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Abstract

Drawing on findings from a Foucauldian-inspired critical discourse analysis, this article examines the hegemonic ways in which social work engages with criminalized women. Utilizing the analytic of governmentality, I explore the construction of criminalized women in contemporary social work discourse and ask how those constructions support and shape practice with criminalized women. Results show that knowledge production in social work serves as a significant site through which the profession draws on, but also resists, carceral logics. I begin by discussing contemporary social work as a form of neoliberal governance. Specifically, I illuminate the ways in which social work is implicated in surveillance and control and how this involvement is obscured under the framework of helping. I then describe how bold counter discourses, such as those offered by abolitionist and anti-carceral thought foster spaces of resistance within the profession. I argue that social work should claim a stance of radical imagination in which we take seriously the calls to abolish the varying manifestations of the carceral state.

Keywords

criminalized women critical discourse analysis governmentality neoliberalism resistance

The last 40 years have seen a dramatic increase in the incarceration of women worldwide (Enos, 2017; Walmsley, 2016). The United States has the fastest growing rate and highest number of incarcerated women in the world (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020). Consequently, the mass incarceration of women has become a growing and complex field of scholarly interest. Feminist scholars have noted that the meaning of women’s criminalization is “not to be found within official legal or penal rhetoric, rather it [can] be located within the practices, conventions, and discourses of the wider aspects of social life and social control” (Barton, 2005, p. 8). The term carceral state usefully encompasses this sentiment and highlights “the multiple and intersecting state agencies and institutions that have punishing functions and regulate poor communities” (Lawston & Meiners, 2014, p. 5). This conceptualization calls our attention to how institutions not typically implicated in mass incarceration often overlap with and bolster the reach of the criminal legal system (Schwenar & Law, 2020). As such, prisons and jails are but one manifestation of a larger web of carceral control.

The growth of the carceral state is intimately connected to the entrenchment of social disadvantage enabled under neoliberal globalization (Carlton & Segrave, 2013; Sudbury, 2002; Wang, 2018). Neoliberalism can be understood as both an economic structure and an organizing ideological framework. As an economic structure, neoliberal austerity measures, working in tandem with privatization, have spawned large-scale divestment from the social wage alongside massive investment in carceral regimes (Ben-Moshe, 2020; Camp, 2016). As an ideology, neoliberalism has brought forth political rationalities and governmental technologies that enable everyday spaces such as work, educational institutions, and health and welfare agencies to become mechanisms for surveillance, regulation, and control of conduct (Beckett & Murakawa, 2012; Maidment, 2006; Wacquant, 2009). The carceral state thus includes logics and discourses that uphold the use of punishment as a “common sense,” response to social ills (Ben-Moshe, 2020).

A growing body of social work scholarship concerns itself with carceral expansion and critiques the ways in which carceral logic infiltrates everyday social work practice (Bergen & Abji, 2020; Jacobs et al., 2021; Jarldorn, 2020; Kim, 2013; Mehrotra et al., 2016; O’Brien et al., 2020; Valenzuela & Alcarzar-Campos, 2020). Such infiltration is neither neutral nor natural: it reflects both neoliberalism’s stranglehold on the profession and social work’s historical situatedness in a positivist school of criminological thought regarding practice with criminalized populations (Roberts & Springer, 2007; Wilson, 2010). The characteristics of positivist criminological thought include an attempt to explain and predict criminal behavior and, thus, modify said behavior through individualized intervention. In an attempt to predict criminality, risk assessments are used to identify and target people who are at risk of certain behaviors. In other words, social work, despite its embrace of an ecological model and social justice goals, has historically assumed a view that crime and criminal behavior are caused by individual factors, such as mental illness (Wilson, 2010). Such a view frames involvement in crime as merely psychological in nature, disconnected from inequality, and lends itself to individualized responses and interventions (Donohue & Moore, 2009; Kendall, 2004; Pollack, 2006). However, prison abolitionists and scholars studying racial capitalism have extensively documented the intertwined role of white supremacy and capitalism in the rise of the carceral state (Ben-Moshe, 2020; Camp, 2016; Davis, 2003; Gilmore, 2007; Wang, 2018).

This article joins with the current critiques of the carceral state and examines how knowledge production in social work serves as a significant site through which the profession draws on, but also resists, carceral logics in research and practice with criminalized women. Utilizing the analytic of governmentality in conjunction with insights from critical feminist scholarship, I will illuminate the less obvious ways that social work is implicated in surveillance and control and how this involvement is obscured under the framework of helping. I also show how bold counter discourses, such as those offered by abolitionist and anti-carceral thought, foster spaces of resistance within the profession.

