American welfare institutions are designed to make dependency itself punishable.

Evidence

Second, there is a powerful imperative to maintain private responsibility for social needs and to make dependency punishable by welfare, public hospitals, and inner-city schools. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1320

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s hypothesis that administrative discretion routinizes cognitive judgments about deservingness faster than cultural narrative shifts.