Abstract
Historically, research on prisons and prisoners privileges an individualizing framework, when in fact the prison experience is strongly tied to social stratification and collective identities. Informed by the data created for a Photovoice project with former prisoners in South Australia, I contend that contemporary “criminological” knowledge tends to individualize crime through its own privileged view of the world. This individualizing approach seeps into the ways in which criminalized women experience release into the community after a prison sentence, confirming that society does not believe that imprisonment furnishes any form of “rehabilitation.”
There can be no separation between capitalism, the prison industrial complex (PIC), and the violence present in carceral settings. This violence, although to a lesser extent than prisoners, is experienced by social workers selling their labor power within the PIC who are co-opted into believing that they can “make a difference.” Yet, social workers, whose codes of ethics are grounded in a framework of human rights, are witness to abuses of human rights on a daily basis within the PIC. Instead of making a difference, they are coerced into silence and roles of social control. The argument proposed here suggests that social workers must radically rethink the place and purpose of prisons by considering them as a violent response by the state to structural social problems that are experienced as politically perpetrated misery and oppression.
Australia: A Prison Nation
Neoliberal ideologies have successfully prevented mainstream society from questioning the place and purpose of prisons; most people are preoccupied with surviving their own daily struggles. Imprisonment is framed as happening to “other” people, people who “bear the hardships imposed by a survival of the fittest society that takes delight in the suffering of others” (Giroux, 2013, p. 258). Yet this suffering is shared by many more people than those who are held behind prison walls as Quinney (2006) suggests: Although there are real and consequential differences between the lives of those in prison and the lives of those outside prison, the injuries caused by the prison are shared by all. No one, in a sense, is an outsider. We are all doing time together. (p. 270)
I contend that there is a massive disconnect between justifications for the purpose of prisons and the lived experiences of prisoners. Prisons, from prisoners’ points of view, are a form of state-sanctioned violence (Shaylor, 2009). This is especially the case for women who experience prisons as abusive, gendered spaces; spaces fuelled by patterns of domination, operationalized through hypersurveillance, deprivation, and emotional repression. The impact of imprisonment is enduring—rarely does release equate to freedom as the pain inflicted by prisons is carried with former prisoners as they return to the community.
Having taught many aspiring social workers over the last decade, I often hear students comment on how they would love to “make a difference” by working within corrections. This article is my response to the notion of “making a difference” and serves as a cautionary tale for social workers whose education is unlikely to expose them to the scholarship of the prison abolition movement (Chandler, 2018, p. 6), which I argue provides a path and a way forward for social work through the shared goals of freedom and liberation.
More than 11 million adults are being detained in prisons and jails worldwide (Walmsley, 2018). Coinciding with the “war on drugs” (Hari, 2015), the dismantling of the welfare state (Mendes, 2008), and the rise of neoliberalism (Hyslop, 2016), imprisonment rates—especially of the poor and the working classes—in most countries continue to rise (Walmsley, 2018). Australia is closely following this trend. At the end of the 20th century, just over 20,000 adults were held in Australian prisons (Graycar, 2001). By 2019, that number has grown with over 43,000 people being held in custody and almost 76,000 more serving community-based corrections orders (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2019). Figures on the number of prisoner receptions indicate that in the 2019 March quarter, 17,349 people entered prison, yet 77% were unsentenced at the time of entry (ABS, 2019). In Australia—much like other colonized countries—the likelihood of imprisonment is much higher for First Nations Peoples (Cunneen et al., 2013, p. 1), who make up 2% of Australia’s adult population but close to 25% of the prison population (Baldry, 2013; Sudbury, 2013).
The possibility that release from prison will not be permanent is a theme both in academic scholarship (Baldry, 2010) and in firsthand accounts of imprisonment (Hampton, 1993; Terry, 2003). The rising prison population is driven by two main causes, the first-time imprisonment of people experiencing addiction, poverty, and/or poor mental health and the second reason, the revolving door of recidivism. Recidivism at its simplest is committing further crime after being caught and punished for a previous offense. Across Australia, close to half of all people currently in prison have previously served a custodial sentence, with many people returning to prison within 2 years of release (ABS, 2019). In effect, this means that the strongest risk indicator of going to prison is having previously served a prison sentence. Yet in public policy and other scholarship concerning recidivism, the “problem” is positioned not so much the failure of prisons to rehabilitate, as the intractable failure of prisoners to reform themselves (or to “learn their lesson”).