Conceptual Foundations

Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Social Work

To understand the power relations underlying helping interventions, scholars draw on Foucault’s (1991) concept of governmentality. Foucault conceptualized governmentality as a regime of power that dictates norms for behavior. In other words, governmentality highlights a system of power in which individuals become governed through the production, internalization, and regulation of norms. Grounded in post-structural understandings of power, governmentality rests on the assumption that power operates both structurally and ideologically and “is exercised and relational rather than merely oppressive or repressive” (Strega, 2005, p. 225). It is everywhere and everything.

Governmentality has inspired much analysis on neoliberal evolutions in the welfare state. Neoliberalism rests on the central tenets of individualism, choice and responsibility, market-driven economics, and laissez faire approaches to the public sector with minimal government oversight and involvement (Abramovitz & Zelnick, 2018; Brown, 2015; Larner, 2000). This set of principles has driven shifts in policy agendas from those that endorse government responsibility for social welfare to those of deregulation and privatization. Consequently, we see relentless government divestment (a roll back) from policies and programs that contribute to our common well-being (such as health, education, and social services) in favor of (a rolling out) those that focus on individual responsibility and market-based rationalities (Brown, 2015; Wacquant 2009).

Viewed from the conceptual lens of governmentality, neoliberalism’s demand for less government does not result in less governance. Rather, neoliberalism is marked by ever-shifting forms of governance which extend well beyond the actions of the state (Rose, 2000; Webb, 2003). Rose (2000) argues that neoliberal strategies of rule govern not only from above (the state) but also through diverse and diffuse technologies of government, which include ideologies and practices infused into the very fabric of our existence. Under this framework, nonconformity, rather than illegal acts, implicitly becomes the focus of governance. As such, nonstate actors increasingly step in to prescribe and regulate a politics of conduct that aligns with governmental interests. Social work figures prominently in this space and the last 40 years have seen a drastic reconfiguration in the role of the profession. The push toward managerialism and professionalization alongside obligations to funders that value efficiency over effectiveness, adherence to evidence-based practice interventions, and documentation of measurable outcomes has transformed social work in several ways. Social work has seen an increased emphasis on resource management, procedural compliance, standardized assessments, and individual-level service delivery over community organizing and macro-level analyses (Gray & McDonald, 2006; Webb, 2001). Subsequently, the assessment and management of risk and a preoccupation with “what works” has usurped holistic approaches to meeting client needs and addressing social problems (Hyslop, 2018).

Governing Risk: Therapeutic Governance

Pollack (2013) asserts that the current “truth regime” guiding what can be known within human services and correctional practice is rooted in evidence-based research and practice. She contends that the narrow definitions of “success” that flow out of evidence-based practices (typically measured in terms of individualized psychological indicators and recidivism rates) limit practitioners’ ability to engage effectively with criminalized women and take away women’s ability to define their experience and needs for themselves. For instance, in qualitative studies, peer support has been found effective in helping women successfully reintegrate into the community upon release from prison (Richie, 2001; Sowards et al., 2006). However, stringent rules applied to women (by both welfare systems and carceral systems) after they have been criminalized often hinge their success on staying out of contact with peers (Pollack, 2013). This is premised on a logic embedded in “risk thinking” that sees interactions with criminalized peers as a risk factor rather than a resilience factor (Pollack, 2010). Therefore, an aspect of reintegration that women view as helpful toward meeting their goals not only goes unrecognized but is also penalized.

Risk thinking has a long history in carceral systems (Hannah-Moffat, 2006) and has increasingly become ubiquitous in social work practice (Green, 2007; Parton, 1998). A central element of risk thinking involves predicting the likelihood of harm to self, others, or society (Rose, 2000). Risk-based interventions for women often emphasize empowerment, “healthy” choices, and the development of self-esteem and self-management skills (Hannah-Moffat, 2005). For example, in an examination of the reintegration experiences of women released from prison, Pollack (2010) illustrates how therapeutic programming for criminalized women works in specifically gendered ways. Grounded in assumptions that link criminal behavior in women to low self-esteem, social work efforts to rehabilitate women focus on reducing risk by raising self-esteem. The logic assumes that greater self-esteem will empower women to make better decisions and thereby reduce their risk for recidivism. Yet, as Pollack (2010) points out, this logic ignores the reality that choice is constrained by social and power relations and that the choices people makes are not always the result of poor self-esteem, but rather the result of the options and opportunities (or lack thereof) available to them. By now, a large body of research documents that structural factors such as poverty and racism play a key role in the nature and extent of women’s involvement in behaviors that are criminalized (Balfour & Comack, 2014; Bhattacharjee, 2002; Comack, 2018; Davis & Shaylor, 2001; Kajstura, 2020; McCorkel, 2013; Muehlmann, 2018; Richie, 2012; Sudbury, 2014).

