The benefits each family received was several hundred dollars a month in food stamps, Medicaid coverage and some received a monthly rent stipend from Section 8. It wasn’t extremely huge amount of benefits. The media reports of each getting benefits totaling a couple hundred thousand dollars per family was cumulative over a six year period, ’09-’14.
The public reports do not indicate how much income each accused allegedly earned per year, except for one or two families out of the six charged. So I don’t see how anyone can say they weren’t truly needy trying to make ends meet, if you don’t know what they earned.
And that’s even before getting to the issue of the fact that there’s no right to believe the allegations they earned off the books money, despite that being alleged.