Resisting Carcerality,Embracing Abolition: Implications for Feminist Social Work Practice

Few social dynamics have altered the landscape of communities in the United States as profoundly as the buildup of a Prison Nation and the expansion of the carceral state. In this article, we will use the terms “carceral expansion,” “carceral state,” and “buildup of a Prison Nation” interchangeably. As the discussion will show, these concepts refer to the ways that ideology, economic policy, and legal/legislative initiatives have supported the growth of legal apparatuses associated with punishment. We have witnessed dramatic shifts in how this country understands, uses, responds to, and, in some sense, creates “crime” in contemporary society, from massive financial investments in law enforcement and surveillance technology; the amplification of deep ideological commitments to retributive justice; aggressive punishment regimes (including preemptive arrests); the swell in the number of the facilities that imprison over 7 million people (for longer periods of time, in harsher conditions) to the co-optation of major reform efforts, these shifts are comprehensive and well-documented. The impact of this shift affects the communities that have been the focus of social work attention for decades; those that have been the most disadvantaged by historical patterns of discrimination and social policies of exclusion.

Scholars, legal theorists, and community activists have used various conceptual frames to characterize this expansion of the carceral state. Included among those widely used and which have made it into professional discourse are the “prison industrial complex,” “mass incarceration or imprisonment,” and “hyper-criminalization.” While there are slight distinctions between these concepts, there are three core elements of carceral expansion that are generally agreed upon.

First is the critical understanding that the buildup of a Prison Nation does not correspond, necessarily, to changes in patterns of crime. That is, the investment in responses to crime does not correspond to actual shifts in what is considered “illegal behavior,” and in some eras, we have seen crime rates go down but the allocation of resources to punishment go up. This inconsistency is important because it helps to show how carcerality actually operates as a set of political commitments that are independent from data about actual occurrences of lawbreaking. Similarly, responses to immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border, the creation of punitive immigration law and the increased policing, surveillance and captivity of (im)migrants do not correlate to actual migration data. In this way, the buildup of a Prison Nation, and its extensions, is as much a sign of our society’s deep commitment to social regulation as it is to public safety.

Important to a critique of the expansion of the carceral state hinges on an understanding of how crime is more of a social construction rather than an absolute phenomenon. What is considered a crime is fluid, not static. Major examples of this include the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, while countless people remain incarcerated or under state surveillance for marijuana crimes. With this, the simultaneous racialized rhetoric of drug addiction to more serious substances needing medical attention versus previous decades of criminal attention. From this perspective, crime can be understood as a social artifact that reflects political and social impulses, as much as it is something “real.” With minimal effort or contestation, new laws are passed that criminalize previously legal behaviors, intrusive policing techniques are implemented, and harsh and/or mandatory sentences are constructed, rendering crime policies fodder for social control by power elites. Examples of this are found in discussions of the different treatment of powder cocaine and crack cocaine charges in the 1980s, the ways that nuanced crimes emerged in response to gentrification efforts in the 1990s, such as that related to broken windows policing, and how new laws and criminal legal policies emerged in response to attack on the United States by governments from around the world. A rigorous examination of what is considered “illegal” reveals patterns that suggest in many ways law and legal policies serve as an instrument of social control of marginalized groups rather than some neutral mechanism for encouraging safety and social order. Therefore, criminologists and other social critics discuss crime as political artifact rather than something that is either absolute or consistently logical.

Second, the expansion the carceral state is associated with a simultaneous divestment of resources from programs and services that would otherwise strengthen communities with their most significant needs. There has been considerable attention given to the ways that investment in punishment correlates with divestment in social services and human needs. When economic and ideological capital are directed toward punishment, surveillance, and control, then funding for health and mental health services, schools and other youth-oriented programs, transportation infrastructure, community-based service organizations, parks, and other public services decline in the communities that need them most. To this point, it is important to consider the role of privatization that is rooted in neoliberal politic, and how the state constructs relationships with private investors to help ease the cost of a punishment regime. This issue is both a basic financial question of where resources are allocated as well as a more nuanced understanding of what it means to fund some kinds of services—those that are linked to social control and punishment—rather than others that are geared toward expanding opportunity or creating equity.

Finally, and perhaps most important, “mass incarceration,” which is sometimes used to describe the buildup of a Prison Nation, is actually a misnomer because the expansion of the carceral state is targeted, not random. It affects different groups in the population differently, with a clear predisposition to aggressively target socially vulnerable groups and those that politically threaten the system controlled by power elites. Race and class disparities are very well established when one looks closely at how punishment is applied across the population. In fact, there are few places where one can better observe the lingering legacy of institutionalized racism and settler colonialism than in the carceral state (Davis, 2000). Continued carceral expansion to capture (im)migrants, transgender and gender-non-conforming people, people with disabilities, young people, and people with physical and mental health challenges illustrate both the power of carceral expansion and the ways that the carceral state is motivated by political instincts to control groups that threaten the status quo. This framing allows for attention to be given to the relationship between the buildup of a Prison Nation and heteropatriarchy, able-bodism, and class exploitation such that we see new laws targeting people who depend on state resources, the criminalization of gender nonconformity and the arrest, and detention of undocumented people in record numbers. The targeting includes the harsh punishments and unforgiving administrative policies, and the lifelong disenfranchisement or what some scholars have called “civil death.”