One of the earliest renditions of the prison industrial complex (PIC) saw Britain use Australia as a solution to their overcrowded prisons, to stake a claim for strategic land and to build a colony on the backs of convict labor. Australia was deemed as terra nullius or a land, which belonged to no one, a false claim that there was no law, language, or ownership of land. The consequences of invasion for First Nations Peoples in Australia were, and continue to be, devastating through the theft of land and resources, racism, violent conflict, and oppressive government policies.
Driven by the global economy, the PIC is not just the profit-driven running of prisons, or the exploitation of prisoner labor, but describes: The overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems. (Critical Resistance, 2004, p. 59)
The PIC is also a workplace for social workers who deliver interventions and “therapeutic” programs. People who work within the PIC are, like prisoners, subject to neoliberal ideologies and the individualizing discourses and practices of “reforming” or “rehabilitating” individuals, usually with the “help” of a therapeutic model and in concert with surveillance and monitoring. Such therapeutic models are politically convenient. If the participant/ex-prisoner is “successful” in completing a program of therapy, they are likely to have internalized the program message that locates blame for systemic failure within themselves. Conversely, if the participant/ex-prisoner is “unsuccessful” in completing the program, individualizing discourse blames the participant not the program. Social workers who deliver these programs have a somewhat parallel experience delivering therapeutic models, where “success” from an organizational view is for the worker to achieve program completions. In this situation, horizontal oppression is actuated, as it leads workers to focus on results rather than the process. Yet, “good” social work outcomes are dependent on the process and relationships, where trust and respect are both earned and reciprocal (Kam, 2019). As a result, the pursuit of human rights and other core tasks of social work (IFSW, 2014) takes a back seat to compliance measures, data entry, and an individualizing “intervention” framework. Such “therapeutic” social work is largely inadequate as it requires acceptance of the status quo and a fundamentally conservative approach to social injustice.
Neoliberalism and Laboring in the PIC
Neoliberalism, along with racism, classism, and sexism, is embedded in the operations of the PIC. Neoliberalism, and its uniquely Australian relative, “economic rationalism” is grounded in the belief that a competitive free market offers choices and freedom for citizens through consumer spending (Monbiot, 2016). Yet, according to Paul (2016), freedom and choices are not equally accessible because “human suffering is built into the political economy of advanced capitalist societies like Australia” (p. 4) of which I argue, prisons and their associated correctional interventions are a significant aspect of this economy. This hands-off, anti-welfare approach effectively leaves the market to define and shape social destiny through the privatization of public services.
Neoliberalism privileges profit-making over the interests of society, riding upon the myth of trickle-down economics. It is the most “dominant form of obligations-based ideology,” an ideology that decimates social citizenship (McKeever, 2012, pp. 467–468). Neoliberalism is underpinned by the belief that we are rational economic actors, making little or no acknowledgment of the structural barriers held in place by the market. Neoliberalism normalizes dominant institutions—like prisons—and relations of power through a “public pedagogy” that creates market-driven subjects, modes of consciousness, and ways of understanding that promote accommodation, acquiescence, and passivity (Giroux, 2014, p. 26).
The state’s refusal to adequately fund communities to resolve their own social problems is, according to Kilroy (2018), state perpetrated violence. Put simply, “the prison industrial complex underwrites the social problems it purports to solve” (Davis & Dent, 2001, p. 1236). Here in Australia, the criminal “injustice” system, enshrined in racist, capitalist, patriarchal, and classist ideals, has a vested interest in the subordination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and men, the working classes who, along with the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally and physically unwell, are disproportionately represented in carceral settings (Kilroy, 2018). Deploying a neoliberal framework implies that the overrepresentation of marginalized groups in prison populations is “proof” of their moral inferiority rather than reflecting multiple, overlapping layers of oppression which comprise the foundations of disadvantage.
Using the language of the criminal injustice system, this disadvantage is measured as “risk.” Women who have experienced violence and abuse have been failed by mainstream education, have unstable housing and employment—if any—and poor mental and physical health are automatically “categorized” as high risk, doubly so if they identify as First Nations Australians. Yet being categorized as “high risk” is, in itself, a measure of oppression, consistent with the individual responsibilities focus of neoliberalism. This is evident in the fact that globally First Nations women and women of color are imprisoned at a higher rate than their white contemporaries (Sudbury, 2013).
