Abolition and Social Work

A critical anthology exploring the debates, conundrums, and promising practices around abolition and social work in academia and within impacted communities.
Within social work—a profession that has been intimately tied to and often complicit in the building and sustaining of the carceral state—abolitionist thinking, movement-building, and radical praxis are shifting the field. Critical scholarship and organizing have helped to name and examine the realities of carceral social work as a form of “soft policing.” For radical social work, abolition moves beyond critique to the politics of possibility.
Featuring a foreword by Mariame Kaba, Abolition and Social Work offers an orientation to abolitionist theory for social workers and explores the tensions and paradoxes in realizing abolitionist practice in social work—a necessary intervention in contemporary discourse regarding carceral social work, and a compass for recentering this work through the lens of abolition, transformative justice, and collective care.

Mimi E. Kim is assistant professor of social work at California State University, Long Beach and founder of Creative Interventions. Kim continues her political work through promotion of transformative justice and abolitionist visions and practices of community care and safety.

Cameron Rasmussen is a social worker, educator and facilitator and an associate director at the Center for Justice at Columbia University. He is also a lecturer at Columbia Social Work, a PhD student at the Graduate Center, and a Collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work.

Durrell M. Washington Sr. is an author, social worker, educator, facilitator, and socio-legal scholar from the Bronx, New York. He is a collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work and PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago.

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, librarian/archivist, and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba co-leads Interrupting Criminalization, an organization she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including Project NIA, We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander (now Love & Protect), Just Practice Collaborative, Survived & Punished, Sojourners for Justice Press and For the People Lefitist Library Project. Kaba is the author of the New York Times Bestseller We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) & most recently Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care with Kelly Hayes (Haymarket, 2023) among several other books that offer support and tools for repair, transformation, and moving toward a future without incarceration and policing.

ISBN: 9798888901366

Publication date: July 9, 2024

Foreword
Introduction (Mimi E. Kim, Cameron Rasmussen, and Durrell M. Washington)
Society for Social Work and Research Keynote (Angela Y. Davis)
Section 1: Possibilities

• Abolitionist Social Work (Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work)
• Abolition: The Missing Link in Historical Efforts to Address Racism and Colonialism Within the Profession of Social Work (Justin Harty, Autumn Asher BlackDeer, and Maria Gandarilla Ocampo)
• Reaching for the Abolitionist Horizon Within White Professionalized Social-Change Work (Sophia Sarantakos)
• Abolitionist Reform for Social Workers (Sam Harrell)

Section 2: Paradox

• Is Social Work Obsolete? (Kassandra Frederique)
• No Restorative Justice Utopia: Abolition and Working with the State (Wakumi Douglas)
• Abolition, Social Welfare and the State (Mimi E. Kim, Cameron Rasmussen, and Durrell M. Washington)

Section 3: Praxis

• Staying in love with each other’s survival: Practicing at the Intersection of Liberatory Harm Reduction and Transformative Justice (Shira Hassan)
• Social Work and Family Policing (Joyce McMillan and Dorothy Roberts) 
• Indigenist Abolition: Strategies for Decolonization, Healing, and Imagination in Social Work Practice (Ramona Beltran, Katie Schultz, Angela Fernandez)
• Involuntary Commitment in Public Sector Mental Health Services: Anti-Carceral Strategies & Responses (Leah Jacobs and Nev Jones)
• Queer Black Feminism and Social Work Practice (Interview with Charlene Carruthers)