Abolition and Social Work: A Community Dialogue.

About the Book: 

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. Contributors include Autumn Asher BlackDeer, Ramona Beltran, Danica Brown, Charlene A. Caruthers, Angela Y. Davis, Alan Dettlaff, Tanisha “Wakumi” Douglas, Annie Zean Dunbar, Angela Fernandez, Kassandra Frederique, María Gandarilla Ocampo, Claudette L. Grinnell-Davis, Sam Harrell, Justin S. Harty, Shira Hassan, Leah A. Jacobs, Nev Jones, Joyce McMillan, Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work, Dorothy Roberts, Sophia Sarantakos, Katie Schultz, and Stéphanie Wahab.

About the Speakers:

Kassandra Frederique is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a national nonprofit that works to end the war on drugs and build alternatives grounded in science, compassion, health, and human rights. At DPA, Frederique has built and led innovative campaigns around policing, the overdose crisis, and marijuana legalization—each with a consistent racial justice focus. Her advocacy, and all of the Drug Policy Alliance’s work, lies at the intersection of health, equity, autonomy, and justice. Mimi Kim is a longtime community accountability/transformative justice practitioner. As a co-founder of Incite! and founder of Creative Interventions, Mimi has challenged interpersonal and state violence through the building of community-based liberatory practice. She is currently re-launching the StoryTelling & Organizing Project through a Stories for Power collaboration between Creative Interventions and Just Practice. Mimi is also an Associate Professor of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach A Native New Yorker from the Bronx Durrell Malik Washington Sr. is an Abolitionist, a Social Worker, a Author, Educator and PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Durrell is a critical and interdisciplinary scholar whose research lies at the intersections between P.I.C. Abolition, Juvenile legal law, policy and other youth serving systems, Black families, and Health. Durrell is a collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work.

Cameron W. Rasmussen is an educator, researcher, social worker, and facilitator. Cameron is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social Intervention Group at Columbia School of Social Work and an Associate Director at the Center for Justice at Columbia University where his work is focused on ending the punishment paradigm and advancing approaches to justice rooted in prevention, healing, and accountability. Cameron is also a Collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW).