Abstract
It has been 25 years since the passage of the Violence Against Women Act as a part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (Crime Bill) of 1994, a moment that marked a victory for the feminist anti-violence movement but also cemented vital supports for survivors of gender-based violence to the expansion of mass incarceration in the United States. It is the lasting feminist ties to law enforcement, what has been coined as carceral feminism (Bernstein, 2005, 2012), and the implications for social work that motivates Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work’s special topic series on Anticarceral Feminisms: Imagining a World Without Prisons. While critiques of carceral feminism are prominent in anti-violence against women, antitrafficking, and prison abolition movements, this compilation offers a rigorous conceptual framing of persisting carcerality within social work. Thirteen articles, which will appear in the February, May, and August 2020 issues of Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, include empirical scholarship on where and how the profession of social work/social workers continues to participate in a system of punishment, retribution, and incapacitation and an interrogation of the possibilities of prison abolition currently expressed in the politic of feminist abolition and practices of transformative justice.
The topic of anticarceral critique and alternatives is not unique to this Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work’s special topic series as is evident in the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare’s grand challenge of “smart decarceration,” as announced in 2015 (Pettus-Davis & Epperson, 2015). The intersection of gender-based and law enforcement violence, however, persists in social work arenas as broad as immigrant advocacy, work in jails and prisons, reentry services, peace circles, LGBTQIA2S+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and/or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Two-Spirit) advocacy, human trafficking, and child welfare. Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work’s call for papers sought feminist, anticarceral scholarship that analyze current social work practices and policies. Many of the articles that constitute this compilation reveal the multiple and often invisible ways in which carcerality remains deeply infused within social work, including that which may be considered progressive, feminist, and even anticarceral, especially in the name of “reform.” The title of Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work’s special topics series is also intentionally aspirational, moving beyond critique to invite concrete examples and models for the world we would like to see and expressions of social work that serve the vision of a “world without prisons.”
While the majority of articles in this series focus on the United States, scholarship from Spain, Canada, and Australia shed light on the global impact of incarceration on the daily lives of millions of people, most of whom are marginalized on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, religion, and other categories of difference that vary in regional/national contexts but offer comparative mechanisms of exclusion, surveillance, and social control. This special topics series is also among the first publications to name feminist abolition as a feminist politic and praxis that explicitly rejects any form of arrest and incarceration as legitimate; aims not to reform but rather to dismantle jails, prisons, and policing; and actively works to build a liberated world without prisons.
The opening article by Richie and Martensen (2020) foregrounds the special topics series with a clear articulation of the basic tenets undergirding the Prison Nation, first introduced in Richie’s (2012) powerfully influential book, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation. In this article, the authors emphasize the close ties between the carceral state and the social welfare state—chronicling the ways in which U.S. investments in prisons correspond not to an increase in crime but to the dismantling of social services and public welfare including education. Despite wholesale expansions in the carceral web, the prison nation is selective in its vulnerable targets, precisely focused on particular raced, classed, and gendered bodies. Social work concessions to carceral logics and reform efforts aimed at service delivery that ameliorates the excesses of the punitive state have played a critical role in legitimizing and upholding the pillars of the prison nation. “Prisons are not feminist, and service is not liberation,” Richie and Martensen (2020) remind us. Rather, a feminist abolitionist framework demands that the social work profession that claims a commitment to social justice must remain vigilant in its opposition to the “punishment industry” in all of its forms.
Social Reforms Within the Criminal Legal System
Over the last several decades of the buildup of the prison nation, social work educators and scholars have varied in their adherence to and contestations against a particular role within the criminal legal system of control and custody that extends to surveillance upon release from jails or prisons across the land. Early observation about differences in values and aims between the systems of corrections and social work discouraged many social workers from entering correctional or forensic practice, especially at a time when ever longer and stiffer sentences had replaced any notion of rehabilitation. When the prison count of custodial bodies reached an apex in 2009 and major research centers such as the Urban Institute, the Vera Institute for Justice, and the Sentencing Project demonstrated the extent of racial bias in the criminal legal system that continued into community corrections and release practices, legislative bodies began recognizing the incarceration binge had not been effective for providing public safety.
