Poverty increases a person’s exposure to contradictory street-level bureaucratic interventions
Evidence
The poorer people are, the greater the influence street-level bureaucrats tend to have over them. Indeed, these public workers are so situated that they may well be taken to be part of the problem of being poor. Consider the welfare recipient who lives in public housing and seeks the assistance of a legal services lawyer in order to reinstate her son in school. He has been suspended because of frequent encounters with the police. She is caught in a net of street-level bureaucrats with conflicting orientations toward her, all acting in what they call her “interest” and “the public interest.” — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 90
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s reading purpose: the concrete case (welfare recipient entangled with housing, legal services, school, police) is precisely where frontline discretion routinizes treatment of the poor fastest. — connects to: Poverty multiplies the number of public agencies a person depends on — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 422; Poverty structurally exposes people to more and conflicting street-level bureaucrats.
- SEED: A possible essay angle: ‘the net of bureaucrats’ — how multiple agencies with conflicting mandates jointly produce the experience of poverty rather than relieve it.