Session: Interrogating and Challenging Carceral Logics across Social Work Practice Areas (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

The relationship between Social Work and carceral systems, logics, and practices is a pressing concern for those both inside and outside the profession. Critics have argued that Social Work is far too institutionalized, too intertwined with society's carceral systems, or too reliant upon the state to take a realistic stand against carcerality. In contrast, others see potential for challenging Social Work's carceral connections by holding up the profession's social justice roots and ethical commitments to society's most marginalized and subjugated groups. This symposium presents four papers that engage in and inform these debates. The presenters are all situated in the belief that Social Work's non-carceral path can only be forged by first interrogating the ways that the profession is complicit in a wide range of carceral logics across diverse practice areas. Despite being central to Social Work, the practice areas highlighted in these papers are often passed over as examples of Social Work's engagement with carcerality, because they are at the margins of formal criminal legal systems. Each paper looks at carceral practices or logics that have significant implications for Social Work clients and the institutions and organizations on which they depend. The first paper draws upon carceral logics and abolitionist politics to review normative research on credit scoring and critically interpret it as a carceral practice. The second paper uses mixed methods, including ethnography and GIS, to examine how refugee management is advanced in camps that have dual goals of refugee protection and camp control. The third paper uses in-depth interviews with fraternity members to explore a case of campus sexual assault response grounded in non-carceral accountability. The fourth paper examines the paradoxical carceral implications of trying to undo carceral logics by examining how carcerality is advanced through state-nonprofit funding dynamics of non-police alternatives. The studies in this symposium raise important findings. They indicate that normative research obfuscates the anti-Black racism and carcerality embedded in tools like credit scoring; that practices designed to protect populations like refugees can be used to contain and manage those populations in ways that advance carceral control; that community accountability interventions, rather than individualized punishment, can successfully reject sexual assault and influence preventative measures; and that police defunding can boost non-carceral alternatives based in care, though concomitantly raise organizational issues that undermine abolitionist aims. Such findings raise questions about the ways Social Work engages with carceral logics that discipline, punish, contain, and control communities in lieu of offering resources and services based in theories of care. Social Work as a field must grapple with the question of carcerality in practice, research, and theory. This symposium will leverage empirical findings to draw further implications regarding the debate on Social Work's relationship to carcerality, including its abolition.