Similarly, Goodkind (2009) illustrates how individualized, risk-based framings are embedded in residential treatment programs for young women involved in the criminal legal system. She found that programs, which professed a feminist approach to their work with young women, operationalized their feminism by way of empowerment groups which sought to build self-esteem and enhance confidence among the young women. Her interviews with program staff revealed the underlying assumption that the enhancement of self-esteem and independence was necessary to mitigating poor decision-making and reducing risk for recidivism. Like Pollack (2010), Goodkind (2009) contends that the focus on self-esteem is ultimately disempowering because it ignores how one’s power to act is shaped by larger social conditions and relations. Additionally, she emphasizes that the available evidence does not support a causal link between low self-esteem and engagement in behaviors that are branded as criminal, which further problematizes empowerment as a strategy for risk management.

These examples highlight how efforts to build self-esteem to reduce criminalized behavior miss the mark in that they conflate freedom and agency and construct the self as contained within the personal rather than as a product of larger social relations (Hannah-Moffat, 2004). Rather than examining factors such as poverty, racism, exposure to violence, unemployment, and lack of childcare as structural factors needing to be remedied, risk thinking turns the consequences of social exclusion and oppression into individual issues that should then be effectively managed and resolved through therapy and empowerment (Hannah-Moffat, 2006; Pollack, 2010). Cruikshank (1993) explicitly links the bolstering of an individual’s self-esteem and self-determination to processes of governmentality. She states, “self-esteem is a technology of citizenship and self-government for evaluating and acting upon ourselves so that the police, the guards, and the doctors do not have to” (p. 330). By internalizing notions of normalization, people can then become sensible managers of their own risk. Indeed, under neoliberal rationalities, risk-avoiding behavior becomes a moral imperative as it involves issues of self-control, responsibility, and self-improvement (Lupton, 1999).

Interventions focused on self-improvement and personal development, then, can be understood as a larger trend in neoliberal governing (Cruikshank, 1993; Hannah-Moffat, 2005; McCorkel, 2013; Pollack, 2009). McKim (2008) argues that such interventions form the basis for therapeutic governance. McKim conceptualizes therapeutic governance as an individualizing form of control which constructs the problems clients face as internal to the self, treating public and political issues as private problems. Pupavac (2001) defines therapeutic governance as a form of risk management that “makes a link between psychological well-being and security, and seeks to foster personalities able to cope with risk and insecurity” (p. 161). The management of risk is taken up through psychological interventions rather than, or in addition to, more overt mechanisms of control. The concept of therapeutic governance provides us with a nuanced view of power and control and allows us to see the ways in which practices of care (embedded in discourses of helping) exist alongside practices of regulation and control (Webb, 2003).

Therapeutic governance, then, can be understood as a manifestation of governmentality, which accounts for the multifaceted, discursive nature of power. Because systems of governance function through discourse, it is important to consider the discourses that shape social work’s understanding of and interventions with criminalized women. Accordingly, this study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a method through which to analyze the language and taken-for-granted assumptions that guide thinking and practice in the profession (Gee, 2011). The purpose of the study was 3-fold: (1) to explore the construction of criminalization of women in contemporary social work discourse, (2) to understand the knowledge that is produced through those constructions, and (3) to explore how that knowledge supports and shapes social work practice with criminalized women. While I provide a detailed examination of the first two inquiries elsewhere (Leotti, 2020), the analysis contained in these pages is primarily concerned with the third.

Methodology

Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that combines linguistic analysis and social theory to address the way power and dominance are (re)produced in texts (Jäger & Maier, 2009; Wodak & Meyer, 2009). Concerned primarily with the construction of social phenomena, CDA involves a focus on the wider social, political, and historical contexts in which talk and text occur and simultaneously explores the way relations of power are encoded and enacted in language. This study draws on Jäger and Maier’s (2009) framework for performing a Foucauldian-inspired CDA. This method of CDA builds on Foucault’s conceptualizations of discourse and provides a concrete platform for attending to the linguistic expressions of issues concerning power and knowledge. Jäger and Maier’s method of CDA helps reveal contradictions between and within discourses, the limits of what can be said and done, and how discourse makes certain statements seem rational and beyond all doubt.

Text Selection

Data include a sample of articles published in social work high-impact journals. My decision to confine analysis to social work high-impact journals is based on theoretical assumptions related to influence and power. Foucault (1972) recognized that the power of discourse is reinforced through institutional support, thereby producing systems that enable, constrain, and govern discourse. Ultimately, what comes to be seen as legitimate knowledge or “truth” is a product of both discourse and power. Thus, with their conferred status and legitimacy, high-impact academic journals can be understood as a governing social work discourse. The institutional support behind high-impact journals merges with the totalizing power of “the scientific” to (re)produce and reinforce specific knowledge claims which in turn shape social work practice.