Due to a long history of co-optation of social movements and resistance strategies that destroy efforts of true liberation, in the short and long term, it is important to emphasize our efforts must bear in mind all of the aforementioned characteristics of the buildup of a Prison Nation (1) that carceral expansion is not related to crime rates, (2) that the investment in punishment is directly related to divestment in other aspects of society that create equitable opportunity, and (3) that it is targeted toward the literal capture and metaphorical containment of black and other people of color, Indigenous peoples, transgender and gender-non-conforming people, young people from poor communities, people with mental health issues, and other groups who are disadvantaged by institutionalized oppression, and as such, it is an artifact of social control and exclusion. Importantly, these three characteristics of carceral expansion make the work against the buildup of a Prison Nation ripe for feminist social work attention. It is the case that, increasingly, social services are adopting the logics of the Prison Nation and progressively building a relationship with the carceral state. Appropriately, we identify these services as carceral services that replicate the control, surveillance, and punishment of the Prison Nation, and thus, punitive and social services can become indistinguishable. It is important to highlight the surveillance element of carceral expansion as it relates to carceral services. Perhaps well-intentioned, social services, and social workers who conspire with the punishment system assist the carceral state in the excessive surveillance that fuels mass incarceration. Accordingly, the distinction between well-intentioned feminist social work and anti-carceral feminist social work should be made.

Indeed, some anti-carceral feminist social workers have been at the forefront of the struggle against the expansion of the carceral state, a struggle that has deep roots in a disciplinary critique of society’s tendency toward social exclusion and ideological commitments to race, class, gender, and other forms of oppression. Taken up as a systemic critique, some feminist social workers have engaged to resist the buildup of the carceral state. A growing cohort has been working to organize community-based intervention services, advocate for community accountability projects, work in coalitions to build a broader systematic justice movement, and provide individual crisis intervention, restorative justice, and harm reduction services in cases where harm has occurred.

This special topic, Anti-Carceral Feminisms: Imagining a World Without Prisons, of the Journal Affilia is an opportunity to showcase those efforts more specifically by focusing on anti-carceral feminism as a particular example of what can be done differently. This specificity is critically important because without it, social work practice will fall prey to the broader social instincts to build up the Prison Nation rather than stop the expansion of the carceral state.

In the remainder of this commentary, we will bring forth the notion of “feminist abolition” and describe how the aspirational political concept has concrete, real-time implications for the work that social workers are called to do. Here, we will review the basic tenants of abolition praxis and point to ways that feminist social workers can work at the individual, community, administrative, or systematic level to embrace a more liberatory understanding of our work.

Feminist abolition praxis is a way of thinking about social justice that takes seriously the damaging power of the three aspects of carceral expansion previously described. It calls forth the need for an analysis of the criminal legal system that understands how it serves to create oppression rather than safety or protection. At the level of direct services, an abolition praxis means that intervention programs and advocacy initiatives must avoid even the most subtle or indirect reliance on the punishment industry as a way to restore equilibrium to individuals or groups. Alternative approaches must be developed that are not built on carceral logic and do not, even inadvertently, build up the Prison Nation. Attention must be paid to those most affected as well as the larger network or community who experience secondary consequences of carceral expansion, so that social work intervention does not position “helping some get protection” against “creating risk” for others who are similarly situated. Self-determination and centering the lives of those most impacted by the work we do is crucially important when advocating and building alliance with the communities targeted by the Prison Nation.

At the level of systems advocacy and institutional change, feminist social workers working from the framework of abolition need to prioritize the work against the buildup of a Prison Nation. Prisons are not feminist, ¹ and service is not liberation. Any work at the individual level must have a concomitant social change component that focus on resisting the profoundly powerful carceral state. This mandate results from the analysis shared at the beginning of this article that shows how issues that social workers are typically preoccupied with; educational access, health, and mental health services, ensuring safe public spaces, food justice, safe, and affordable housing, and so on, in addition to the larger questions of racial justice, gender equity, community empowerment, and the like, which are all threatened by the pernicious expanding carceral state. That is, the specific goals that we have as feminist social workers as well as the larger principles that guide our work are critically threatened if we do not engage with resistance to the buildup of a Prison Nation. It is here that we must begin any attempt to create safety, expand opportunity, or deliver on the promise of justice that we are called and obligated to do, and abolition of the carceral state and investing in the liberation of people and the power of communities will advance our work almost more than anything else that we can do.

And finally, it is critical that as social workers, we embrace the philosophy of feminism, especially women of color feminisms, that offers so much guidance on how to do our work. Being led by those most affected, understanding the intersectionality of oppression, resisting participation in structures of oppression as short-term reform compromises, and working at both the micro- and macrolevel will surely advance our cause. The articles in this series are guided by these feminist abolition ideals. When feminist social workers are influenced by an understanding of the ways and the reason carcerality has been so prominent in the course of continued oppression, then the path toward a feminist abolition future is possible.