Desperate or Deviant? Trends in Criminality among TANF Recipients

Lindsay M. Monte, Northwestern University
Dan A. Lewis, Northwestern University

As state welfare rolls have declined significantly in the past decade, female criminality has been on the rise. Under these circumstances, we are uniquely poised to answer important questions about the links between gender, welfare receipt, financial hardship and criminal behavior, such as the following: How did the 1996 welfare legislation affect criminality among recipients and former recipients? Does going off welfare increase the likelihood of committing an offense, as many critics of the reform argued it would? Or is there more criminality among women who remain on the rolls, as the culture of poverty argument suggests? Using the Illinois Family Study (IFS), a longitudinal study of individuals who were receiving welfare in Illinois in 1998, we explore trends in criminal arrest by welfare receipt. We find that financial hardship, in both the forms of unemployment and non-receipt of welfare, is significantly associated with an increased hazard of criminal behavior.