It was during this period of the discovery of what Davis (2001) coined as the prison industrial complex (PIC) that social work discovered their role in reforming a broken yet everexpanding system. While research began pointing to the lack of the promised rehabilitation or restoration that could evolve with release, social workers began looking for the markers of success and resilience that enabled some to rebuild their lives after release from prison (Harris, 1987; O’Brien, 2001). That scholarly work opened some doors for case management and efforts to facilitate the rebuilding of lives after release with only partial success, given the multiple ways that new citizens were stigmatized and provided with few avenues for making good (Reardon, 2017). Major research efforts demonstrated that former inmates needed what any humans need to meet their basic needs (Chandler et al., 2009; Diamond et al., 2001; Fazel et al., 2016).
Social work educators also ventured into prisons and jails to establish courses for teaching social work students how to work within closed correctional settings and release sites (Frerich & Murphy-Nugen, 2019; Pollack, 2004; 2020). The National Organization of Forensic Social Work was established in 1983, offering a professional certificate in forensic social work, a published Journal (2011–2015), and hosted an annual conference for its members. Social work programs began offering courses, degrees, or graduate specialty programs that attempted to educate social workers in the core concepts for building a professional workforce. Both of the national social work professional organizations, the Council on Social Work Education and the Society for Social Work and Research, developed forensic program groups. The PIC had arrived at the door of the profession.
Prison Reform and the Nexus of Care and Control
In this special topic series, several articles specifically address the ways in which social work aiming toward reform and rehabilitation within the correctional system serves to strengthen carceral logics and the pathologizing of those incarcerated within jails and prisons. Three articles that span across the settler colonial nations of Canada and Australia, and Spain’s autonomous region of Andalusia, demonstrate the ways in which social work within prison walls participates in the violence of the carceral state. Pollack (2020), keenly noting that “[s]ocial workers are often positioned at the nexus of both care and control,” illustrates just how feminist and indigenous informed discourses when applied to programming among women in Canadian prisons are rather co-opted or “absorbed” by the dominant institution of the carceral state. While these programs may offer the guise of reform, they cannot transcend the prison system’s intrinsic and inescapable violence. Jarldorn (2020), in their examination of Australia as a prison nation founded as a colonial outpost, built by convict labor and the genocide of Australia’s First Nations People, is strident in what they describe as a “cautionary tale” against those that identified with the helping professions. Jarldorn’s stark juxtaposition between the optimistic language of “mak[ing] a difference” among social workers of good intent and an institution formulated toward “hypersurveillance, deprivation, and emotional repression” of prisoners reveals the impossibility of resolution except through a therapeutic model that assigns blame for imprisonment not upon the hegemonic mechanisms of the carceral state but rather upon the internal failings of individuals entrapped within its walls.
Alcázar-Campos and Valenzuela-Vela (2020) examine more closely the ways in which the narratives of the “good mother” and the “good victim” link Spain’s domestic violence services and the expanding reliance upon the carceral system to special privileges granted to women in prison who perform the gendered expectations of motherhood. The circumscription of women, disproportionately immigrant or Roma, to the neoliberal discourses and practices of social protection, in the case of victims of gender-based violence, or social control and redemption as good mothers in the case of women prisoners, demonstrates the related mechanisms through which the “state has co-opted the equality discourse to control vulnerable populations.”
