Far from being an anti-poverty program, welfare reform, as we now know it, has become a program that punishes people who are poor and in many cases makes them even poorer. Welfare reform has eliminated a federal commitment to protect poor children and replaced it with a program to separate poor women from the work of caring for their children and to force them into poverty-level jobs, often at less than a minimum wage.

The ideological shift from a program designed to alleviate structural economic difficulties to one designed to correct the perceived character flaws of individuals has resulted in increased discrimination in the operation of welfare programs.

As the color of welfare recipients has changed across time, the welfare program has abandoned its original mission of providing economic support to keep children and their parents out of poverty in favor of controlling the allegedly deviant behavior of its recipients. It should not surprise us that since preventing poverty is no longer its goal, neither is it any longer the effect of the American welfare system.

Excerpted from Poverty to Punishment: How Welfare Reform Punishes the Poor.