I identified high-impact social work journals using Eigenfactor. Eigenfactor is a project established through the University of Washington which evaluates the importance of scholarly journals and provides a searchable database of the most influential journals by Institute for Scientific Information subject category. Eigenfactor is freely available and is considered a good proxy for the Impact Factor (Davis, 2008). Utilizing the list of journals generated by Eigenfactor, I then performed a key word search in the Web of Science using key words AND publication name [journal title] AND date range [2000–2017]. Key words included criminal/ criminalization/ criminalized/ criminality/ prison/ incarceration/ criminal justice/ corrections/ reentry/ diversion/ offender / offense/ re-offense/ recidivism/ parole/ probation AND women/ woman/ female/ mother. The above key words are those that are commonly found in the literature regarding women involved in the criminal legal system and include women who may be currently and formerly incarcerated. Furthermore, because children of incarcerated parents are a growing topic of interest to social workers, mother/motherhood was included in addition to women/woman/female as key words. My final data set consisted of 49 articles from 12 journals. Online Appendix A shows the journals from which the data set was drawn. Online Appendix B provides a list of the articles included in the data set.

Analysis Process

In terms of analysis, CDA requires a particular orientation when engaging with texts; rather than simply looking at what a text says or depicts, CDA provides a close reading on how meaning is constructed and negotiated in the text, questioning what is implied as well as what may be missing or left out (Jäger & Maier, 2009). My analysis consisted of two main phases: (1) a structural analysis of the entire sample and (2) a detailed analysis of selected texts. The structural analysis involved multiple readings of the entire sample. In this phase, I looked at what was represented, what was missing, and identified broad discursive themes and patterns. The detailed analysis involved a close in-depth reading of how meaning was expressed through the structure and form of language. Analysis at this level was organized around five main facets: context, surface, rhetorical means, content, ideological statements, and discourse positions. Jäger and Maier (2009) offer a template for detailed analysis consisting of specific analytic questions. I adapted their template to conceptually align with my study and used the adapted template to guide each dimension of the detailed analysis (see Online Appendix C). These two levels of analysis led to an overall synoptic analysis or final assessment of the discourse. For more details on analysis, see Leotti (2020).

Results and Analytic Discussion

This section begins by reviewing social work as a site of governance. I outline the dominant stream of interventions and practice modalities offered throughout the data, including those predicated on risk reduction and active alignment with the criminal legal system. Through this analysis, I show that social work functions as a form of government at a distance. Next, I move onto considering social work as a site of resistance, where I describe a small but bold counter discourse found in the data. Although just a small subset of my sample, I see these emergent counterdiscourses as indicative of the larger discursive struggle within the profession and as critical to fostering spaces of hope and possibility.

Social Work as Governance

There are two primary ways in which the discourse in the data set operate as a form of governance. The first focuses explicitly on risk assessment and risk reduction, and the other focuses on the enhancement of a psychological self. Authors in the data set do not always draw on one or the other exclusively, but often pull on both. As such, the data call for a variety of practices that monitor and surveil criminalized women while simultaneously encouraging them to become experts on themselves and work to change themselves, their thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. Here, I focus on two overlapping discursive manifestations of governance: an emphasis on risk management practices and the construction of carceral involvement as a therapeutic “opportunity.” I argue that the uncritical embrace and deployment of therapeutic correctional programming serves to justify the existence and expansion of carceral institutions.

Reliance on risk

The majority of articles in this study (n = 38) include a strong reliance on risk frameworks, with a focus on risk assessment and risk reduction as the intervention and reduced recidivism as the preferable outcome. The logic of risk management rests in a framework of assessment and prediction that determines future involvement in the criminal legal system (i.e., recidivism). Such determinations then lead to responses that always require more intrusion into the lives of those who are marginalized. In this we see a positivist, neoliberal rationality that defines social work’s role as that of assessor and manager of risk. In so doing, such articles often call for expansion of programs and services both in and out of the criminal legal system to act as surveillance mechanism for criminalized women and their families. Such surveillance is often coded through the language of helping.

For example, Jung and LaLonde (2016) state, “We conclude that incarcerated women with foster care experiences need more attention and extra support [emphasis added] from the appropriate institutions upon their release” (p. 41). The discourse throughout the data often identifies risks women face and then, like Jung and LaLonde, proceeds to call for increased “attention and support.” Such calls presuppose benevolence in attention and support rather than an element of intrusion and surveillance. However, increased surveillance of any sort, even the professed benevolent type, paves the way for more carceral interventions and sanctions. Such interventions work by inserting constant surveillance into the lives of those convicted and are backed up by the looming threat of incarceration for technical violations (McCorkel, 2017). Indeed, technical violations while on parole and probation account for the largest proportion of recidivism rates (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020).

