Building Social Capacity: A Core Concept for the Promote Smart Decarceration Grand Challenge

A central theme in social work practice is to build environmental supports in order to effect individual and social change. However, efforts to build community and shape environments is often lost in policy and research efforts. The Grand Challenge for Social Work Initiative is a call to action for the social work profession to systematically shape solutions to some of society's most intractable yet important problems. In order to achieve the kinds of transformative change called for in these grand challenges, it is important to integrate social work practice, policy, research and education around a central concept of building social capacity.

Smart decarceration will be accomplished when three interrelated outcomes have been achieved: 1- substantially reduce the jail and prison population; 2- redress existing social disparities in the criminal justice system; and 3- maximize public safety and well-being. Tinkering around the edges of the criminal justice system will not affect these outcomes to the extent needed – what is required is a different approach for responding to “crime” and undesired behaviors in a way that builds capacity for local level innovations.

The planning work of the promote smart decarceration grand challenge has focused on building social capacity as a central theme. Our working definition of social capacity is as follows: A community's ability to work together to build and sustain their own solutions, rather than yield the responsibility to another set of actors. We define community as individuals, families, civic groups and institutions, and public and private sector actors, grouped locally, and interacting with larger structures. Presenters will frame the roundtable in a community-based context and explain the role of local communities in devising innovative criminal justice solutions that are feasible, acceptable, and sustainable for various community stakeholders. We will discuss several ways in which we have deployed this concept in practice, policy, and research applications.

The presenters will describe methods and outcomes of initiatives they have led to build social capacity to promote smart decarceration. Attendees will leave with clear strategies in four areas: (1) cultivating large and small networks to advance smart decarceration concepts and applications (e.g., working groups, community advisory boards); (2) conducting multisite and applied research to generate community-based alternatives to current criminal justice practice approaches (e.g., deferred prosecution and community bail funds); (3) engaging community stakeholders in organizational and governmental policy reform (e.g., boundary spanning); and (4) building social capacity through research-practice-policy partnerships to achieve local level innovation, implementation, and adaptation. Attendees will learn how the components of “community” contribute to each of the four strategies and how to factor in jurisdictional variance in order to “innovate in context”.

We will lead a discussion amongst scholars interested in promote smart decarceration as well as other grand challenges about how the concept of building social capacity can advance their individual and collective work. We will then facilitate a brief action planning process through which attendees can develop concrete and tangible “next steps” for building social capacity.