Social Work, Abolition and the State: Assessing Possibilities and Paradoxes for Research and Practice

In recent years, prison abolition has emerged as a salient framework for critical analysis and practice in social work research and education. Mobilized through a series of social movement events and formations from the late 1990s, prison abolition has become increasingly prominent since the summer of 2020 as we witnessed unprecedented U.S. and global protests of racialized police violence. While proponents of abolition have called for the dismantling of the carceral state or that sphere of the state represented by policing, jails, and prisons, the implications for the welfare state and the many public social provisions offered by the state have been less clear. For example, abolitionist theorizing has offered a divest / invest framework with the aim of divesting from the carceral state, while investing in public social provisions. Social work researchers and educators are steeped in questions and practices related to both the carceral state and the welfare state, and yet there is limited attention to the complex relationship between these two forms of state governance and power, and how they impact social work research and practice. This roundtable brings together a group of social work researchers who study the intersections of abolition, social work and various aspects of the carceral and welfare state to examine the possibilities, challenges and paradoxes in advancing rigorous scholarship and practice related to social works relationship to the state. This roundtable will explore critical frameworks and questions focused on how abolitionist theory, principles and practice can shape social work research and practice. Frameworks include abolitionist reform (Harrell, 2024) the inside, outside and against state framework as offered by Interrupting Criminalization (2022) and Rasmussen (2024), and a series of questions offered by Kim and Rasmussen (2024) about the relationship between abolition and the welfare state. The roundtable will explore a series of research related questions including what gaps in the literature exist, what further research is needed, what kinds of partnerships and research methodologies may be effective, as well as examining the possibilities and challenges in pursuing state funding opportunities and collaborations while doing research that is critical of the state. The roundtable will also consider practice related questions including analyzing the possibilities and paradoxes of how abolitionist oriented social workers are relating to the intersections of the carceral and welfare states in practice, examining where practice has furthered the harms of the state and where practice has been successful in reducing state harm.