The issue of working with and for the criminal legal system was present throughout the data set. Authors in the data accomplish this in a number of ways, primarily by calling for collaboration of various sorts between carceral systems and social work, discussing the opportunities for practice and research that are available in jails and prisons, and emphasizing what social work can offer the criminal legal system. For example, Fedock (2017) advocates for the increase of social workers in carceral settings and states, “Given the inherent tension between prison goals of security and the mental health needs of prisoners, social work may serve as a field for mediating this tension” (p. 39). These and similar statements throughout the data assume that social work will, or can, exert a therapeutic, perhaps humanizing quality on the criminal legal system. Such statements do not account for the danger that the influence will work in the inverse direction: that the goals and values of social work will be consumed under correctional logic, inadvertently functioning in complicity with the interests and goals of carceral institutions. As such, the discourse deployed throughout the data set was one that allowed authors to appear progressive in intent while ultimately remaining neutral and reinforcing carceral logic.

Furthermore, very little explicitly political language is used in the data. For example, despite it being widely understood that systemic racism is a key feature of mass incarceration, racism is named in only four articles (i.e., Epperson et al., 2009; Fedock, 2017; O’Brien & Ortega, 2015; Willison & O’Brien, 2017). Similarly, despite the fact that our national professional organizations recognize mass incarceration as an urgent social justice issue, mass incarceration is named in only two articles (i.e., O’Brien & Ortega, 2015; Willison & O’Brien, 2017). The site of intervention is typically scaled down to target individual behaviors and risks. For example, in an article examining “women’s psychological adjustment to prison,” Fedock (2017) claims that, “psychological adjustment is a core issue for determining the mental health needs of prisoners, preventing worsening mental health, and promoting lowered recidivism” [emphasis added] (p. 33). Here, the sneaky issue of recidivism rears its head. Linking psychological adjustment, or lack thereof, to risk for recidivism assumes an individualized understanding of the factors that lead to recidivism and (re)entanglement with the criminal legal system and keeps the discussion located at the site of individual choices and feelings. The individual is centralized as the explanatory variable (i.e., risk factor) for recidivism. Such explanations ignore the research that shows that incarceration itself actually works to increase recidivism (Lipsey & Cullen, 2007).

Fedock (2017) then proceeds to define and discuss psychological adjustment in prison and states, “Initial psychological distress on entry into prison is considered normal and typically decreases after the first few weeks (Islam-Zwart et al., 2007). However, persistent psychological distress is viewed as abnormal [emphasis added]” (p. 34). Although the author later discusses deprivation theory, which connects an incarcerated woman’s distress to their environment, the above excerpt invokes normalizations in which psychological distress is pathologized as abnormal and, the individual rather than the prison environment, becomes the focal point for intervention.

Prison as opportunity

Although there are many ways the existence of the carceral state is legitimized throughout the data, the most troubling trend I observed is the explicit framing of prison, or carceral involvement, as an opportunity. Seventeen articles frame the prison and carceral supervision as an opportunity for growth, reflection, and skill building. For example, after discussing the challenging life experiences many incarcerated women face, Miller et al. (2014) assert that. “Jail may at some level provide—if not a respite—an opportunity to reflect [emphasis added]” (p. 168). Similarly in an article on substance use, Hepatitis C, and service availability among rural incarcerated women, Staton-Tindall et al. (2015) discuss the dearth of substance abuse treatment facilities in rural areas and state:

In the absence of these available and accessible services, the rural jail may provide an opportunity to “sober up” and return to the street where relapse and/or overdose is a significant risk. Thus, jails provide a valuable and often untapped opportunity to provide drug abuse and related health interventions to this high-risk population. [emphasis added] (p. 393)

In the above excerpt, the authors not only frame jail as an opportunity for women to “sober up,” but they also reinforce the use of incarceration as a way to accommodate for neoliberal eviscerations to the welfare state. Through the assertion that jail is a useful venue for providing treatment, the authors implicitly affirm that incarceration is an appropriate way to compensate for the lack of treatment and services in the community. This statement highlights the very real ways in which jails and prisons are used to manage the social issues that manifest as a consequence of social exclusion under neoliberalism. Furthermore, such statements effectively constrain social work’s advocacy efforts. Rather than advocating for appropriate treatment availability in the community, Staton-Tindall et al. activate a logic that works to sustain the use of incarceration as a means for dealing with substance use. Through the propagation of social service/criminal system alignment, they also ensure their own (i.e., social work’s) legitimacy in a rapidly disintegrating welfare state. The question remains: what happens when services that are designed to “help” are dictated in and through (and perhaps depend on) the carceral system?

In another explicit framing of incarceration as opportunity, Gilham (2012) states:

Preparation for and return to life beyond the institution requires a corrective treatment experience that is based on exploration of past behaviors, skill development, and enhancement of the individual’s self-confidence and self-efficacy to meet the demands of the future. These women must capitalize on the opportunity they have while incarcerated. [emphasis added] (pp. 100–101).

