Trapped in a Maze

How Social Control Institutions Drive Family Poverty and Inequality

Leslie Paik

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780520344631
• eBook ISBN: 9780520975590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Diritto antidiscriminazione

Trapped in a Maze provides a window into families' lived experiences in poverty by looking at their complex interactions with institutions such as welfare, hospitals, courts, housing, and schools. Families are more intertwined with institutions than ever as they struggle to maintain their eligibility for services and face the possibility that involvement with one institution could trigger other types of institutional oversight. Many poor families find themselves trapped in a multi-institutional maze, stuck in between several systems with no clear path to resolution. Tracing the complex and often unpredictable journeys of families in this maze, this book reveals how the formal rationality by which these institutions ostensibly operate undercuts what they can actually achieve. And worse, it demonstrates how involvement with multiple institutions can perpetuate the conditions of poverty that these families are fighting to escape.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Trapped in a Maze
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: The Hernandez Family
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Concurrent Involvement Challenges in Navigating Multiple Institutions at Once
• 3. Revisiting the Past to Understand the Present The Temporal View of Family Multi-Institutional Involvement
• 4. Who’s in the Family? Multihousehold Exploration of the Maze
• 5. Mitigating Factors Institutional Mismatch and Unpredictability in the Maze
• 6. Conclusion Reflections on the Maze and Practical Steps Forward
• Postscript: Brief Update about the Families
• Appendix A: Methods and Reflexivity
• Appendix B: List of Families
• Notes
• References
• Index