This is an open letter from clinical, mezzo and macro social work practitioners, researchers, and professors against the borough based jails, and the recent efforts to propose a women’s jail. If you would like to sign on to this letter, please fill out the form below.
July 1, 2022
As social workers, professionals in the field of social work, researchers, advocates and organizers, we urge New Yorkers to organize against a women’s jail in NYC, as well as the borough based jails. Wecall on the New York City Council to begin the immediate closure of the jails on Rikers Island, followed by their subsequent demolition. The women’s jail is being proposed as a therapeutic alternative to the Kew Gardens borough based jails, which itself was proposed as a therapeutic alternative to Rikers, which itself was proposed as a “humane reform” of what existed prior to the penal colony.
We believe that advocates must look to the People’s Plan NYC, Cage Free NYC, the No New Jails NYC Abolition Plan, and other programs put forward by people to prioritize public safety and long-term wellbeing for all New Yorkers.
Make no mistake- developing, refining, honing, and innovating ways to incarcerate people of marginalized genders is about keeping incarceration on trend and applicable to the times. Each new method of caging and incarcerating people invests in the permanence of incarceration, rather than planning for its end. As abolitionist social workers, we must refuse to collaborate with this retrenchment of anti-Black abuse, violence, and genocide and demand that our roles be in systems of healing and reconciliation. As more people understand the need for housing, healthcare, education, transportation, and food to be central to safety and wellness, the city, state, and federal government criminal justice reformers continue to reinvent and repackage incarceration to show that it can be “improved.” A real investment in decarceration would seek to reduce the number of people of marginalized genders from 126, the number that would be incarcerated at Kew Gardens, to 0 through non confinement programs at the minimum.
Given the clear and unconscionable violence that the criminal legal system inflicts, we, as social workers, have a moral and professional obligation to resist it daily and to advance just, equitable and decarceral pathways to community safety and wellness. Jails fracture communities and families.he very real fear of incarceration plagues those who are targeted by law enforcement and state violence: Black, brown, poor, disabled, transgender, gender non-conforming people and people who have immigrant status, or are engaged in street economies such as sex work. Incarceration fosters economic inequality and poverty, while replicating white supremacist legacies of enslavement and extraction.
As social workers, we must oppose policies that perpetuate structural violence and racism and further harm. In our profession, we regularly come face to face with the realities of incarceration and the criminal legal system. We recognize both from research and practice that incarceration does little to provide healing for survivors of harm, does not provide avenues for accountability for those who cause harm (who are more often than not survivors themselves), and does not address the roots of inequality, poverty and violence. Instead, it exacerbates them.
Language and theory from our profession has been co-opted and used as justification for expanding the suffering of our friends who are incarcerated. Those behind the new women’s cages recommend that staff “should use a social work approach and there should be a coordinated continuum of care.” In reality, jails do not provide mental health services that we should deem tolerable. Instead, jails warehouse people with mental health issues who are often misdiagnosed and medicated incorrectly. The number of people incarcerated with mental illnesses has dramatically increased over the past 40 years. People can not get well in cages and we cannot sit by and silently observe as the City prepares to use billions of tax payer dollars to further fund this health crisis.
Prisons and jails dehumanize some of the most vulnerable communities in order to maintain social control by isolating people from their communities, traumatizing them and their families, and denying them autonomy and their humanity. In New York City, we are seeing in real time how jails and prisons are expanded at the cost of schools and public housing. Instead of spending public funds on public housing and ending the epidemic of houselessness, the city now produces the very problem which it claims will be solved by social workers in jails.
While we all engage in social work in different ways and a diverse array of professional spaces, adherence to the core values listed in the National Association of Social Work’s code of ethics is what knits our profession together. These core values include social justice, dignity and worth of the person, and the importance of human relationships. In fighting for social justice, we are committed to the pursuit of “social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people" (National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2017). The criminal legal system and incarceration stand in direct opposition to our core values and code of ethics. From the racialized criminalization of poverty, to the continued legacy of slavery and colonialism, from the breaking apart of families, and to the degradation of human dignity, incarceration is in direct opposition to the values and practices of social work. Prison abolition seeks to actualize the vision of social work values and ethics, through abolishing the interlocking oppressions of racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism, and the systems that bolster them, and through building life affirming institutions and practices. We as social workers must be on the side of abolition.
We are not alone. The Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work released a report “Challenging Carceral Social Work and the Struggle for Abolition,” where several participants and social workers identified the growing desire among social workers to no longer be complicit in sustaining the Prison Industrial Complex. Across the country, social workers and healthcare professionals are rejecting the carceral humanism and sanism of proposals to rebrand jails as service providers.
Throughout history, the social work profession has been deeply intertwined with policing, prisons, and the carceral state. Through engaging in mandated reporting without the consideration of community-lead transformative justice processes, to the overlap between the foster care/child welfare system and the juvenile justice system, social workers have often aided in the dehumanization of our clients and communities. Social workers have also been complicit in the school to prison pipeline which is responsible for the incarceration of young people in ever increasing numbers, primarily Black and brown youth. Too often, social workers are in positions of gatekeeping. Our obligation is to make sure that we do not perpetuate incarceration by “feeding” people into the system, or supporting punitive and carceral interventions. Instead, we must fight against oppressive systems and practices and advance just, human-centered alternatives .
Those of us on the outside have a responsibility to show up for, and take leadership direction from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated organizers who have first-hand experience with the horrors of New York’s incarceration system. This is an important opportunity to stand in solidarity with our clients, our colleagues, and our friends and loved ones who have been oppressed and harmed by incarceration by forcefully naming the harm and violence caused by jails and prisons and advocating for community-based support.
The carceral state seeks to gain legitimacy by relying on research and practice provided by mental health professionals. Jails and prisons act with more impunity if they continue to incarcerate people under the guise of providing adequate or affirming mental health care. In addition to emphasizing faux “therapeutic” settings, reformers who claim to care about incarcerated people’s long-term mental health, now lift up trauma-informed care as a popular talking point. What these reformers fail to realize is that the best way to address harm in communities and prevent the trauma caused by incarceration is by providing community support to lessen the likelihood of people’s interactions with policing in the first place. Access to mental health services, housing, and other forms of actual care should be prioritized/
As abolitionist social workers, we fight daily against the racist and classist origins of our profession and choose to resist furthering the surveillance and division of Black and Brown communities. While we push for the immediate closure of Rikers, we do so with the awareness that Rikers is one facet of an expansive anti-Black system that will never truly keep us safe. Building community and providing affirming and sustainable mental-health care is central to the work that we do, and this cannot exist in Rikers, just as much as it cannot exist in the proposed borough-based jails. With care for our clients and their communities, our families, friends and loved ones in mind, we call on social workers to denounce this project, and for those at Columbia and UT Austin Schools of Social Work to agitate against this project.