There are obvious ways in which the above statement reflects the ideological positioning of psychological discourses and activates technologies of the self to initiate self-governance. The authors presuppose that the purpose of incarceration is treatment and rehabilitation rather than incapacitation and punishment.

In a less explicit framing of incarceration as opportunity, Schlager and Moore (2014) state, “Mothers who use incarceration constructively as a time of self-reflection can have more successful reunification with their children [emphasis added]” (p. 100). In this statement, the authors implicitly assert that there is a right way and a wrong way to “use incarceration.” For them, the correct way involves “self-reflection.” It leaves one to wonder if self-reflection is really all that is needed to support reunification with children? There is an inherent responsibilizing quality to their assertion. Women are held responsible not only for the behavior that fostered their incarceration, the behavior for which they presumably need to “self-reflect” (sit in the corner and think about yourself), but they are also held responsible for what reunification looks like. If reunification does not go well, it can then be reduced to a problem of the self—an individual woman’s lack of effort or inadequate self-reflection.

My discussion here is not meant to diminish a woman’s agency but to point to the factors that constrain agency and therefore limit the logic of the author’s assertion. The reality is that there are many reasons that reunification is challenging post-incarceration, and many of those reasons fall outside of the control of individual women. Child welfare requirements for employment, housing, and childcare all interact with policies that disenfranchise and restrict the upward mobility of women who have been criminalized (Smith & Young, 2003).

The framing of incarceration as an opportunity is troubling for a range of reasons. First, it requires infusing the discourses of treatment and “helping” with those of punishment and control, a process Carlen and Tombs (2006) dub “thera-punitive.” Second, thera-punitive rationality assumes that women are getting effective treatment and support in carceral settings, which has been widely critiqued as a contradiction in terms given the violent and often traumatizing nature of correctional involvement (Hannah-Moffat, 2006; Pollack, 2010). Third, the discursive framing of incarceration as a therapeutic “opportunity” elides moral and political concerns regarding the carceral state, aligns social work with carceral institutions, and upholds the use of prisons and jails as an appropriate response to social exclusion. Further, it passively accepts the logic of punishment and aligns social work with carceral institutions in concerning ways. The effect this has is to ultimately depoliticize social work itself (author masked).

Social Work as Resistance

Although not dominant by any means, there was a small subset (n = 4) of my sample that I would consider as offering a counterdiscourse (i.e., Heidemann et al., 2016; O’Brien & Ortega, 2015; Smith & Young, 2003; Willison & O’Brien, 2017). Counterdiscourses are examples of resistance that contest prevailing representations and ways of knowing (Hall, 1997). My discussion of counterdiscourses is gleaned from my analysis of the dominant discursive themes that I have problematized so far in this article and elsewhere (author masked). Dominant discourses have power because they naturalize their subject matter and make certain things seem self-evident (Foucault, 1972). Therefore, a look at the discourses that exist on the margins helps us disrupt what comes to be known as normal and natural. As Fadyl et al. (2012) state:

…those practices on the boundaries, which occupy the areas of ‘possible but outside the mainstream’, allow an exploration of what could be. Exploring the boundaries between what is allowed and not allowed, between what makes sense and what seems absurd, highlights those things that are thinkable and doable but not self-evident, and thus helps to make current discourse and its material effects more visible. (p. 492)

In other words, by attending to the discursive, we can see how discourse is contested and contestable, productive in expanding possibilities for resistance. I identified, and discuss here, pieces that present a significant challenge to the dominant ways of constructing, knowing, and working with criminalized women that were prevalent in the data set. The meaning of a counterdiscourse is revealed only in juxtaposition to the dominant discourse. Therefore, the counterdiscourse does not seek to simply supplant the dominant discourse; it exists in the same discursive space and by virtue of that existence exposes and questions the logic and strategies of the dominant discourse, and thereby undermines it.

Embracing the logic of abolition

Unlike the majority of articles in the sample, the pieces I identify as a counterdiscourse disrupt the underlying construction of crime and question the logic of punishment. Accordingly, they move away from reliance on the criminal legal system as a means of dealing with social problems. They call on social workers to engage in policy advocacy, utilize anti-oppressive practice frameworks, and consider prison abolition as a viable option. In this, social work defines itself politically, as an advocate and agent of social change.

