Session: Advancing Anti-Carceral and Community-Led Responses in Social Work (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

Central to the 2025 conference theme is the necessity to ground empirical research in the lived experiences of marginalized individuals to inform solutions. One burgeoning - and urgent - conversation among many social work students, their programs, and researchers is on the role of carceral vs. non-carceral social work responses to address social problems. Carceral social work responses tend to be punitive in nature and involve collaboration - or other forms of complicity - with the criminal legal system. For example, a restorative justice program within a court or a co-responder crisis intervention model. Anti-carceral social work responses are often community-led and involve interventions that are distinctly - and purposefully - separate from a criminal legal response. As Jacobs et al. (2020) note, carceral social work responses disproportionately penalize, police, and harm Black, Brown, low-income, and other marginalized communities in ways that are contrary to social work values. Anti-carceral social work responses, on the other hand, offer social workers a genuine opportunity to fulfill the key tenets of the NASW Code of Ethics: "service, social justice, dignity and worth of the person, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence." The papers in this symposium offer an empirical examination of the harms of carceral approaches and promises of anti-carceral ones. In the first paper, a scoping review of restorative and transformative justice responses to sexual violence, the authors find that most restorative justice approaches are not the departures from carceral responses they could be; instead, they represent "carceral accommodation" (Kim, 2020). The second paper is a historical case study of a citizen-run hotline. This hotline, founded in Chicago in 1970, responded to community members' concerns about neighborhood crime or police misconduct. This early example of peer-support is an excellent - and replicable - example of an anti-carceral response for the community, by the community. The third paper highlights the day-to-day interactions within and impacts of a co-response model. That is, by analyzing social worker clinical notes from over 4000 co-response encounters with law enforcement, the results of this study highlight the impacts and limitations of co-response models and illuminate the need for non-carceral responses for marginalized people in crisis. The fourth paper, a mixed methods study conducted in collaboration with Trans Lifeline, an anti-carceral peer support hotline, focuses on people's experiences and the impacts of carceral responses after seeking help during mental health crises (from sources other than Trans Lifeline). The findings of this study provide further support, based on lived experiences, for the need to remove police officers from crisis care. Following the presentations, a discussant will facilitate a conversation to explore the implications of these studies including how these findings can inform policy changes, social work education, and the practical implementation of anti-carceral approaches in various social work settings. This discussion aims to foster a comprehensive understanding of the structural changes required to shift from carceral to community-focused and community-led interventions, emphasizing collaborative, interdisciplinary strategies for advancing abolitionist political vision and more humane and just responses to social issues.