Anti-Oppressive Social Work Practice and the Carceral State

With violent policing, inhumane detention and imprisonment, community surveillance and loss of civil rights, the criminal legal system is unjust; and it is crucial for social workers to understand and take steps toward change. Under the guise of helping adults in multiple correctional contexts, social workers have historically engaged in efforts that privilege the carceral system and reproduce its harmful apparatus that extends to families and communities.

Anti-Oppressive Social Work Practice and the Carceral State plots a path to change by using an anti-oppressive and transformative approach. Patricia O'Brien and Judith S. Willison critically examine strategies to shift punishment-centered practices to build collaborative partnerships and possibilities toward decarceration and individual and community power.

Patricia O'Brien, PhD, MSW, is Associate Professor (retired) at the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Nationally known for her advocacy and research on women in and out of prison, she published one of the first studies examining how women succeed in
the community after release from incarceration.

Judith S. Willison, PhD, MSW, LICSW, is Associate Professor in the Bridgewater State University School of Social Work. Her scholarship focuses on understanding the place of criminalized behavior within existing systems of social inequity and institutionalized white supremacy to support activist
interventions.