Treating claimants like criminals: universal credit sanctions as punishments

ABSTRACT The UK’s social security system has attracted much criticism for the severity, ineffectiveness and invasiveness of its sanctioning regime. Political theorists, news outlets, and welfare claimants repeatedly describe sanctions as punitive, yet most use the term ‘punishment’ in a colloquial manner, rather than treating it as a theoretically-contested concept. Instead, this article subjects the empirical realities of welfare sanctions to four theoretical models of punishment: the classic Flew-Benn-Hart model, a Foucauldian model focussed on the disciplinary potential of punishment, a Durkheimian model concerning social sentiments, and Feinberg’s censure-based model. This article ultimately concludes that there is sufficient overlap in order to consider welfare sanctions a form of punishment. For this reason, proponents of welfare sanctions must be able to justify sanctions not just as a mechanism of social security law, but also as punishments.