Building Prisons: Appealing to “Common Sense”
Often the promise of prison growth is used for political leverage by positioning the prison and its associated industries as a function of public safety and thus worthy of “investment” (see, e.g., Andrews, 2019). This can be an appealing message, especially for women who fear for their safety in public and private domains. Therefore, it may seem counterintuitive that “feminists have been in the forefront of struggles against mass incarceration” (Carlton & Russell, 2018; Chandler, 2018, p. 6).
O’Brien and Ortega (2015) challenge “mainstream” feminists to take a different approach to mass incarceration, asking them to interrogate their own assumptions around harm within a context that considers all aspects of crime, punishment, and prisons. One of those assumptions is that prisons make women’s lives safer. Yet, since the recognition in legislation that domestic violence is a criminal act that can and does result in imprisonment, there has been little change in the pattern of gendered violence, where in Australia, in 2018, 69 women were killed at the hands of a male violence in Australia (Destroy the Joint, 2018). Violence against women does happen in all classes of the community, but the impacts are much harder to negotiate when there is an intersect between racism, poverty, homelessness, poor health, and addiction (Klippmark & Crawley, 2018).
Programs and initiatives designed to end violence against women often measure their success through police intervention, increased surveillance, and prison sentences. According to Victoria Law (2014), this “carceral feminism” is “an approach that sees increased policing, prosecution and imprisonment as the primary solution to violence against women” (para. 3), an approach that effectively ignores how “race, class, gender identity, and immigration status leave certain women more vulnerable to violence and that greater criminalization often places these same women at risk of state violence” (para. 4). Yet criminalized women are often excluded from domestic and family violence and other social support services, even though there is a strong correlation between criminalized women and experiences of violence (Flat Out, 2015). Involving the criminal justice system in domestic/family violence matters can have unintended consequences for criminalized women as highlighted in a recent submission to the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence (Flat Out, 2015). The submission documents how calling the police for help does little to keep criminalized women safe. Instead, they are likely to experience discrimination; their fears are not taken seriously, they are at risk of arrest for outstanding matters, and/or they are threatened with the loss of their children through child protection interventions. In effect, seeking “help” can make the situation worse. Sending perpetrators of violence against women to prisons that are ultimately violent hypermasculine spaces is unlikely to resolve gender-based violence. Indeed, carceral feminism has itself contributed to the growth of the PIC (Law, 2014). Further, sexual assault—in the form of strip searching and violent, abusive, neglectful, and harmful treatment is normalized in adult and youth prisons across the world every single day.
Laboring in the Neoliberal PIC
Prisoners are, of course, an essential component of the PIC. They are not just the passive subjects of labor (i.e., those who are guarded, those who are searched, those who are “trained” and “corrected”) but are also agents of labor. While the popular misconception that everything is “laid on” for prisoners remains strong—and is often reiterated in media reports and public commentary about prisons and prisoners—the truth is rather different. Prisoners labor under conditions materially similar to slavery (see, e.g., Alexander, 2010; Calathes, 2017; Davis, 2003; Platt, 2019). Where work is available, it tends to be unrewarding, both personally and financially. Prisoners have little choice concerning how their earnings may be spent, exacerbating their material deprivation. In fact, as laborers in the PIC, prisoners are not afforded the subjectivity of neoliberal subjects, flawed though that subjectivity may be. Their capacity to consume and to make consumer choices is severely and deliberately limited, and perhaps this (even more than physical confinement) constitutes the nature of neoliberal punishment. Thus, prisoners are constituted as flawed subjects almost by definition. It is not surprising, then, that “preparing” prisoners for reentry into the wider community—a task often carried out by social workers—is an anxious and inefficient project.
The failings of the welfare state are the embodiment of the “problems” faced by social workers, especially those who reject dominant individualizing ideologies and choose to work in alliance with service users (Hyslop, 2011). This begins within the neoliberal university (Heath & Burdon, 2013) where widening participation policies prop up profit-driven education that produces debt-choked professional workers at the expense of critical thinkers with the courage to question the status quo (Morley, MacFarlane, & Ablett, 2017). Once employed within social services, neoliberalism has a direct effect on social workers who feel demoralized as their skills are devalued and where their social work “identity” is continually challenged (Hyslop, 2018). Postgraduation, and under the weight of a significant education debt, social workers have little choice than to become compliant agents of social control. Even if they work outside of correctional services in nongovernment agencies, they are likely to be constrained by funding “gag clauses” designed to silence critique of government policy (Gray, 2013). Their ability to form relationships with service users is compromised and the liberation that social workers have the potential to provide diminishes (Hyslop, 2018; Wallace & Pease, 2011), reduced to short-term interventions, surveillance, and social control.
