Abstract
With the growing critical reflection among social work scholars and practitioners regarding the complex—and often complicit—role of our profession in sustaining the carceral state, Anti-oppressive social work practice and the carceral state is a timely release, providing practical insights into the application of an anti-oppressive practice (AOP) framework to guide our reimagining of the role of social work and our professional goals and practice.
Grounded in AOP praxis, Willison and O’Brien (2022) begin the book by offering an intersectional analysis of key socio-political and historical factors—including, but not limited to, neoliberalism, classism, racism, and poverty—that interdependently co-create and perpetuate various forms of social and policy arrangements that predominately and disproportionately punish racialized and marginalized groups in the United States. The social work profession, historically and presently, is by no means immune to the impact of these socio-political factors and the carceral arrangements. For example, the authors illustrate how, under the influence of the neoliberal agenda, social work interventions often move away from confronting structural forms of oppression but, instead, focus on addressing problems at the individual level (Chapter 2). Working toward shifting our professional focus to addressing these intersecting socio-political factors, Willison and O’Brien (2022) articulate an AOP framework (Chapter 3), which integrates critical feminist, anti-racist, and strength-based principles with trauma-informed approaches and evidence-informed perspectives. The authors use client case examples to illustrate specific AOP social work skills essential to different stages of practice, such as engagement, assessment, intervention, and evaluation. Within the AOP framework, the authors encourage social workers to examine critically the consequences of existing carceral mechanisms on marginalized communities and to apply anti-AOP skills at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. In Chapter 4, the authors present a public health-oriented sequential intercept model. Along with community-led efforts, this model illustrates how anti-AOP social work responses can serve as alternatives to the mass criminalization of and punishment-based treatments for people living with mental illnesses.
Carceral logic is deeply and pervasively embedded in and drives many state-sponsored systems of punishment, and within each, historically, social workers have played various roles. The second part of the book delves into several primary sites of carceral practice to illustrate how the carceral state reinforces social and racial inequities and critically analyzes social work's position within the carceral systems. This section of the book offers concrete examples of AOP social work and community-led resistance toward decarceration. Specifically, this section (Chapters 5 through 8) anchors its intersectional and AOP analysis on four domains, including policing as a primary response to public safety, carceral detention and prison conditions, the overrepresentation of racialized men in the prison systems, and the rising of women incarcerated. When addressing these topics from an AOP perspective, the authors critically reflect on the police-social work collaboration, the punitive and coercive nature of certain problem-solving courts despite of their advantages over incarceration, health inequities and service accessibility among incarcerated people, the impact of gendered racism, the issue of death by suicide in prisons, and ethical dilemmas faced by social workers who serve at these sites of carceral interventions.
Carceral strategies for public safety, such as incarceration, probation, and parole systems, have profound life and health consequences for people. The final section of the book critically examines how these consequences are deeply gendered and racialized, which can often inflict collateral damage on family members of people who are incarcerated. The “child welfare”/family policing system is one example (Chapter 9), and the disproportionate burden of “technical violations” and re-incarceration borne by racialized people living in poverty is another (Chapter 10). Rather than relying on state-sponsored punishments and surveillance, Willison and O’Brien (2022) advocate for our attention to be shifted toward addressing the intersecting structural obstacles faced by incarcerated people, emphasizing the engagement of people with lived experiences in community participatory research and liberatory policy work (Chapter 11), and adopting an anti-carceral stance through transformative justice (Chapter 12) and abolitionist praxis (Chapter 13).
Beyond the rich content and diverse case examples, one other notable strength of the text is the “Expanding Our Vision” section provided at the end of each chapter. This section presents additional case scenarios, reflection questions, and online learning resources, all of which offer readers an opportunity to delve more deeply into the topics presented within each chapter. In addition, this thoughtfully designed section serves as a valuable resource for social work educators when integrating AOP content in their classroom teaching. Overall, Anti-oppressive social work practice and the carceral state stands out as a timely and practical book, orienting students, educators, and practitioners to both the historical and contemporary contexts of when and how social work professional practice intersects with, gets co-opted into, or radically resists the primary functions and consequences of the legal criminal systems and social-carceral infrastructures in the United States.
