Michael Adler: Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment? Benefit Sanctions in the UK
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Author | Katie Bales |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12173 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
Book Reviews
CRUEL, INHUMAN OR DEGRADING TREATMENT? BENEFIT
SANCTIONS IN THE UK by MICHAEL ADLER
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 162, £44.99)
The rise in foodbank usage, homelessness, and poverty in the United
Kingdom indicates that the state's welfare benefits system is failing ± an
inevitable consequence of an austerity regime which ensures that the poor
pay for the mistakes of the rich. Alongside devastating cuts to public services
and local authority spending, conditionality in accessing welfare benefits has
also been circumscribed to reduce claimants' ability to access state support.
Though many perceive these cuts as an unavoidable fallout from the 2008
banking crisis, it is important to remember that austerity is a political choice,
implemented to reduce the governing state's financial deficit and that
alternative means of revenue raising is possible. Imposing austerity measures
as opposed to increasing certain taxes ensures that the rich stay rich and the
poor stay poor.
Michael Adler's book, Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment? Benefit
Sanctions in the UK, explores a form of this `poor law' ± benefit sanctions
and welfare conditionality. This much-needed analysis of the sanctions
regime suggests that current welfare conditions are not just about cost
cutting, but also about control, discipline, and punishment, framed by the
overarching premise that the market, and thereby labour market par-
ticipation, is the best mechanism for redistribution. Yet, as noted by Adler
himself, eligibility conditions for accessing welfare benefits are nothing new
± so why write this book? Why now? The answer is that benefit sanctions
have never been so large in scope, so severe in impact or so common
amongst claimants. Anybody who has seen I, Daniel Blake could not fail to
be moved by the sheer inhumanity of the sanctions regime and the benefits
system into which applicants are drawn to survive. Though Ken Loach's
central characters are fictional, their stories are commonplace, evident in the
wealth of media and NGO reports that detail the spate of deaths occurring
following the imposition of benefit sanctions.
Benefit sanctions warrant public scrutiny. It is this call to arms which is
most clearly projected from Adler's book. Accordingly, he places benefit
sanctions at the centre of his analyses, explaining that sanctions are a form of
conditionality used to govern the conduct of claimants. In twelve chapters,
Adler charts the history of benefit sanctions in the United Kingdom and their
changing nature in terms of scope, severity, and number. Whilst the book's
title draws upon the concept of `inhuman and degrading treatment', this
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ß2019 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2019 Cardiff University Law School
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