Constrained to providing band-aid solutions and to scramble for meagre resources, neoliberal practice frameworks successfully thwart opportunities to tackle the roots of oppression in the pursuit of social change (Hyslop, 2011, 2016). Social work under neoliberalism has become increasingly depoliticized and risk focused, at direct odds with the pursuit of social justice (Hyslop, 2018; Morley et al., 2017; Pollack & Rossiter, 2010). Although some social workers report using covert means to carry out activist work in settings unsupportive of such practices (Greenslade, McAuliffe, & Chenoweth, 2015), this is usually done in a piecemeal fashion, where the beneficiaries are individuals, lucky enough to get a “good” worker.
For probation and parole officers, often with social work qualifications, the irony of the term criminal “justice” is not lost on them as their daily work exposes them to the inequities and social isolation experienced by the people they work with (Telfer, 2003). Walker and Beaumont’s (1981) classic text, Probation: Critical Theory and Socialist Practice speaks to the role of social workers in the criminal justice system, where they describe the tensions, contradictions, and ethical dilemmas that social workers encounter in the probation service given that the role is part of the “state apparatus of social control” (p. 90); a troubling relationship for some who acknowledge that they benefit from working in an industry that feeds upon the surveillance and punishment of marginalized people. Their work can seem far removed from the values and purpose of social work and the pursuit of social justice.
Working outside of correctional services in nongovernment organizations does not always equate to working outside the PIC. Even though prison construction, “managing” prisoners, the exploitation of prisoners’ labor, and the industries that service prisons are the obvious products of the PIC, the “prisoner reentry industry” (Clear, 2010, p. 585; Corcoran & Fox, 2013; Platt, 2019) has become an integral arm of the PIC. In a political climate where funding for communities is continually under threat, there appears to be little hesitation in blindly funding “evidence-based” cognitive behavioral program packages that are seen as a “fast fix,” deployed within a suite of risk management approaches.
Therapeutic programs aimed at rehabilitating people entangled in the criminal justice system do vary, but that variety is rarely if ever presented to prisoners as a range of options for personal development in prison. Instead, they are subject to “one size fits all” programs that typically aim to address the moral or behavioral deficiencies of prisoners. One such postrelease program, often delivered by social workers to ex-prisoners in South Australia—and around the world—is Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT). Best known by its abbreviation, MRT is a trademarked cognitive-based behavioral treatment program devised by former corrections workers, Little and Robinson (1997) in the United States. South Australia was an early importer of MRT, deploying its use throughout the Drug Court, a 12-week intervention in tandem with other surveillance and monitoring strategies operating under the jurisdiction of the Adelaide Magistrates Court.
According to Armstrong (2003), MRT draws on a patchwork of Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Jungian ideas around personality, and notions of moral development taken from Kohlberg and Piaget’s theories (p. 670). MRT is delivered within a group counselling setting, taking participants through a series of morality levels with the use of a workbook and homework activities. There has been criticism of the design and “evidence base” that underpins MRT, which is grounded on the premise that the individual “creates their own prison” and is therefore fully responsible for their situation. The focus is relentlessly individualizing, with little acknowledgment of collective struggles or identities. Participants are brought into moralizing discourse as the bearers of a rationality guiding individualized choices and as people with responsibility for the conditions and circumstances of their lives. There is little focus on managing the context or cause of their addiction. Using a prison metaphor, over the course of multiple sessions, participants climb up the 16 steps of the “freedom ladder” until they reach the highest level, grace. Relapse then, although a normal and expected element in healing from addiction (Sellman, 2010), is positioned as a fall from grace. The underlying moral–religious connotations of “falling from grace” neatly blame the individual for the structural issues that targeted them as bodies to be warehoused in prison. When participants fail to meet the hypersurveillance requirements accompanying programs like MRT, their failure is recorded as a breach of parole conditions, the participant is ejected from the program and can be returned to custody, even if they had made some progress up the freedom ladder.
