In recent decades, the U.S. has witnessed the unprecedented expansion of the criminal justice system in the face of welfare retrenchment. Are these two developments related? Well-established accounts focus on either welfare or criminal justice, ignoring the potential link between them. When a connection is asserted, both policy arenas tend to be treated as functionally equivalent forms of social control or labor market regulation. But this perspective imputes motives on the actions of government officials, taking seriously neither the discourse of policy-makers, nor the political struggles and institutional factors that affect policy. In this paper I take a cultural approach to understanding the relationship between these two policy arenas, and their recent historical trajectories, by analyzing congressional discourse on welfare and criminal justice policy-making in two periods: 1961-1967 and 1981-1996. I show how conceptions about the causes of poverty and crime, about the poor and criminals, and about the role of government in each period are similar; and how changes in these conceptions have entailed different policy solutions over time. I discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the punitive turn in both criminal justice and welfare policies over the last forty years.