How Often Are TANF Sanctions Imposed?
In our analysis, we examine how often sanctions are imposed on a cohort of TANF recipients over a specified period of time. This analysis allows us to answer the following question: What fraction of current TANF recipients is now sanctioned (and still on the TANF caseload) or will eventually be sanctioned? Because some recipients might have been sanctioned before our period of observation, our estimates provide a lower bound of the likelihood that a recipient has ever been or will be sanctioned. We find the following: • Over a 10-month period, 5 percent of recipients are fully sanctioned in South Carolina compared to 10 and 12 percent in Illinois and New Jersey, respectively. South Carolina’s low rate of sanctioning is most likely attributable to an explicit administrative decision to encourage the use of sanctions only as a last resort. • When partial and full sanctions and a longer time period (18 months) are taken into account, the fraction of recipients who are sanctioned in Illino
