Weaving Social Work's Inherent Ties to Carcerality: A Critical Analysis of Social Work Education

Background and Purpose: Recent scholarship has placed renewed emphasis on a need for the field of social work to examine the paradox of help and harm present since the field’s inception. The field of social work – inclusive of epistemologies, values, practices, and professionalization - has historically framed its mission as a benevolent tool to assess and remedy social issues. However, underlying this narrative are ideologies and practices rooted in surveillance and control, supporting and perpetuating the criminalization of marginalized communities. Gendered criminalization has been central to social work since its earliest forms and continues today. As social work education programs serve as a formative training opportunity for new social workers, as well as continuing education for current social workers, this paper explores whether social work education incorporates content around the criminalization of women, arguing that social work education must be more intentional in acknowledging the field’s continued perpetuation of carceral practices.

Methods: This paper provides a critical analysis of public documentation around social work educational standards, practices, and curricula. Evidence includes accreditation standards and documentation of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), syllabi and course descriptions from various social work education programs, and briefs from professional social work organizations such as the Grand Challenges for Social Work. With the analysis of this public documentation, both discourses and practices around carcerality and gender within social work education were examined to understand how social work education addresses its historical and current practices around gendered criminalization.

Findings: Social work’s relationship to criminalization and carcerality has been normalized and institutionalized through educational practices, prioritizing objective knowledge and reinforcement of hegemonic cultural expectations. There is limited evidence that social work education programs prioritize education around gendered criminalization, although there has been movement toward incorporating decarceration broadly into social work education. CSWE, for example, does not discuss social work’s contemporary complicity in carcerality and criminalization of women, although there is an acknowledgment of social work’s complicity with systems of historical injustice. The Grand Challenges highlight various social work programs that have incorporated decarceration into their curriculum and programmatic offerings, although none of these examples include an explicit focus on gender. There are examples of social work programs offering coursework focused on abolition and transformative justice, and while these courses may include some mentions of gender, there is limited coursework that prioritizes gendered carcerality and social work as the primary focus.

Conclusions and Implications: While social work education has made progress in incorporating training and engagement around challenging carceral systems, it would benefit from incorporating more explicit emphases on social work’s complicity in women’s criminalization. Shifting social work education to grapple with this history and challenge current practices of gendered criminalization offers opportunities for furthering equitable practice and sustained contributions to social change. As social work education is the foundation for all social work – macro, mezzo, and micro - policymakers and practitioners, it is vital to address issues of social work’s complicity with women’s criminalization and educate future social workers toward transformative social work.