To begin, there is very little behavior talk in the counterdiscourse. When a discussion of individual level issues or behaviors is presented, the articles of the counterdiscourse tend to situate behaviors within a sociopolitical context and examine them as manifestations of larger structural issues related to inequality. For example, in a discussion regarding the impact of the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 on women, Willison and O’Brien (2017) state, “When women turn to survival behaviors, these are criminalized, stripping the contextual factors of poverty and institutional racism from the analysis” (p. 41). There are a number of factors worth noting. First, behaviors are discussed as being criminalized, not inherently criminal. Second, behaviors are contextualized within, and as an inevitable product of, capitalism and white supremacy. The use of the adjective survival also depathologizes women without stripping them of their agency; it alerts us to the fact that not everyone has the same choices, and the choices that people make may be among the best that are available to them. In other words, the term “survival behaviors” creates space to conceptualize behavior that is criminalized as a form of resistance to poverty and oppression (Comack, 2014; Richie, 2012; Sered & Norton-Hawk, 2014). And finally, because the sentence was linked to a discussion of the impact of welfare reform, the authors attend to the nuanced ways in which seemingly disparate policies (i.e., social welfare and carceral) intersect in complex ways to impact the lives and criminalization of women. This sentence provides an example of how in the counter-discourse women are constructed as criminalized and marginalized, rather than risky.

Although the term risk is used very little in this portion of the data, when it is utilized, the locus of risk as well as the site of intervention is firmly grounded in systemic issues and the need for systemic change. Smith and Young (2003), for example, do a deep dive policy analysis on “The Multiple Impacts of TANF, ASFA, and Mandatory Drug Sentencing for Families Affected by Maternal Incarceration.” After providing an overview of the intention and impact of the Adoption and Safe Families Act, they state: “There is a societal obligation to address risk factors related to poverty, and concurrent planning does not address this reality” (p. 544). In this statement, the authors not only name poverty as a risk, they also address the failures of policies such as the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) when they are decontextualized from political and economic conditions that shape women’s lives. Further, the use of the term “societal obligation” creates a sense of urgency and responsibility. In this way, the authors are taking an explicit political stance.

Most articles in this subset of the data situate desirable interventions and outcomes at the systems level, rather than at the level of individual behavior. For example, Smith and Young (2003) call for changes in sentencing policies and for administering financial assistance, rather than therapy and skill building, to women and their families. O’Brien and Ortega (2015) move a step further and call for a complete dismantling of the criminal legal system and emphasize the politics of prison abolition:

Prison abolition exposes the racism and institutionalized oppression inherent to the prison system and challenges the ideological ‘need’ for prisons. Advocates and activists within the prison abolition movement recognize that prison does not make us safer and calls for shifting resources to reinvestment in community-based empowerment, community-led education, and radical activism as alternatives to the prison system. (p. 143)

In this way, the articles in the counterdiscourse all, in some way, actively undermine, rather than bolster the use of the prison and criminal legal system.

Conclusion: Social Work an Ontological Paradox

A central aspect of this study encourages an ongoing critique of risk discourses and the ways in which hegemonic practice scripts within social work contribute to processes of criminalization and complicity with the carceral state. Findings indicate that individualized interventions which focus on individual choice and therapeutic treatment appear to be the dominant model of service delivery in social work with criminalized women. With some notable exceptions, it appears as though the discourse on “therapeutic” interventions in carceral settings has largely escaped critical scrutiny in mainstream social work. As such, it is ubiquitously taken up as a “commonsense” framework for thinking about social work interventions with criminalized women. Given the concerns I have outlined regarding the discourse on individual growth and change that is deployed in the data, as well as the almost universally accepted framework of risk in social work (author masked; Webb, 2006), there is reason for alarm. Individualized and psychologized notions of crime function in tandem with risk discourses to reduce gendered sociopolitical realities to a problem of the self, which can then be remediated though therapeutic intervention. The discursive framing of punishment as rehabilitation is dehumanizing to those caught in the carceral apparatus and activates a logic that justifies the existence, and expansion, of carceral institutions (Lawston & Meiners, 2014). I argue that the notion of therapeutic opportunity in this data operates as a “screen discourse” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2001, p. 4) to provide a veneer of progressiveness/social justice, while simultaneously minimizing or erasing the importance of racialized, gendered, and economic oppression.

Which begs the question: within social work, is “helping talk” synonymous with social justice talk? If so, what are the implications for the profession’s ability to effect meaningful and substantial social change? This is the primary tension in the data, whereby authors invoke, yet, ultimately, undermine social justice values. When terms such as social justice and empowerment are drawn on, they are immediately undermined by the suggested use of individual treatment, which effectively drains these words of their political and ideological meanings and reinforces essentialized notions of gender. Although I did not find any of this particularly surprising, I was caught off guard and deeply troubled by the calls, both explicit and implicit, for social service and carceral system alignment that I found in the data. Through an eager alignment with carceral systems, the profession functions as an instrument of state sanctioned governance and is depoliticized far too easily. Social work’s imbrication in the carceral state brings into stark relief the profound ethical ramifications of doing business as usual. Our ability to contribute to the common good is thwarted by reckless engagement with carceral logics and neoliberal rationalities. In this, I worry that we are too far removed from the ethical and political discourses that are necessary for promoting social justice and social change.

