Welfare from below: Recipients' Views of the Public Welfare System

I think the Welfare Department is too soft, too lenient.They don't make investigations to see how the welfare money is being spent.If the workers went to the house more often they would be able to tell if people are cheating.They could go to the home anytime they want to, day or night.If the person isn't guilty, then they shouldn't care when the worker comes.T F SE ARE NOT THE WORDS of an irate taxpayer or public official concerned about the rising costs of public welfare programs.On the contrary, this statement was made by a poorly educated welfare recipient living in the Negro ghetto of an industrial city.But the importance of this statement is that these views are not atypical of the opinions expressed by the more than ninety welfare recipients interviewed in the study reported in this article.In the growing body of literature on what has been called "the law of the poor," 1 little attention has been paid to the conceptions held by the poor themselves about their relationship to the law and to legal and quasi-legal institutions.This omission is partly due to the lack of systematic data on this subject, a lack which is only beginning to be remedied. 2Another explanation, one which partly accounts both for the inattention to the conceptions of law held by the poor and for the lack of research on the subject, is found in two assumptions which appear in some of the recent literature on the law of the poor: (1) that one of the basic social problems in this area is the lack of legal services; and (2)