Radically Rethinking Social Work in the Criminal (in)Justice System in Australia

Abstract

<jats:p> Historically, research on prisons and prisoners privileges an individualizing framework, when in fact the prison experience is strongly tied to social stratification and collective identities. Informed by the data created for a Photovoice project with former prisoners in South Australia, I contend that contemporary “criminological” knowledge tends to individualize crime through its own privileged view of the world. This individualizing approach seeps into the ways in which criminalized women experience release into the community after a prison sentence, confirming that society does not believe that imprisonment furnishes any form of “rehabilitation.” </jats:p><jats:p> There can be no separation between capitalism, the prison industrial complex (PIC), and the violence present in carceral settings. This violence, although to a lesser extent than prisoners, is experienced by social workers selling their labor power within the PIC who are co-opted into believing that they can “make a difference.” Yet, social workers, whose codes of ethics are grounded in a framework of human rights, are witness to abuses of human rights on a daily basis within the PIC. Instead of making a difference, they are coerced into silence and roles of social control. The argument proposed here suggests that social workers must radically rethink the place and purpose of prisons by considering them as a violent response by the state to structural social problems that are experienced as politically perpetrated misery and oppression. </jats:p>

Beyond a Sugarcoated Pill: Critical Approaches to Social Work Field Supervision

“…An element of this accountability recognizes the student as an emerging practitioner in these systems. The critical supervisory space is one where knowledge and experiences are shared including the exegesis of social structures and systems (Jarldorn, 2020; Morley et al, 2017). Students and newly graduated social workers otherwise risk a replication of oppression alongside the people with whom they work (Jarldorn, 2020).…”

Introduction to Special Topic on Anticarceral Feminisms: Imagining a World Without Prisons

“…While these programs may offer the guise of reform, they cannot transcend the prison system’s intrinsic and inescapable violence. Jarldorn (2020), in their examination of Australia as a prison nation founded as a colonial outpost, built by convict labor and the genocide of Australia’s First Nations People, is strident in what they describe as a “cautionary tale” against those that identified with the helping professions. Jarldorn’s stark juxtaposition between the optimistic language of “mak[ing] a difference” among social workers of good intent and an institution formulated toward “hypersurveillance, deprivation, and emotional repression” of prisoners reveals the impossibility of resolution except through a therapeutic model that assigns blame for imprisonment not upon the hegemonic mechanisms of the carceral state but rather upon the internal failings of individuals entrapped within its walls.…”

“The thing about animals is they are not judgemental”: Stories and images from formerly incarcerated women about their relationships with companion animals

“…communities, relationships, addiction, domestic violence, lack of housing and employment. The overarching theme, though, was the interpersonal and structural violence they saw and experienced created by the prison system (Jarldorn, 2019).…”

“…long distance, early morning running to help maintain her sobriety (for more see Jarldorn, 2019) and spoke of her "big picture dreams," telling me:…”