MRT suggests that the “real” prison is the participants’ own personality, implying that being a “criminal” comes down to personal choice. Essentially, MRT takes the approach that people who problematically use drugs or enter prison are morally and intellectually inferior, ignoring the causal pathways of social stratification (Behrens, 2009), exposure to violence or experiences of trauma. Given the violence and abuse happening in adult and juvenile detention centers in Australia (Yaxley, 2016), it seems farcical at best to think that prisoners and former prisoners are not aware of the irony of being mandated to participate in such “therapeutic” programs.
Such “therapeutic” work, often performed by social workers, undermines the values, goals, and aspirations of radical and emancipatory social work, reducing social workers to roles of gatekeepers, mediators, and purveyors of state surveillance (Hyslop, 2016, 2018). Therapeutic, mandated “treatment” programs individualize responsibility for social stratification, treating participants as a homogenous group that ignores, rather than embraces, their complexities. Social work “interventions” in this sense imply that it is the worker/professional who is the expert and only through their guidance change can occur. Attempting to create compliant citizens accepting of their oppression as self-inflicted is an injustice and leaves little space for the person to express their own story or to explore the role of social inequality a net of treatment. Such approaches have no prospect of radically transforming the criminal injustice system, a task that drives the work of prison abolitionists.
Transformative justice is an approach proposed by abolitionists, where solutions are sought, created, and enacted within the community. As Lawston and Meiners (2014) propose, transformative justice requires a commitment to “collective liberation” (p. 14) and a rejection of the unequal social structures that dominate our existence. It follows then that a community-based research method that privileges the voices and perspectives of former prisoners can help guide us to learn about transformative solutions.
Using Photovoice to Learn From Former Prisoners: Method and Rationale
Photovoice is a feminist, qualitative, community-based, participatory action research (PAR) method where participant-generated photographs and stories become data. Photovoice is a useful and egalitarian method for socially marginalized groups to inform consultative policymaking. PAR methods and Photovoice in particular seem to be a natural extension of social justice social work (Jarldorn, 2018a). Built on relationships and privileging the knowledge and experience of participants, Photovoice is as much about the process as it is about the outcome. Arguably, the main purpose of feminist research is the production of “transformative knowledge” (Nanzeen & Sultan, 2014). Germane to this research is the suggestion by Lawston and Meiners (2014, p. 17) that PAR with criminalized women can “support transformative justice” because it refuses to begin from a starting point that frames imprisonment as a result of individual deficiencies. Willison and O’Brien (2017, p. 44) agree, arguing that social work research with criminalized women can, in itself, be transformative with the use of feminist-based PAR.
“Stella” (not her real name) was the final contributor (nine women and three men) in a Photovoice project I created to learn about the post-release experiences of people who had been held in prison in South Australia (see Jarldorn, 2016, 2018a, 2018b; Jarldorn & Deer, 2017). Participants were invited to generate images to help them explain their experience and were guided by the deliberately broad research question, “If you had the opportunity, what would you tell a policy maker or politician about your postrelease experience?” Once Stella had created her data, I met with her in her home to hear the stories behind the images. As we looked at each image on my laptop, I recorded our discussions, which were guided by Wang’s (1999) SHOWeD script (see, Jarldorn, 2018a), later transcribing them verbatim.
Sitting at her kitchen table, the rapport seemed simple, our conversation was energetic and unrestrained, a setting that I believe facilitated the breadth and depth of Stella’s testimony. Interviewing women in their homes is not just about convenience or ambience but is an intentional approach to dismantling the perceived power of the researcher. For a few hours, over multiple cups of coffee, Stella shared her story aided by 26 photographs. Our discussion, sparked by each image, was robust, complex, and a profound learning experience for me. Although I have never been in prison, we connected through other shared identities; we are of a similar age, we grew up in—and still firmly connected to—working-class communities, we both had an early exit from formal education but later entered university as mature-aged students. Here is some of Stella’s story.
Learning From “Stella”: Seeing and Listening to a Voice of Experience
Stella grew up quickly; her father would get violent and abusive when he had been drinking, and he drank a lot. By her early teens, Stella was spending more time in the streets than at home. She had left school and had begun using heroin by age 14. She was just 16 when she first went to prison on a minor drug possession charge after lying about her age to keep her arrest secret from her mother. Young, frightened, and detoxing from heroin, Stella remembers the other women prisoners knew that she was not an adult. They took her under their wing and protected her. All of a sudden, Stella realized: In all my life I’d never felt such a strong sense of belonging. Mum raised merry hell when she found I was in a women’s prison, so they let me out pretty quickly after that, dropped all the charges, but that started the cycle. I still felt that…a sort of a hole, that I don’t belong I don’t fit…when everything broke down I’d go back to the drugs and with the misfits, because that is where I fitted. That’s why I felt more at home in a prison than anywhere else. I spent close to 14 years of my life locked up.
