Social Work Research Towards Abolishing Mass Criminalization and Incarceration: A Roundtable Discussion on Research That Supports Abolitionist and Epistemic Justice

This Roundtable will give participants the opportunity to discuss: How can social work researchers advance the contemporary movement aiming to abolish racialized criminalization of Black and Brown persons, mass incarceration, and multi-systemic disenfranchisement of re-entering persons?

This round table will: 1) discuss and critique prevailing research frameworks, theory of counteracting criminalization and mass incarceration, and philosophical notions of epistemic justice, and 2) advance knowledge about the impact of the racialized U.S. criminal legal system through the perspectives of lived experience and the scholarship work of W.E.B DuBois. The Roundtable will begin with Introductions of the leaders and all participants and their interests in the topic. Then the leaders will present context, so participants will have shared points of reference.

The presentation topics are: 1) Sociologist W.E.B Dubois, in The Philadelphia Negro (DuBois & Easton, 1899), expressed the need for Black liberation through epistemic justice (i.e., Black intellectual thought and consciousness), through comprehensive strategies aimed at remedying bias in social science. He posited several methods: representation of Black intellectuals among influential academics who could influence social thought and policy through their research, education and mobilizing activist groups to protest (such as the NAACP).

2) Contemporary responses protesting racialized criminalizing injustices take two central forms: 1) reform, focused on improving the moral life(Liebling*) and humanity of the criminal justice system, prevailing in some sectors of the U.S., U.K., Paraguay, and Chile, and 2) abolition, prevailing in Nordic countries, including open prisons and eliminating prisons. Scholars describe the institution of mass incarceration as an oppressively built structure that perpetuates biased practices and racially oppressive methodologies (Davis, A. Y., 2003; Fornili, 2018). These oppressive structures can influence the development of knowledge production, social treatment, access to opportunity, economic advancement, and services rendered (Davis, A. Y., 2003; Hong & Lewis, 2014). Racialized mass incarceration is self-perpetuating by continuing to disproportionally impact access to higher education and other economic opportunities for formerly incarcerated persons, predominantly Black and Brown Americans (Donaldson, V.M., & Viera, C. 2021).

3. Knowledge to support reform and abolition can be a form of transitional justice, defined as redress towards broader forms of justice, brought about through civil society practices, including social interventions and participatory knowledge generation processes (United Nations Office of Human Rights). This will require ensuring persons experiencing criminal justice system toxicity are treated by researchers as experts about their conditions and interventions that work for them “testimonial justice (Fricker, M. 2013), counteracting scientific racism (Saini, 2019) and epistemic appropriation (Davis, 2018), and advancing cognitive and epistemic justice (Cummings & Dhewa, 2023; Smith, 2012).

Next, group reflection will address:

1) Reflect on a moment when you experienced oppression, what was it like for you? Did you feel you could do anything to remediate the situation? If so, what did you do? If not, why not? 2) Now let us take those feelings to put yourself in the position of persons harassed by police, incarcerated, or re-entering from prison. 3) How can research bring about transitional justice?