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Welfare As A Social Control In The United States, Jimmi Sue Brown

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The question is whether the Clinton Administration “reforms” were a revolutionary concept or an extension of history’s pattern of forgetting the “deserving poor” and ignoring the “undeserving poor”. A literature search was conducted focusing on the deserving and undeserving poor in the United States over the past century. Historically, the deserving poor were defined as people who were impoverished as a consequence of old age, mental illness, physical illness and blindness or widowed and orphaned. The undeserving poor were people who were able to work, but did not and people of color. There have been occasions when the unemployed were …