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Neither. The purpose of welfare is to minimize the cost to broader society from crimes borne out of not having enough(prostitution, shoplifting, unsafe housing, etc). It doesn’t have to do a perfect job of this to be worth the cost; I don’t particularly want a flophouse with broken windows on my street and will pay taxes to put some portion of the people that would otherwise create demand for run down flophouses in apartments instead.
That doesn’t mean everyone is equally deserving, but sometimes paying them to sit in a corner is easier and cheaper than forcing them to contribute. I don’t have to like it, and in fact I don’t, but we as a society don’t have any meaningful way of fixing the problem.
Now that being said, I do think welfare reform to incentivize good behavior and penalize bad behavior is easy to do and a bunch of, uncharitably, pinko do-gooders high on the communist fan fiction that passes for ‘research’ these days are preventing it(charitably, they’re mostly overly credulous and empathetic), or at least would be if our government was capable of doing anything. Lots of people belong in a jail cell, not section 8, welfare programs frequently discourage marriage, anti discrimination laws make it harder to reward good things among the poor, etc.
In this specific case, it sounds like all of these people should somehow be forcibly interned. ‘It’s a fetish’ should not be a defense to ‘you’re obviously insane’.
I think you are wrong about the purpose of the welfare state. The purpose of the welfare state is to mollify the 15% of people who are happy to barely scrape by if it means that they don't have to work. We pathologise personality issues these days, which means being lazy is a mental disorder.
Here's the thing though - the do-gooders were right, but not for the reason they think - it costs about $40k to keep people imprisoned in the US on average, welfare recipients cost much less and they volunteer for it.
Things can have more than one purpose; social housing decreases demand for unsafe and unsanitary living conditions that shit up the commons for lots of ordinary working people who have to share a street with them and makes do gooders and pinkos feel good about themselves for helping poor unfortunates and mollifies the people who care more about not having to be productive than about their standard of living. Presumably, it also helps some people who are poor through no fault of their own, but no one's ever really cared about them so that's more of a happy side effect than an actual goal.
It's also dramatically cheaper than prison, as you note.
prison is very cheap. Cheaper than a welfare state , as it can be done at scale.
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Welfare state doesn't work that way in real life. "Idle hands are devils plaything", also it promotes single motherhood causing increased crime of the kids raised without fathers.
single motherhood probably works better in high trust, high IQ societies.
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It’s not all together clear that welfare users commit crimes at a much higher rate than the working poor, or that there’s enough difference between the two groups to make that distinction. And in practice a lot of these benefits(eg suppressing flophouses) happen regardless.
This is why I specified poor design of the welfare state encouraging bad behavior as a problem, yes.
We can't need a welfare state to prevent violent crime if it actually causes violent crime.
My post was mostly referring to petty crime, prostitution, flophouses, things of that nature. Violent crime is a different kettle of fish and best solved with policing, not any particular economic policy(and welfare doesn’t cause it either; it’s caused by a refusal to punish criminals until they escalate into heinous offenses).
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