Throughout this project, I kept returning to the same questions: Why has the prison and the carceral state become such an inevitable, or necessary, feature in the social imagination of our profession? And why does social work seem to continuously fall back on individual-level skill development as the answer for systemic issues? Do we simply lack imagination? Foucault reminds us that wherever there is power, there is resistance. In fact, the sustenance of power, in part, relies on the tension produced through resistance. Resistive ideas, then, are not suppressed but remain marginal, because in comparison to what passes for “truth” or common sense, they often seem illogical and irrational. Indeed, under a rationality of neoliberalism, resistance to the carceral state seems not only illogical, but also untenable.

However, as the articles comprising the counterdiscourse illustrate, it is possible to push beyond dominant narratives toward abolition. The pieces in this counte-discursive thread firmly anchor their analysis in explanations of structural inequity, disrupt the underlying construction of crime, and question the logic of punishment. In short, all of the articles in the counterdiscourse share an element of anti-carceral/abolitionist logic. The logic of abolition rests in a framework of non-reformist reforms (Hereth & Bouris, 2020; Kaba & Duda, 2017). In contrast to reformist reforms which “serve to resolve the crisis of the carceral state through carceral accommodation” (Kim, 2020, p. 319), and thus support the status quo, non-reformist reforms work to “imagine a different horizon and are not limited by a discussion of what is possible at present” (Ben-Moshe, 2020, p. 16). For example, fighting for women’s safety in prisons is supported by feminist abolitionists and considered a necessary non-reformist reform (Davis, 2003). In contrast, other seemingly progressive initiatives, such as the uptake of gender responsive programming in carceral settings or the use of community-based electronic monitoring, are considered reformist in that they strengthen and expand, rather than displace, the reach of carceral systems (Balfour, 2014; Ben-Moshe, 2020; Gilmore, 2018; Hannah-Moffat, 2006; Pollack, 2006; Lawston & Meiners, 2014).

Although beyond the scope of this study’s analysis, it is notable that by the time of this writing, Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work published a special edition on “Anti-Carceral Feminisms: Imagining a World without Prisons.” I believe the emergence of such discourses illustrates a stretching of discursive limits. I do not intend to imply that social work cannot or should not provide individual-level supports and treatment, but there are some serious questions our profession must grapple with regarding how we can provide effective support when aligned with carceral institutions and how we sustain our values and ethical imperatives for social justice if some of the most influential scholarship coming out of our field is bound up in individualizing and pathologizing discourses. I argue here that the project of social work may benefit from claiming space for imagination: a stance of radical imagination in which we take seriously the calls to abolish the varying manifestations of the carceral state (Ben-Moshe, 2020; Davis, 2003; Gilmore, 2018).

The framework of feminist abolition (or anti-carceral feminism) can be a useful tool in this regard. Feminist abolition brings forth a broader understanding of punishment and control that includes, yet moves beyond, the physical boundaries of confinement (Lawston & Meiners, 2014; Meiners, 2016; O’Brien et al., 2020). In this sense, the meaning of women’s criminalization is understood to be infused into the gendered discourses, rationalities, and practices of not only the criminal legal system but also the everyday institutions that dictate norms for behavior. Angela Davis (2016) contends that a central aspect of feminist abolition is learning “how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as ‘normal’” (p. 100). Such a framing compels us to critically analyze both institutional capture and the underlying logics and practices that shape everyday spaces and seemingly benign, or “progressive,” interventions. As such, the logic of feminist abolition can help social work researchers, educators, and practitioners to examine the ways in which our work upholds or contributes to carceral capture and to identify innovative “non-reformist” alternatives.

Abolitionist thinking requires both critique and vision (Ben-Moshe, 2020; Davis, 2003; Kaba, 2021; Schenwar & Law, 2020). Critique is necessary to adequately account for our current social, political, and economic arrangements: the same arrangements that contribute to the legitimation and expansion of the carceral state. Such critique then demands that we center an “analysis of ‘crime’ that links it with social structures as opposed to individual pathology” (Davis & Rodriguez, 2000, p. 215). Abolition simultaneously requires bold visions of what might be. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2018) contends that abolition “isn’t just absence…. it’s a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently” (para. 28). It requires generating a social landscape in which people can thrive and imagining nonpunitive responses to social problems (Kim, 2020; O’Brien et al., 2020; Richie & Martensen, 2020). Taking abolition seriously requires the motivation and ability to envision a society that does not rely on or need carceral practices and logics (Richie & Martensen, 2020). When we begin to imagine what is possible, even if it appears improbable, we also begin to create the conditions for its existence. Only through radical acts of imagination can the improbable become possible.

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Footnotes

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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: John F. Longres Research Fellowship.

ORCID iD

Sandra M. Leotti

Supplemental Material

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