The Prison Nation and Gendered Harms
In 2001, Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, a feminist social movement organization cofounded by Richie, and Critical Resistance, an explicitly prison abolitionist national organization cofounded by Angela Davis, came together to articulate the contributions and shortcomings of the feminist antiviolence movement and the prison abolitionist movement, respectively. While the language of carceral feminism had not yet emerged at that time, the critique of the feminist embrace of criminalization as a remedy to gender-based violence was clearly identified; on the other hand, the prison abolitionist movement’s preoccupation with law enforcement’s violence against men of color excluded that impacting women of color. Women and girls are indeed targeted by the carceral state in evergrowing numbers at a rate now surpassing men and boys, and the forms of violence they endure are often specifically gendered.
Several articles in this special topic series explicitly name the ways in which women, femme-identified, queer and gender nonconforming bodies surveilled, arrested and captured within jails and prisons, have been subjected to multiple forms of police violence. While Pollack, Jaldorn, and Alcazar Campos and Valenzuela-Vela turn our attention to the violence of women’s prisons, Hutchison (2020) and Winters and McLaughlin (2020) examine additional further forms of gendered violence that take place against incarcerated female bodies. Building on analyses of the PIC and racialized oppression, Winters and McLaughlin argue that the carceral mechanisms of policing and corrections are “projects to maintain white supremacy.” Their argument is framed by Winters’ analysis of long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) and their use within prisons to limit black fertility. They provide examples in which benefits, including reductions in sentences, are used to coerce criminalized women to agree to implantation of an LARC. Hutchison’s interviews with previously incarcerated women about strip searches lead her to view this pervasive practice as state-sanctioned and state-inflicted sexual assault.
Social Reforms Beyond Prison Walls
The false promise of social reform extends beyond prison walls to women and girls caught in the liminal space occupied by those identified as sex trafficked or otherwise deemed to be “forced” into sex work. The rapid growth of PIC attention to sex trafficking and the expansion of a new frontier for carceral feminism have further fueled the dual subjectivities of women and girls engaged in sex work as both victims and criminals. Anasti (2020) interviews social workers and other advocates working broadly within this sector to examine their views on law enforcement. The close relationship between advocates in the field and law enforcement as well as the ties between arrest and service provision lead not surprisingly to widespread failure to discern a rigorous critique of the dominance of the PIC. While deeply embedded carceral logics that define sex work through the lens of crime control and incorporate sex work and its remedies within the carceral state, the recognition of abuses inflicted by law enforcement and the contradictions between protection and incarceration are more likely to be interpreted as individual shortcomings or the unfortunate results of resource limitations. Collusion between service providers and the neoliberal dismantling of the social welfare sector is further illustrated in Whalley’s (2020) ethnographic study of a sexual assault center’s concessions to cost cutting outsourcing of services, the corporatization of service provision, and the facile acquiescence to law enforcement.
The analysis of social work complicity with the carceral system extends to the point of reentry for incarcerated people and what Welsh and Leyva (2020) describe as the “pathways into and out of ‘carceral citizenship.’” Examining the carceral logics embedded within the social welfare system, Welsh and Leyva turn their attention to what happens when people leaving prison apply for public assistance. Recognizing the complex and contradictory positionalities of frontline welfare workers, themselves subject to workplace abuse and exploitation, they examine how these workers comply with and resist the carceral logics embedded within their work with criminalized clients. The deprofessionalization of welfare work and the intentional lack of training regarding the conditions of their clients result in the continued exposure of formerly incarcerated people to further punishments. However, far from a simple condemnation of welfare workers as agents of social control, Welsh and Leyva’s analysis sheds light on the consequences of neoliberalism and the vulnerability of frontline workers to similar logics of carcerality that entrap their clients.
Pipelines to the PIC
Another set of articles by Mountz (2020) and Bergen and Abji (2020) investigate the carceral logics of the child welfare system and the ways in which they serve as a pipeline to the PIC. Mountz brings to attention queer and trans youth of color rarely featured in now ubiquitous pipeline metaphors. Arguing that the regulation of sexuality and gender norms among youth has been long embedded within the U.S. system of juvenile courts and detention, Mountz interviews queer and trans youth of color. Their stories expose the ways in which “families of origin, foster and adoptive families, schools, and the child welfare and juvenile justice systems” form a “constellation of exposures to interpersonal and state violence.”