Women do jail together.
Men do jail blinkered. They don’t talk about their feelings much. Women, we help each other through, we talk about stuff. I have had some of the funniest times of my life in prison. That might sound weird, but you get through with humor. You learn to control your environment and not think about the outside world. That’s why it is very hard when you get out. They think you can flick a switch and get back into life on the outside, but you can’t.
Being able to compartmentalize in the way Stella describes here was a successful coping strategy for her while she was in prison, but similar to women who survive the trauma of violence and abuse, those same survival strategies became problematic when it was time to leave. I asked Stella whether she had seen other criminalized women struggle with letting go of the ability to “de-compartmentalize,” she said “yes, every day.”
Like the other women in this project (see, e.g., Jarldorn, 2016; Jarldorn & Deer, 2017), Stella used her participation to speak collectively for women still in prison. Along with three other participants, Stella spoke candidly about the practice of strip searching. A prison management regime claiming to prevent drugs and other contraband from entering prisons, strip searches are ineffective and rarely discover contraband. Kilroy (2018) argues that strip searching is state-sanctioned sexual assault, with McCulloch and George (2009) likening the practice of regular and routine strip searches of women to the treatment of detainees in the “war on terror” (p. 108). Stella told me that: I think that people are unaware of how often strip-searching happens in prison, including here in Adelaide. There doesn’t need to be “reasonable suspicion,” it happens every day. I know women who don’t go to the hospital or doctor or refuse to have their family visit them because of the strip-searching. So many women in prison have been sexually abused, experienced domestic violence or some sort of trauma and what strip-searching does is, it makes them re-live it. It humiliates them over and over and over again. They rarely find drugs or contraband, so what is its purpose? To keep telling you that you are a piece of shit and we can do anything we want with you. You are a piece of meat and if we tell you to squat and cough, you will do it, if you don’t do it, they will force you to do it—that is more physical power and violence. I mean they can just come and pull you out of bed and strip-search you. They own you, make no mistake.
Like other participants, Stella conceptualized an extended critique of time, demonstrating how time is experienced by prisoners as an instrument of violence. Writing about time and punishment, Kenny (2014) proposes that, “time, being invisible, is a handy and effective tool to use as, behind the language of procedure and bureaucracy, it is easy to forget its corrosive properties” (para. 4). Time is an exaggerated concept in prison that attaches to people upon their release, magnifying the feelings of being an outsider. Stella spoke about time with the following image and narrative (Figure 2):
The prison clock still ticks at home.
I can remember sitting at the kitchen table after I had been released and looking at the clock and thinking “oh it’s eleven o’clock, the women will be sitting down to lunch around now”—who doesn’t? The whole time my brain was working to the timetable of the prison. I couldn’t sleep because it was too quiet. There was no one whistling, no jangling keys, or walking around, it was just a total culture shock. I was feeling guilty for feeling that way. Here am I with my kids and those women are stuck in there. Yet I’m not feeling comfortable in my own skin.
Release From Prison Does not Equate to Freedom
Stella spent her last night in prison almost 20 years ago. Since then she successfully completed her parole and credits overcoming her addiction from learning what worked for herself, by moving away from her drug using connections and developing strategies to manage cravings and triggers such as early morning, long-distance running (see Jarldorn, 2018b, p. 225). However, as her children became independent adults, Stella had this nagging feeling that something was missing from her life, she was isolated and still did not feel like a part of the community. Her former parole officer—a social worker who sees her role as “more than just a job” (Kam, 2019), had also seen that institutional responses were mostly unsuccessful in supporting women leave the prison system so together they cofounded a community group, Seeds of Affinity, which supports women upon their release from prison. Deploying an abolitionist framework based on a model of peer-led mutual support, Stella has dedicated the last 12 years of her life to volunteering to support criminalized women. Her philosophy of “leaving no woman behind” through authentic, individualized support is an alternative to the “one size fits all” approach to working with criminalized women. Stella explained: I think she (former parole officer) knew that if I could just find a purpose, a way of giving back and validating my experience that I would find my own way.…This work gave me that. It gave me a platform to reclaim my dignity and I want to pay that forward to other women. I really value being different now, but when I was young I hated it. I would think, ‘why can’t I be like other women’? That’s when I started putting needles in my arm. I used to think I’ll never be like them, but now I wouldn’t be like them for all the money in the world. What I once disliked about myself so much is exactly what I love about myself now. I now value the fact that I am different, that I can think outside the box. I value the life that I have, that I am blessed. I value the connection that I have to mother-nature, I value the simple things. I don’t care about money. Money and stuff doesn’t interest me at all. My strength. That is the other thing I value about me, my incredible mental strength. What I have realised since going to university and getting good grades is, that once I make a decision, consider it done. I have the strength to change the world.
