Control in the Name of Care: Social Work As a Gendered Intervention to the Carceral State

Since the Progressive Era, social work has been positioned as a gendered intervention to crises of policing and corrections, serving as a reformist tool to humanize law enforcement while expanding the reach of the carceral state. This positioning extends to the child welfare movement which enacted family separation and surveillance masquerading as care. Yet, tracing the historical trajectory of white women's roles in social work's origins elucidates a pervasive pattern of what scholars have termed benevolent violence (Roberts, 2022), compassionate control (Murray et al., 2024), and coercive care (Harrell, 2023). From early 20th-century policewomen who engaged in "maternal policing" of women and youth to the 1970s rise of police social work units, social workers have been embedded within law enforcement under the guise of care and rehabilitation. Social reformers participated in the forced removal of Indigenous children, embraced eugenics, and continue to disproportionately separate Black children from their families through the child welfare system. These paradoxes demonstrate how popular narratives of "good intentions" obscure colonial and anti-Black violence while disentangling white women from complicity in white supremacist oppression. White women have also strategically positioned themselves to intervene in the lives of racially minoritized communities to legitimize themselves under whiteness. This roundtable traces the historical entanglements of social work within the interconnected spheres of policing, child welfare, and corrections - demonstrating how the profession has functioned as a carceral mechanism that upholds structural violence and pathologizes Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Concurrently, social work positioned white women as moral authorities tasked with "saving" these very populations. Drawing from historical analyses of white women's roles in carceral reforms and "benevolent" interventions, speakers explore a lineage that begins with Progressive Era policewomen and the child-saving movement, moves through the 1970s institutionalization of police social work, and culminates in contemporary mental health crisis collaborations between police and social workers. They examine how white womanhood was mobilized to address anxieties of morality, constructions of delinquency, and failures to assimilate to whiteness. Across these historical flashpoints, social work was framed as a softer, feminized alternative to masculinized law enforcement - yet ultimately legitimized and expanded disciplinary reach into racially minoritized communities. By historicizing the integration of social work into policing and corrections, this presentation situates these practices within broader patterns of carceral state-building. Speakers engage feminist and abolitionist critiques, interrogating how social work's positioning as a "helping profession" has provided a smoke screen for its participation in upholding white - and white feminist - hegemony. This history remains critical today as reforms continue to advocate for social work-led crisis response teams and embedded mental health professionals as solutions to policing. Child welfare reforms mirror those of policing, such as increasing workforce diversity and providing families with individual supports that ultimately extend the system's reach and serve as another mode of surveillance. By tracing these historical continuities, this roundtable challenges dominant narratives that frame social work as a mitigating force within carceral apparatuses and instead highlights its role in sustaining carceral power through gendered and racialized intervention.