Abolition and Social Work: Dismantling Carceral Logics to Build Systems of Care

Abstract

Social work has historically operated as an extension of the carceral state, embedding policing, surveillance, and punishment into youth-serving institutions under the guise of care. This paper examines carceral seepage—the infiltration of punitive logics into social work practice—across child welfare, education, and juvenile legal, revealing how these systems function as interconnected circuits of criminalization rather than support. Using abolitionist frameworks, we critique social work’s complicity in punitive interventions and address common concerns about safety, scalability, and sustainability. Instead of reforming oppressive institutions, we argue for a fundamental transformation of social work, advocating for non-carceral models such as community-led crisis response, restorative justice, and mutual aid. By divesting from punishment and investing in collective care, abolitionist social work can move beyond harm reduction and toward genuine liberation.

1. Introduction

In the United States, Social work has long been regarded as a profession committed to public welfare, advocacy, and intervention on behalf of vulnerable communities. However, a deeper examination of its history reveals a more complicated reality in which social work has also operated as an extension of the carceral state, at times reinforcing systems of control rather than promoting genuine care (Jacobs et al. 2021). The profession’s early entrenchment in white supremacist, Christian missionary, and colonial projects shaped its approach to intervention, especially in communities of color (BlackDeer and Ocampo 2022). From its role in the forced separation of Indigenous children into boarding schools (Krawec 2022) to the ongoing racial disproportionality in child welfare removals (Detlaff et al. 2020; Harris and Hackett 2008; Puzzanchera and Taylor 2021), social work has often functioned as a mechanism of state surveillance and punishment rather than as a tool for social justice.

This paper engages abolitionist social work as a theoretical framework to examine the role of social workers in sustaining carceral systems while also identifying pathways toward abolitionist practice (Toraif and Mueller 2023). We employ the framework of carceral seepage to describe how punitive logics extend beyond the criminal legal system into institutions such as schools, social services, and healthcare, as well as historical socio-political contexts (Serrano 2022, 2024; Washington et al. 2025). We also critique youth systems in social work to interrogate how youth-surveilling institutions—including child welfare, education, and the juvenile legal system—operate not as separate systems but as interconnected circuits of criminalization (Detlaff et al. 2020; Washington et al. 2021; Washington et al. 2025).

This conceptual intervention builds on and deepens critical scholarship on carceral social work (Roberts 2022; Richie 2012; Detlaff et al. 2020) by explicitly tracing how carceral ideologies and techniques do not merely overlap with social work but seep into its daily operations, professional logics, and institutional functions. Where much of the existing literature has documented racial disproportionality or institutional harm as a series of policy outcomes, this paper shifts the analytic frame toward the circulation of punitive culture itself—examining how risk assessments, mandated reporting, and compliance structures reproduce policing in therapeutic and educational spaces (Rasmussen and Suslovic 2025; Detlaff et al. 2023). Our use of carceral seepage offers a lens to see how social work’s complicity is not only about proximity to the criminal legal system but about internalized carceral ways of knowing, evaluating, and intervening (Washington et al. 2025). In doing so, this paper both extends and challenges the field’s current reformist tendencies by arguing for a paradigmatic reorientation grounded in abolitionist praxis.

Through case studies of education, child welfare, and juvenile justice, we argue that social workers are often positioned as agents of the carceral state, enacting surveillance, family regulation, and risk assessment practices that extend policing. We conclude with an exploration of abolitionist alternatives, calling for a transformation of social work toward community-centered and non-punitive care practices.

2. Abolition and Social Work: Rejecting Carceral Reform Care

In the United States, social work has long presented itself as a profession of care, committed to advocacy and intervention on behalf of marginalized communities. However, it is a mistake to equate state institutions with care itself. Abolitionist social work begins from the premise that state systems—whether child welfare, juvenile justice, or public education—are not inherently mechanisms of genuine care. Rather, these systems have historically functioned as tools of control, discipline, and surveillance, particularly targeting Black, Indigenous, and other racially marginalized communities (Roberts 2022; Detlaff et al. 2023).

Abolitionist social work challenges the reformist orientation that dominates much of the profession. Reformist frameworks assume that with sufficient training, regulation, or oversight, carceral institutions can be transformed into sites of healing and protection (Powell 2001; Richie 2012). In contrast, abolitionist social work asserts that carceral logics—surveillance, risk assessment, pathologization, and coercive compliance—are embedded into the very DNA of these systems and social work practice (Brock-Petroshius et al. 2022; Toraif and Mueller 2023). These logics are neither incidental nor peripheral—they are structural.

The historical record is clear. Social workers were instrumental in the forced separation of Native children into boarding schools (Navia et al. 2018), the criminalization of Black motherhood (Roberts 2022), the institutionalization of disabled and mentally ill individuals (Aviram 2002), and the pathologizing of poverty as deviance (Kim et al. 2024; Jacobs et al. 2021). Contemporary policies echo these legacies. Mandated reporting, portrayed as benignly protective, frequently initiates damaging investigations and separations, disproportionately impacting low-income BIPOC families (Lash 2017; Williams et al. 2025). These policies foreground state-defined risk management over community-rooted healing and ignore systemic drivers such as poverty, housing instability, and inadequate access to education and health services.