A Message for Qualitative Researchers: Don’t Lose Sight of the Statistics
In the eyes and minds of a neoliberal conservative, Stella’s success story might seem to support the neoliberal ideology that prison works. After all, her account shows that people can and do change. Much of what she said speaks to her “inner strength,” “determination,” and “persistence,” the same individual traits championed by the neoliberal state. Stella can be described as “successful” along several fronts and from several perspectives. But that (neoliberal) logic is deeply flawed; only exceptional people survive, and only the most exceptional flourish. Crediting the success of Stella to the prison experience would be a misattribution.
It is important to understand Stella’s testimony in context. At the broadest statistical level, prisons do not work. Recidivism rates are very high—one of the strongest indicators that a person will go to prison is that they are a former prisoner. The financial and human costs are also high—to the prisoner, their family, and the community. The damage imprisonment does to a person’s health and well-being is recognized internationally (Lloyd et al., 2017), while mortality rates among prisoners and former prisoners are significantly higher than for people who have never been to prison (Davies & Cook, 1998).
The “magic” of the PIC (Davis, 1998) is that rarely do people consider or even notice its reach; the social costs of profiting from prisoners or its hidden agenda of racism, classism, and sexism (Platt, 2019). This is probably why Stella was the only participant who discussed and understood the operations of the PIC, providing a blunt appraisal gleaned from hearing scholars and activists speak at an international conference. She told me: I’ve heard Angela Davis, Gina Dent and the Critical Resistance people from the United States share their knowledge about the prison industrial complex and the sneaky ways that the establishment try to get us to think about reform. Now I know about the multimillion-dollar corporations that are involved in private prisons and how they are getting into immigrant detention work too—it’s fucked. Knowing what I do about the PIC has shaped the way I run my community group. The abolition of prisons guides every step I take in this work.
Wow, researchers should never underestimate how much knowledge is held in the community. Stella’s story of her years in and out of prison, the way she goes about her business of lifting up other criminalised women and her insights into the prison industrial complex were profound. It’s like she holds the most important piece in the puzzle, how abolitionist practices are enacted in the community. Now I can see what abolition looks like.
Prison Abolition: A Strategy and an End Goal
Until I interviewed Stella, I had only ever read about prison abolition; I still held a nagging doubt that while the theory was convincing, it seemed more like an aspirational concept. I often wondered how I could argue prison abolition as a way of thinking for social work. What Stella showed me was abolitionism in action; what it looks like at a local, grassroots level. She demonstrated the power of community-based and led responses to social problems. On reflection, I think that the normalized presence of prisons is what leads people to resist even to the idea of abolition; that the problem of prisons and all that is associated with them is so voluminous and their presence so natural and embedded in the landscape (Wang, 2018) that the possibilities of everyday, community action (see, e.g., Carlton & Russell, 2018) working toward the project of abolishing prisons are overlooked.
Contributions made by people with lived experience are often undervalued, relegated to a voluntary model of peer-on-peer support, yet what Stella showed me is that lived experience holds powerful perspectives in terms of imagining a world without prisons. Abolitionism is not just about challenging stereotypes or changing narratives, it’s also about immediate, tangible action. Take, for example, Sisters Inside, a Queensland organization led by former prisoner Debbie Kilroy. For decades, Sisters Inside has relentlessly pursued social justice for criminalized women. Recognized globally for their best practice service delivery model, Sisters Inside is a leader in not only imagining a world that does not rely upon prisons but putting what they imagine into practice. Sisters Inside works at the micro, meso, and macro levels to holistically support women, to raise awareness in the community about the injustice and inequities of relying upon prisons to resolve social issues and in developing creative initiatives. Their recent social media campaign, #freethepeople (Sisters Inside, 2019), targeted the practice of imprisoning women with unpaid fines in Western Australia. In communities already crippled by poverty, Aboriginal women, who are disproportionately disadvantaged with fine debt, are often locked up to “work off” their fines. The violence of imprisoning Aboriginal women and men in racist and colonial spaces has serious consequences for their safety (see, e.g., the Death of Ms Dhu in Western Australia, Klippmark & Crawley, 2018 and the death of Wayne Fella Morrison in South Australia, Rule, 2018). The associated publicity increased awareness of the need to decriminalize nonpayment of fines, helping the public to understand that such “alternatives” to prison disadvantages the people already at most disadvantage.
