Beyond the Bars: Rethinking Social Work with Criminalized Women

Background and Purpose

Neo-liberal transformations in the economy have contributed to women’s poverty across the globe and have brought an increasing number of women into contact with the criminal justice system. The United States, in particular, has the fastest growing rate and the highest number of incarcerated women in the world. The rising incarceration rate of women, and the disproportionate rate of women of color women in U.S. prisons is a timely and urgent issue and one that social work is poised to address. Indeed, some of our most prominent national organizations recognize mass incarceration as an urgent issue that merits the attention of social workers. As such, it is prudent to examine social work’s engagement with this issue. Thisstudy employed a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of social work scholarship in order to: 1) explore current constructions of criminalized women in social work; 2) understand the knowledge produced through such constructions; and 3) explore how that knowledge supports/shapes practice with criminalized women.

Methods

This study draws on Jäger and Maier’s framework for performing a Foucauldian inspired CDA.Data included a sample of 49 articles published in social work high impact journals from 2000-2018. A keyword search was performed to locate articles with an explicit focus on incarcerated/criminalized women. Only articles dealing with a U.S. context were included. Analysis occurred on two levels consisting of a structural analysisto identify initial coding schema; and a detailed analysisof select articles. Detailed analysis attended to: context of text; surface of text; rhetorical means; content and ideological statements. These two levels of analysis lead to an overall synoptic analysis, or final assessment of the overall discourse.

Results

Results reveal three major discursive patterns: the construction of criminalized women as “risky”; de-politicized explanations for crime; and a clear preference for individual level service delivery. Findingsindicate that social work privileges a psychological discourse, effectively erasing the link between inequality and “criminality,” and that the assessment and management of risk has supplanted a holistic approach to meeting client needs and to addressing mass incarceration. In this way, contemporary social workcan be understood as a form of neo-liberal governance. Social work’s growing dedication to practices that seek to adjust the psychological fortitude of individuals relies on broader cultural discourses of responsibilization, which reproduce, rather than interrupt criminalization, and divert attention away from the need for broader social and economic change.

Conclusions and Implications

This study shows that social work passively accepts the logic of punishment and relies heavily on decontextualized understandings of crime and criminal justice involvement. There is a need to re-center social and political issues in our understanding of and interventions related to criminalization, else we risk simply relocating the punishment and control of marginalized populations into the community. This analysis exposes how social work is implicated in processes of criminalization and propels a shift in emphasis from individualized service delivery, aimed at changing the behavior of individuals, to launching interventions that tackle structural injustice and inequity.