Abolitionist social work is a theoretical framework and political project within the field of social work and an extension of the project of carceral abolitionism more broadly. Abolitionists seek to abolish punishment, prisons, police, and other carceral systems because they view these as being inherently destructive systems. Abolitionists argue that these carceral systems cause physiological, cognitive, economic, and political harms for incarcerated people, their families, and their communities; reinforce White supremacy; disproportionately burden the poor and marginalized; and fail to produce justice and healing after social harms have occurred. In their place, abolitionists want to create material conditions, institutions, and forms of community that facilitate emancipation and human flourishing and consequently render prisons, police, and other carceral systems obsolete. Abolitionist social workers advance this project in multiple ways, including critiquing the ways that social work and social workers are complicit in supporting or reinforcing carceral systems, challenging the expansion of carceral systems and carceral logics into social service domains, dismantling punitive and carceral institutions and methods of responding to social harms, implementing nonpunitive and noncarceral institutions and methods of responding to social harms, and strengthening the ability of communities to design and implement their own responses to social conflict and harm in the place of carceral institutions. As a theoretical framework, abolitionist social work draws from and extends the work of other critical frameworks and discourses, including anticarceral social work, feminist social work, dis/ability critical race studies, and transformative justice.
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Abolitionist Social Work
Noor Toraif and Justin C. Mueller
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Client Violence
Christina E. Newhill
Client violence and workplace safety are relevant issues for all social workers across practice settings. This entry addresses why and how social workers may be targets for a client's violent behavior, and what we know about who is at risk of encountering violence. Understanding violence from a biopsychosocial perspective, identifying risk markers associated with violent behavior, and an introduction to guidelines for conducting a risk assessment will be discussed. The entry concludes by identifying and describing some general strategies for the prevention of client violence.
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Confidentiality and Privileged Communication
Carolyn I. Polowy, Sherri Morgan, W. Dwight Bailey, and Carol Gorenberg
Confidentiality of client communications is one of the ethical foundations of the social work profession and has become a legal obligation in most states. Many problems arise in the application of the principles of confidentiality and privilege to the professional services provided by social workers. This entry discusses the concepts of client confidentiality and privileged communications and outlines some of the applicable exceptions. While the general concept of confidentiality applies in many interactions between social workers and clients, the application of confidentiality and privilege laws are particularly key to the practice of clinical social workers in various practice settings.
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Criminal Justice: Overview
Michael C. Gearhart
The American criminal justice system is comprised of four main components: law enforcement, the judiciary, corrections, and legislature. These components work together to investigate crimes, arrest individuals, weigh evidence of guilt, monitor individuals who are found guilty, and make laws. Though the criminal justice system is meant to administer justice in an equitable manner, a number of controversial policies and practices exist within the criminal justice system. These practices are typically rooted in historical biases that continue to create disparities today. Social work has a long history of reforming the criminal justice system. However, modern disparities illustrate that there is still work to be done. The skills of macro social workers are foundational to present-day advocacy efforts and emerging criminal justice practice, highlighting the enduring significance of macro social work practice in criminal justice reform.
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Prison Social Work
Jason Matejkowski, Toni Johnson, and Margaret E. Severson
This entry provides a description of prison social work and the array of responsibilities that social workers in prison settings have, including intake screening and assessment, supervision, crisis intervention, ongoing treatment, case management, and parole and release planning. The authors provide the legal context for providing social-work services to prisoners and delve into issues involving three specific populations of growing concern to corrections officials and to prison social work: women inmates, inmates who are parents, and inmates with mental illness. The tension between the goals of social work and corrections is explored and opportunities for social workers to apply their professional values within the prison setting are highlighted.
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Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System
Susan A. McCarter
Social work and criminal justice have a shared history in the United States dating back to the 19th century when their combined focus was rehabilitation. But with an increase in crime, this focus shifted to punishment and incapacitation, and a schism resulted between social work and criminal justice. Given current mass incarceration and disparities in criminal justice, social work has returned in force to this important practice. The latest Bureau of Justice Statistics research reports that 1% of all adult males living in the United States were serving a prison sentence of a year or longer (Carson & Anderson, 2016) and rates of diversion, arrest, sentencing (including the death penalty), incarceration, etc., vary considerably by race/ethnicity (Nellis, 2016). This entry explores race and ethnicity, current population demographics, and criminal justice statistics/data analysis, plus theories and social work-specific strategies to address racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system.
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Transformative Justice
Jelena Todic, Xhercis Méndez, Mel Webb, Calista Castellanos, Ruben Soto, Sheila M. McMahon, and M. Candace Christensen
Transformative justice (TJ) is a dynamic set of emergent strategies and abolitionist political commitments focused on responding to and transforming violence, harm, and abuse at the root. It encompasses values, beliefs, and community-based responses that aim to do so without resorting to further violence, punishment, or revenge and without relying on state mechanisms (e.g., prisons, police, courts) that produce and reproduce violence. TJ emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, led by and for communities most affected by criminalization and state-sponsored violence. This includes women of color, Indigenous communities, Black communities, people of color communities, immigrant communities, trans and queer communities, disabled communities, poor and low-income communities, sex workers, and youth. As such, TJ is deeply intertwined with the larger abolitionist movement. Its key concepts include recognizing structural violence as a root cause of interpersonal harm and focusing on trauma-informed care for healing justice. It also involves centering disability justice, adopting liberatory harm-reduction methods, and understanding accountability as a complex process involving individual and community aspects. Additionally, TJ embraces emergent strategy in social change, seeing everyday simple interactions as building blocks for complex systems that can foster more just and life-affirming worlds.
While most social workers face institutional constraints, such as mandatory reporting, that prevent them from practicing TJ, the principles of TJ can still inform social work. This TJ-informed social work approach involves shifting away from punitive and surveillance methods in social work to advocate for individual, organizational, community, and systemic changes consistent with liberatory harm reduction. Social workers can integrate TJ principles and practices within their professional roles to better align their practice with their ethical commitments. For example, social workers can differentiate between politicized and charity-based approaches to social services, learn about and integrate pod practices in their personal and professional lives, and commit to cultivating a TJ mindset. These actions could contribute to the broader aims of both social work and TJ while carefully avoiding the appropriation of TJ principles.