Bergen and Abji (2020) explore a highly publicized case of child welfare neglect in Canada and social workers’ complicity in the threatened deportation of a racialized youth who was funneled through the foster care system. Drawing on the linkages between the carceral state and the child welfare system, their account vividly demonstrates what they identify as the “carceral pipeline for non-citizen youth.” Through deconstructing this case, Bergan and Abji discuss the deep complicity of the child welfare system in the state’s surveillance of immigrant bodies and how removal of children who are deemed at risk of future abuse and neglect, coupled with the child welfare workers’ failure to secure a child’s citizenship, can impose further harms including detention and deportation.
Feminist Abolition and the Possibilities of Transformation
Finally, this special topic series asks the question: What is to be done? While the analysis of the ways in which the PIC has permeated all levels of social, political, economic, cultural, and ecological life is critical, so too is an inquiry into what decarceral or more liberatory visions and practices are possible. Feminist social work, informed by and aligned with anticarceral and abolitionist praxis, offers a set of frameworks and practices that can better build toward such liberatory goals. Grounded in the feminist abolitionist framework of transformative justice and the values of collective and self-determined community strategies for justice, Pollack, Jaldorn, Hereth and Bouris (2020), and Kim (2020) each amplify feminist practice that illustrates the underlying principles that can counter the legacy of reformist social work that has too often colluded with the logic and institutions of incarceration.
While both Pollack and Jaldorn provide ample critique of educational programs and therapeutic programming within prisons, they both also highlight programs for incarcerated women that reject the hegemonic narrative of the woman prisoner as the fallen victim and incarceration as a pathway to correction and rehabilitation. Condemning conventional programs that individualize success and failure and place the blame for incarceration firmly within the scope of the individual choices of character and action of those captured within the PIC, they offer another set of principles, priorities, and practices that underlie programs centering the knowledge, perceptions, and needs of those inside. These prison educational programs, grounded in an explicitly prison abolitionist analysis of conditions within jails and prisons, illuminate the everyday violence of prison conditions and the underlying structures that regularly deliver women’s bodies into the PIC. While ever vulnerable to co-optation and the prioritization of university or other elite expertise over that of the women inside, the programs featured are anchored in a vigilant prioritization of the voice and collective decision-making of the participants. They illustrate how abolitionist work taking place inside of prisons can validate the experiences of the harsh realities of the carceral state while also opening resistant spaces for the liberatory potential of collective knowledge production and action. Hereth and Bouris (2020) further queer feminist analysis, highlighting three initiatives in which queer youth and adult organizing grounded in a prison abolitionist politic have engaged in what is referred to as nonreform reforms or reforms that counter the logic of the PIC. In this case, the fight for queer people within the PIC, for example, filing paperwork to change the names and gender markers for incarcerated transgender youth and adults, can serve to demand changes within carceral systems while also challenging the policing, surveillance, and incarceration of queer people and others targeted by the system of mass incarceration.
Kim’s (2020) overview of carceral feminism and the paradoxical choices that characterize the feminist anti-violence movement in its pursuit of enhanced policing also highlights the ways in which anticarceral and abolitionist transformative justice movements have developed and persist within the perils of the still hegemonic systems of capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, and settler colonialism. Citing the rising popularity of restorative justice as a counter to the punitive criminal legal system, she tempers the current attention to the harms of the carceral buildup with a warning to discern reforms that resolve the carceral crisis through accommodations to the carceral state from those that stand outside. This includes the promise of restorative justice that, in many cases, continues to work together with law enforcement. In opposition, transformative justice, and forms of restorative justice aligned with what Richie and Martensen name as feminist abolition, offers not only a vision of a world without prisons but also the on-the-ground implementation of the practices of liberation we as feminists and social workers have been and should join in constructing.