Resisting Carcerality, Embracing Abolition: Implications for Feminist Social Work Practice

Abstract

Few social dynamics have altered the landscape of communities in the United States as profoundly as the buildup of a Prison Nation and the expansion of the carceral state. In this article, we will use the terms "carceral expansion," "carceral state," and "buildup of a Prison Nation" interchangeably. As the discussion will show, these concepts refer to the ways that ideology, economic policy, and legal/legislative initiatives have supported the growth of legal apparatuses associated with punishment. We have witnessed dramatic shifts in how this country understands, uses, responds to, and, in some sense, creates "crime" in contemporary society, from massive financial investments in law enforcement and surveillance technology; the amplification of deep ideological commitments to retributive justice; aggressive punishment regimes (including preemptive arrests); the swell in the number of the facilities that imprison over 7 million people (for longer periods of time, in harsher conditions) to the co-optation of major reform efforts, these shifts are comprehensive and welldocumented. The impact of this shift affects the communities that have been the focus of social work attention for decades; those that have been the most disadvantaged by historical patterns of discrimination and social policies of exclusion. Scholars, legal theorists, and community activists have used various conceptual frames to characterize this expansion of the carceral state. Included among those widely used and which have made it into professional discourse are the "prison industrial complex," "mass incarceration or imprisonment," and "hyper-criminalization." While there are slight distinctions between these concepts, there are three core elements of carceral expansion that are generally agreed upon. First is the critical understanding that the buildup of a Prison Nation does not correspond, necessarily, to changes in patterns of crime. That is, the investment in responses to crime does not correspond to actual shifts in what is considered "illegal behavior," and in some eras, we have seen crime rates go down but the allocation of resources to punishment go up. This inconsistency is important because it helps to show how carcerality actually operates as a set of political commitments that are independent from data about actual occurrences of lawbreaking. Similarly, responses

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