end welfare dependency by requiring recipients to work at government-created jobs or by cutting off benefits after a set period of years. Programs that force recipients to perform menial labor for subsistence benefits resemble involuntary servitude more than the creation of meaningful work. Work programs cannot possibly enable untrained and poorly educated women to achieve financial self-sufficiency, especially in an economy structured against women and with diminishing demand for unskilled workers. Any work disincentive that exists for welfare mothers is caused not by overly generous welfare benefits, but by the miserable conditions of available full-time jobs: poverty wages, loss of welfare benefits, and inadequate child and health care. In the end, workfare programs leave poor mothers worse off economically because they remain at the same AFDC level but incur the added costs of going to work. Treating AFDC recipients as citizens rather than as subjects would require dramatic economic and social changes, including aggressive job creation, a higher minimum wage or a guaranteed minimum income, subsidized child and health care, and elimination of inequalities in the labor market. Pitied But Not Entitled and The Color of Welfare reveal how welfare policy was structured to maintain a Black menial labor force. The fear that welfare would allow recipients to resist poverty wages was a chief justification for excluding Blacks from New Deal welfare programs and opposing guaranteed-income proposals during the 1970s. As one Georgia Democratic Congressman warned in opposition to President Nixon's guaranteed- income proposal, " 'There's not going to be anybody left to roll these wheelbarrows and press these shirts."' In addition, welfare officials used work programs as a source of Black labor to fill degrading jobs. The subsequent "deindustrialization" of the U.S. economy has rendered Black menial labor largely superfluous and cast the masses of Black Americans even further from citizenship status. By connecting welfare to social citizenship, both Gordon and Quadagno seek to expand welfare's cultural meaning beyond its current definition as a public handout to the very poor. Welfare's role in fostering citizenship suggests its potential for helping to achieve racial justice instead of perpetuating racial inequities. Moreover, Black people's demand for citizenship rights is a powerful catalyst for reimagining our conception of welfare. Paradoxically, white Americans' resistance to Black citizenship has prevented this vision from achieving fruition. After describing the citizenship ideal of welfare, I will discuss in Part VI possible strategies for overcoming this impediment. An early example of the citizenship vision of welfare comes from the convergence of welfare advocacy and "race uplift" work in Black women's activism at the turn of the century. At a time when most Americans viewed welfare as undeserved relief for social inferiors, Black women reformers advocated welfare as a prerequisite for Black people's citizenship, similar to the right to vote or to equal access to public accommodations. For these advocates, "[r]ace issues were poverty issues, and women's issues were race issues. Race uplift work was usually welfare work by definition, conceived as a path to racial equality. And black poverty could not be ameliorated without challenges to white domination." Black women's citizenship perspective helped to structure the welfare programs they advocated: They preferred universal programs and a broad meaning of welfare that included public education and accessible health care. Following in their foremothers' tradition, Black people's organizing for relief during the Depression combined civil rights and welfare activism. Quadagno, moreover, applies this citizenship orientation to her analysis of the War on Poverty, in which she discusses a wide range of government programs because of her focus on Black Americans' equal participation in society rather than the narrow issue of payments to the needy. Thus, Quadagno devotes as much attention to fair housing policy, political empowerment, and affirmative action in employment as to Social Security and AFDC. The history of welfare in the 1960s reminds us that many of these currently vilified programs were established as remediation for centuries of institutionalized repression. Particularly enlightening is Quadagno's constant attention to the interdependence of our civil rights. Quadagno links together Blacks' ability to enter the labor market, to participate in politics, and to choose where to live. The right to work without coercion depends on the right to fair housing: People must enjoy the liberty to live where they can find jobs and take advantage of investment opportunities. For this reason, "[r]esidence is more than a personal choice; it is also a primary source of political identity and economic security. Likewise, residential segregation is more than a matter of social distance; it is a matter of political fragmentation and economic stratification along racial lines . . . ." Quadagno sees residential segregation as a major obstacle to the formation of class solidarity across racial boundaries as well. Because "working-class politics generally operated on the basis of membership in the local community rather than membership in a union," Blacks' spatial isolation impeded multiracial political organizing. Thus, decades of forced residential segregation that concentrated Blacks in inner cities compounded the racial barriers to their employment and political participation. Similarly, the right to vote depends on the right to work without coercion: People who are economically subjugated have less freedom to assert their political will. For example, Quadagno points out that the critical determinant of Black political participation in the South was the source of Blacks' income: "[C]ounties with high black voter turnouts were those in which African Americans depended least on whites for their livelihood." And Quadagno notes that white Southerners opposed President Nixon's guaranteed- income proposal, the Family Assistance Plan, because it threatened to upset the racial caste system by emancipating the Southern Black labor force. Quadagno also demonstrates the interdependence of public and private barriers to equality. After the New Deal and prior to the War on Poverty, for example, the federal government tacitly allowed racial discrimination by trade unions, even on projects using federal funds. Federal housing policies also reinforced the private residential discrimination carried out by homeowners, brokers, and lenders: Government-subsidized mortgages were virtually reserved for whites, and