Eighth Amendment Literature Review

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In America’s earliest days, punishment for being poor extended beyond poverty’s unpleasant, concomitant circumstances—nagging hunger, tattered clothing, vagrancy—to include community-inflicted sentences such as banishment, whippings, and auctioning off the poor like slaves. American attitudes towards the impoverished may have transitioned from this uncivilized state of affairs, but resentment towards the poor continues to fester. Free choice, personal responsibility, and privilege are constant elements in an increasingly polarized national discourse on the appropriate balance between human compassion and accountability.

In the 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson transformed this debate by launching a national “war on poverty” and insisting that America provide education and opportunities to citizens of lower socioeconomic …show more content…
Eighth Amendment doctrine has transformed over time to accommodate contemporary standards of human decency and to prohibit punishment that is offensive to society’s values, such as executing minors or the mentally impaired, or punishing the homeless for squatting in public when they lack adequate shelter. An unanswered question in Eighth Amendment scholarship is exactly where on these scales the denial of welfare benefits to the needy falls. This work seeks to fill that analytical void by analyzing Eighth Amendment doctrine and applying it to the welfare reform context, where new TANF restrictions penalize certain recipients by revoking benefits upon job loss and imposing harsh time limits on benefits. In the aggregate, this Comment contends that overly punitive welfare reforms represent unconstitutional punishment of a “status” rather than an action, offend contemporary notions of human dignity, [14] and may, in fact, violate the Eighth
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