Vicki Lens

Welfare and Work Sanctions: Examining Discretion on the Front Lines

Sanctions are a key tool for enforcing welfare reform’s work requirements, but little attention has been paid to how laws, administrative procedures, judicial decisions, and worker discretion interact in the application of sanctions on the front lines. This study analyzes administrative fair hearing decisions and in‐depth interviews with sanctioned recipients. The findings suggest that workers interpret and apply sanction rules narrowly, failing to distinguish procedural violations from substantive ones. It also finds that workers are skeptical about claims of good cause exceptions from work rule violations, are strict in the application of the rules governing such exceptions, and overlook rules requiring them to show that a client’s action (or inaction) was willful before imposing sanctions. Sanctions are applied across various groups of clients, including those engaged in ongoing work activities, as well as those who are disadvantaged and less willing to work.

Administrative Justice in Public Welfare Bureaucracies When Citizens (Don't) Complain

One of the few avenues open to citizens to dispute mistakes in the administration of public welfare programs is administrative hearings (“fair hearings”). However, recipients rarely use them. This has important implications for social equity, as government is obligated to ensure its process for distributing benefits is fair and equitable. Drawing on data from 28 qualitative interviews with recipients who were sanctioned for violating the work rules, this study explores why recipients appealed, or did not appeal, their work sanctions. The findings indicate that nearly all of the recipients believed they were wrongfully sanctioned and were aware of their right to appeal. For recipients who did not appeal, the fair hearing system was indistinguishable from the rest of the agency, which they viewed as inflexible and intractable. In contrast, those who appealed viewed fair hearings more favorably, and unlike the nonappealers, had been encouraged to appeal by social networks.

Complaining after Claiming: Fair Hearings after Welfare Reform

Over 30 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court granted welfare clients the right to an administrative hearing before the termination of their benefits. Fair hearings have since become a mainstay of the welfare bureaucracy, but there has been scant empirical research on them, particularly since welfare reform, which eliminated the entitlement status of welfare while emphasizing clients’ obligations. This article reports on an empirical study of the fair hearing systems in New York, Wisconsin, and Texas. The findings indicate that fair hearings are rarely used but frequently successful. This article explores why clients so infrequently rely on fair hearings.

Advocacy Be Not Forsaken! Retrospective Lessons from Welfare Reform

This article reviews the often uneven and sometimes peripheral role of advocacy as a social work function and explores its current relevancy in regard to agency practices, ethical mandates and the “person-in-environment” orientation of social work practice. Welfare reform (in which Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC] was abolished in 1996 and replaced with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families [TANF]) is presented as a case example of both a failed opportunity to influence the course of public debate, and the potential benefits of advocacy when it is systematically applied and integrated as part of an overall organizational approach to services. Generalized principles are then drawn from the case study as they apply to advocacy practice with vulnerable populations.

Reading between the Lines: Analyzing the Supreme Court’s Views on Gender Discrimination in Employment, 1971–1982

Supreme Court decisions can be read on two levels: as prescriptive statements of what legally can or cannot be done and as discourses that define the Court’s view of social problems. This article explores this latter role through a content analysis of Court decisions that directly address the struggle for women’s equality in the workplace during the 1970s. As it formulated the legal rules applicable to gender discrimination, the Court also gave social and political meaning to the concept of equality. Examining this process of problem definition in the judicial arena provides a different perspective for viewing Supreme Court decisions.

ADVANCE DIRECTIVES: LEGAL REMEDIES AND PSYCHOSOCIAL INTERVENTIONS

Although the legal basis to refuse life supports is firmly embedded in the laws of all 50 states, there is evidence that a gap exists between patients preferences and physicians actions. Patients and their families have increasingly begun to turn to the courts for redress, requesting damages when a physician has ignored their request to forgo life-sustaining treatment. This article explores the reasons why patients end-of-life medical choices are often ignored by the medical profession and the results of recent attempts to remedy these situations through the courts. Implications for practice are discussed, including practical suggestions for increasing the likelihood that a patients wishes will be respected by medical providers.

The Supreme Court, Federalism, and Social Policy: The New Judicial Activism

The Supreme Court is entering a new era, discarding long‐standing legal doctrines to reshape the relationship between the states and the federal government. Paralleling trends in the legislative and executive branches of government, the Court is constructing its own version of devolution. Through a reinterpretation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which is the anchor for many of our civil rights and social welfare laws, the Court has severely curtailed the power of the federal government to enact progressive legislation. This article provides an overview of this new judicial doctrine and discusses its implications for social welfare policy.

When the Personal and the Political Collide

A consistent theme within social work has been the exploration of the conflict between the personal and the political -! especially how social workers resolve conflicts between their own personal values and their political views. This account explores the clash that occurred when a researcher’s findings about school vouchers conflicted with the personal experiences of those around her.

Judge or Bureaucrat? How Administrative Law Judges Exercise Discretion in Welfare Bureaucracies

Administrative law judges are neglected but powerful actors in public welfare bureaucracies, presiding over quasi-judicial hearings triggered if participants challenge a bureaucratic decision on public welfare benefits. Drawing on ethnographic observations of fair hearings, as well as interviews with administrative law judges and appellants, this study seeks to understand the ways in which these judges exercise discretion and how it affects the adjudication of disputes. Findings suggest that disputes generated by poorly run bureaucracies provide judges with limited opportunity to use professional skills or discretion to scrutinize bureaucratic practices. When opportunities for such judgments do arise, judges take widely divergent paths. Some align themselves with the welfare agency, enforcing bureaucratic practices rather than scrutinizing them. Others emphasize their neutrality and judicial role, scrutinizing and aligning agency practices with the law’s underlying purposes.

Contesting the Bureaucracy: Examining Administrative Appeals

This article explores citizens’ use of administrative hearings to appeal adverse government decisions about their welfare benefits. It draws on interviews with 79 welfare participants and observations of hearings and interviews with administrative law judges in a state in the United States to understand what hearings, and the act of appealing, mean to citizens. I find that beyond individual redress, participants view appealing as an opportunity to expose and repair social injuries and to renegotiate social relationships, social identities and their status as citizens. Their ability to rehabilitate strained social identities and establish their deservingness as citizens is contingent and variable, with hearings sometimes reproducing appellants’ powerlessness and other times allowing for a more positive enactment of citizenship and social status. Over time, participants experience an increase in legal consciousness, using the knowledge of the law and bureaucratic practices they glean from hearings to better navigate the welfare bureaucracy. While this transformation of legal consciousness emphasizes individual gains rather than collective or systemic change, it cultivates a culture of complaining, rather than acquiescing, within the welfare bureaucracy.