public housing for Blacks was confined to inner cities. Federal housing subsidies, then, are a form of welfare needed to redress decades of enforced isolation and to enable Blacks to participate fully as citizens in the national polity and economy. Gordon and Quadagno suggest a conception of welfare's enabling role in citizenship that is more radical than the civic republican defense of minimum entitlements. Welfare is more than a minimal means of survival for the poor; it is a badge of citizenship, a prerequisite to full membership in the national community. Both books make clear that building a just welfare state requires abolishing its stratification based on earned entitlements and undeserved handouts. Advocates must strive to place individual welfare programs in their larger context of "all of a government's contributions to its citizens' well-being." This view would include as welfare not only AFDC, Social Security, and unemployment insurance, but also presently concealed benefits such as home mortgage deductions, public schools and parks, garbage disposal, farm subsidies, and corporate tax breaks. The view would thus reveal that most welfare helps Americans who are not poor. This broader view of welfare would dramatically change the debate about single mothers receiving AFDC, for example. Far from being seen as undeserving and irresponsible dependents on public relief, these women would be seen as mothers whom the government should be obligated to compensate for their valuable contribution to society. We would view them as no less entitled to government aid than retired elderly people or mothers who rely on Social Security benefits to support their children. In addition, a citizenship view of welfare would seek to bring these women into full participation in the labor market rather than merely helping them to subsist. Under this approach, welfare would support working mothers through day care, medical insurance, education, paid parental leave, and a guaranteed income, as well as an aggressive policy to restructure the economy to provide more decent jobs.The aff reimagines welfare as a right for all, not merely a handout to deviants; we refuse to believe that corporate subsidies, tax breaks, and universal programs like social security are deserved while aid to the historically marginalized isnt. Roberts 96 [Dorothy, Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania, where she holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology, Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship, 105 Yale Law Journal 1563 -1602, 1576-1584]By connecting welfare to social citizenship, both Gordon and Quadagno seek to expand welfare's cultural meaning beyond its current definition as a public handout to the very poor. Welfare's role in fostering citizenship suggests its potential for helping to achieve racial justice instead of perpetuating racial inequities. Moreover, Black people's demand for citizenship rights is a powerful catalyst for reimagining our conception of welfare. Paradoxically, white Americans' resistance to Black citizenship has prevented this vision from achieving fruition. After describing the citizenship ideal of welfare, I will discuss in Part VI possible strategies for overcoming this impediment. An early example of the citizenship vision of welfare comes from the convergence of welfare advocacy and "race uplift" work in Black women's activism at the turn of the century. At a time when most Americans viewed welfare as undeserved relief for social inferiors, Black women reformers advocated welfare as a prerequisite for Black people's citizenship, similar to the right to vote or to equal access to public accommodations.133 For these advocates, "[r]ace issues were poverty issues, and women's issues were race issues. Race uplift work was usually welfare work by definition, conceived as a path to racial equality. And black poverty could not be ameliorated without challenges to white domination."134 Black women's citizenship perspective helped to structure the welfare programs they advocated: They preferred universal programs and a broad meaning of welfare that included public education and accessible health care. Following in their foremothers' tradition, Black people's organizing for relief during the Depression combined civil rights and welfare activism.135 Quadagno, moreover, applies this citizenship orientation to her analysis of the War on Poverty, in which she discusses a wide range of government programs because of her focus on Black Americans' equal participation in society rather than the narrow issue of payments to the needy. Thus, Quadagno devotes as much attention to fair housing policy, political empowerment, and affirmative action in employment as to Social Security and AFDC. The history of welfare in the 1960s reminds us that many of these currently vilified programs were established as remediation for centuries of institutionalized repression. Particularly enlightening is Quadagno's constant attention to the interdependence of our civil rights. Quadagno links together Blacks' ability to enter the labor market, to participate in politics, and to choose where to live. The right to work without coercion depends on the right to fair housing: People must enjoy the liberty to live where they can find jobs and take advantage of investment opportunities.136 For this reason, "[r]esidence is more than a personal choice; it is also a primary source of political identity and economic security. Likewise, residential segregation is more than a matter of social distance; it is a matter of political fragmentation and economic stratification along racial lines . . . .",37 Quadagno sees residential segregation as a major obstacle to the formation of class solidarity across racial boundaries as well.138 Because "working-class politics generally operated on the basis of membership in the local community rather than membership in a union," Blacks' spatial isolation impeded multiracial political organizing.139 Thus, decades of forced residential segregation that concentrated Blacks in inner cities compounded the racial barriers to their employment and political participation.140 Similarly, the right to vote depends on the right to work without coercion: People who are economically subjugated have less freedom to assert their political will.141 For example, Quadagno points out that the critical determinant of Black political participation in the South was the source of Blacks' income: "[C]ounties with high black voter turnouts were those in which African Americans depended least on whites for their livelihood."142 And Quadagno notes that white Southerners opposed President Nixon's guaranteed-income pr