There are ongoing dilemmas in the dream of abolition and the reality of incarceration. While undertaking work that aims to abolish prisons, abolitionists cannot and do not ignore the plight of people who are suffering in prisons at this current moment. To do so would be like seeking equitable access for a disabled person through policy while ignoring their immediate daily needs. One of the tensions involved in the work of the abolition movement is that proponents are often cautioned for seeking reform, which intentionally or not, can lead to prison expansion (Baldry, Carlton, & Cunneen, 2015; Carlton & Russell, 2018; Faith, 2000; Platt, 2019; Shaylor, 2009). Arguing for abolition and seeking prisoners’ rights can certainly be a balancing act (Lawston & Meiners, 2014), requiring “non-reformist reforms” (Faith, 2000, p. 164) and solidarity with prisoners (Sudbury, 2015, p. 18). Baldry, Carlton, and Cunneen (2015) propose that abolition and reform are not “mutually exclusive strategies” (p. 173); rather, abolition is both a strategy and an end goal. As Anderson and Bedford (2019) suggest, the “traditional rhetoric of reform only serves to strengthen an unworkable and unfair system” (p. 12), going on to argue that abolitionists can use creative “tools of desistance” such as their community radio project, Radio Seeds. Anderson’s radio documentary project shows that the community has much to offer when it comes to imagining what a world without prisons might look like (Anderson & Radio Seeds, 2019).
Social Workers as Abolitionists?
Thinking radically is a necessity for social workers for social work to be transformative. This requires us to take a radical stance and align ourselves as allies in the struggle for social justice (Baines, 2011, p. 24), while Chandler (2018) maintains that “radical analysis is at the heart of feminism as is activism and sisterhood, in the broadest sense of that word” (p. 6). Thus, feminist analysis is nothing without action.
Returning to the idea of social workers “making a difference,” Morley and colleagues (2017) argue that social work educators have a role to play in resisting neoliberalisms’ impact upon social work practice, reminding us that social activism is an important aspect of practicing the art of social work. Social activism can be deployed in various ways by academics, how and what we teach, the methods we use for research, how we frame those research findings, and how we give back to the community (Scraton, 2016). Engaging with the perspectives of the prison abolition movement—which align closely with the values of social work—provides both a path forward and an end goal.
Prison abolition is based upon human rights and a shared humanity grounded in healthy communities. Revenge and retribution have no place in such communities. There is no single, linear approach to the project of abolition—tearing down prison walls without broad community support in place is unlikely to succeed. Transformative justice requires power, resources, and trust to be returned to communities, along with acknowledgment that the people who are closest to the issue are best placed to resolve those issues.
From Stella’s perspective, holding the vision of prison abolition firmly in place guides her daily work. Her experience shows that prisons are violent spaces and that while this violence can manifest interpersonally, it is the state-sanctioned, institutionalized violence that permeates the prison, deeply affecting the people who spend their days inside them. Collective punishment, strip searching, infantilizing treatment, substandard medical support, and boredom all make up the daily, unrelenting, punishing regime—a regime often devoid of human rights. For criminalized women, the difficulties in returning to the community are profoundly personal and complex and speak directly to the failure of prisons to furnish prisoners with the skills and resources they need to survive beyond release. Stella confirmed that prisons are a site of social violence, with her insights drawn from strongly situated, thoroughly embodied knowledge. After all, she spent over 5,000 days and nights behind prison walls.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge that this research took place on the lands of the Kaurna people, the traditional custodians of the land where I live, work, and play. Their sovereignty has never been ceded. I am grateful to the editors of Affilia: Women in Social Work and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and detailed comments whose input has greatly improved this article. I also want to say thank you to “Stella” who has taught me more than she will ever know. Finally, my sincerest thanks go to my supervisor, Dr Heather Brook, whose beautiful mind guided me with encouragement, sensitivity, and patience throughout this research project.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
