Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Public Assistance, Monetary Sanctions, and Financial Double-Dealing in America

Research on punishment and inequality finds that people with criminal records routinely avoid systems of surveillance. Yet scholarship on monetary sanctions shows that many people experiencing poverty with criminal legal system debt are also involved with the state in other domains of social life. How can these literatures be resolved? In this article, we posit that past research can be reconciled through a focus on financial double-dealing—disparate and contradictory economic entanglements that redistribute welfare resources from individuals to the criminal legal system and its institutional affiliates. Drawing on nationally representative survey data, as well as unique data collected on people with monetary sanctions in seven states, we find that individuals and families receiving cash and noncash public assistance are significantly more likely to owe monetary sanctions and are less likely to pay them. We discuss the implications of multiple-system involvement for ongoing surveillance.