Historian Premilla Nadasen explains how Bill Clinton's "reforms" dismantled America's welfare system by criminalizing the poor, redirecting resources from families to private interests, and strengthening levels of surveillance and punishment that mark the modern mass incarceration state.
Premilla wrote the new Jacobin article How a Democrat Killed Welfare.
Premilla Nadasen is a scholar-activist and professor of history at Barnard College.