Legal authorities’ second‐order legal consciousness—their perceptions of others’ understandings of law—shapes the social realization of legal power. Analysis of interviews with welfare fraud enforcement workers from five US states reveals their perceptions of how clients view law, policy, and enforcement practices, and shows these perceptions’ consequences. Enforcement workers’ perceptions influence the discretionary work of policy implementation, as fraud workers attempt to circumvent what they see as clients’ evasive maneuvers and act in ways they believe will influence clients’ thinking and behavior. Fraud workers’ second‐order legal consciousness can also influence welfare law, when their perceptions of clients’ understandings and behaviors drive changes in written rules. Together, these effects demonstrate the power of authorities’ second‐order legal consciousness to affect both law in action and law in books. Through documenting the impact of authorities’ second‐order legal consciousness, this study fills an important gap in social scientific knowledge of how ongoing, dynamic processes of assessing others’ thinking and responding accordingly shape law‐infused environments.
State-level public assistance agencies completed nearly a million SNAP fraud investigations in fiscal year 2016. These investigations hinge on compiling incriminating information about clients. Drawing on interviews with welfare fraud workers in five U.S. states, this article shows how fraud investigators creatively exploit clients’ social networks to extract such information, and thus use clients’ social ties against them. Investigators gain some information through elective cooperation, when people voluntarily implicate others. Fraud workers say these denunciations typically arise from negative-valence ties (bad blood). Other times, investigators co-opt neutral or positive-valence ties (good will) for enforcement purposes. This co-optation includes eliciting information from unwitting acquaintances and exploiting clients’ own online social networking activity. These findings demonstrate social ties’ appropriability, through which they serve as resources for relational outsiders’ interests. Repurposing welfare clients’ social ties for fraud enforcement presents a two-fold threat to subsistence and social mobility prospects: it imposes punishments—including program disqualifications—while simultaneously damaging social support networks. These enforcement practices reveal appropriability as an unrecognized property of social ties, particularly for socioeconomically marginalized people, and constitute a noteworthy element of contemporary poverty governance.
Sociologists have neglected the politically channeled and racially connected role of leveraged debt in mass incarceration. We use qualitative and quantitative data from California, circa 1960–2000, to assess how Republican entrepreneurial leveraging of debt overcame contradictions between parochial preferences for punishment and resistance to paying taxes for building prisons. The leveraging of bond debt deferred and externalized the costs of building prisons, while repurposed lease revenue bonds massively enlarged and extended this debt and dispensed with the requirement for direct voter approval. A Republican-dominated punishment regime capitalized debt to build prisons in selected exurban Republican California counties with growing visible minority populations. We demonstrate that the innovative use of lease revenue bonds was the essential element that enlarged and extended funding of California prison construction by an order of magnitude that made this expansion a boom. With what Robert Merton called the consequences of imperious interest, this prison expansion enabled the imprisonment of an inordinately large and racially disproportionate inmate population.
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