By “reformist carceral care,” we mean interventions that maintain the goals of control, surveillance, and discipline, even under the rhetoric of care. These include behavioral modification programs in schools, coercive compliance structures in child welfare, and case management models that monitor and penalize non-compliance. Such practices blur the line between assistance and punishment, cloaking state violence in service jargon (Detlaff et al. 2023; Okechukwu 2021). These are not accidental abuses—they reflect the logic of policing turned bureaucratic.

Abolitionist social work, in contrast, refuses to conflate care with coercion. Abolition does not simply mean abolishing police from schools or revising reporting thresholds—it demands a paradigmatic shift in how care is defined, structured, and delivered (Richie 2012; Kaba 2021). It insists on transforming—not reforming—institutions by reinvesting resources and power in community-led, non-coercive care structures rooted in mutual aid, collective accountability, and local knowledge.

Central to this framework is the question: “Who defines care and safety?” Dominant models vest this authority in state institutions, assuming they are best suited to determine harm, need, and remedy. Yet, as Dotson (2014) and Fricker (2007) remind us, knowledge and epistemic authority are not neutrally distributed. Those most impacted by coercive systems are often excluded from defining what counts as support or safety. Abolitionist social work demands that these definitions emerge from within communities themselves, not from detached policymakers or bureaucratic apparatuses.

Safety, in this abolitionist frame, is not a fixed endpoint delivered by the state. It is instead relational, contextual, and contested. Some individuals may rely on state institutions for a baseline of safety in the current system, but sustainable, transformative safety comes through alternatives: mutual aid networks, housing co-ops, restorative circles, healing justice frameworks, and peer-led crisis response systems (Kelley 2002). These models, grounded in trust and collective stewardship, show promise for promoting lasting wellness. However, they remain under-resourced and understudied, not due to lack of potential, but because they challenge the dominant systems of state power (Spade 2020a). For example, the Oakland Power Project emerged as an alternative to policing by training people in communities impacted by police violence to provide emergency medical care for various emergencies, including gunshot wounds and mental health crises. The initiative provides an alternative to reduce reliance on 911 calls, which can result in death or incarceration for those who call and need help (Agid 2022; Spade 2020b).

To be clear, abolition is the absence of carceral seepage and carceral reform systems; it is not the absence of care, but the presence of non-carceral, community-centered care. This means divesting from the punitive infrastructure of risk assessment, surveillance-based case management, and threat-based family regulation. Instead, it means investing in building systems that uplift dignity, self-determination, and relational forms of healing—such as community remediation circles, youth-led peer healing spaces, housing-first initiatives, and universal access to mental health and substance-use supports (Okechukwu 2021; Kaba 2021).

In this section and this article, in general, we try to do more than rehash known critiques—we are attempting to sharpen the analytic edge by honing in on how abolitionist social work both conceptually and historically destabilizes the premise that state institutions can be reformed into caring entities. It establishes a foundation for the work that follows—mapping how these logics seep into youth-surveilling systems and identifying what non-carceral models look like in practice.

3. Carceral Creep and Seepage in Youth Systems

The idea that care systems can be insulated from punishment is a dangerous illusion. In reality, punishment does not remain confined to jails, courts, or police departments—it spreads. Scholars have used terms like carceral seepage (Serrano 2022, 2024), carceral creep (Kim 2020), and creeping carcerality (Schenwar and Law 2020) to describe how punitive logics infiltrate institutions that are framed as supportive or therapeutic. Nowhere is this more visible than in youth-surveilling systems, where schools, child welfare agencies, and social services often replicate the very logics of discipline, surveillance, and control that define the criminal legal system (Detlaff et al. 2023; Washington et al. 2025). These systems may claim to provide safety or support, but they frequently criminalize the very people they are meant to protect—particularly Black, Indigenous, and disabled youth (Briggs et al. 2022; Platt and Gephart 2022; Washington et al. 2025). For example, children with disabilities may be at elevated risk of experiencing child maltreatment and becoming involved in the child welfare system. Yet, when placed in foster care for protection, they tend to spend more time in the system and experience more placement disruptions than their non-disabled peers (Platt and Gephart 2022).

One of the most enduring conduits for creeping carcerality is the use of risk-based decision-making frameworks in child welfare and youth services. Risk assessment tools—ostensibly used to predict the likelihood of future harm—are now standard practice in evaluating youth and families. Though often portrayed as evidence-based or neutral, these tools are deeply racialized and classed. They rely on administrative data and prior system contact that reflect and reproduce structural inequality (Pollack 2010; Eubanks 2018; Serrano 2022, 2024; Washington et al. 2025). In practice, this means Black, Indigenous, and low-income families are disproportionately flagged as “high-risk,” not because of any inherent danger, but because of how poverty and racialized state surveillance are encoded into the data itself (Roberts 2022). These assessments do not offer care; they determine eligibility for state control. As Lash (2017) argues, this transforms social workers into arbiters and gatekeepers of coercive intervention rather than supporters of family well-being.

The logics of punishment also infiltrate educational spaces, where school social workers increasingly find themselves navigating conflicting mandates. Positioned as both support staff and enforcers, social workers are frequently tasked with implementing truancy laws, documenting student behavior, and referring youth to law enforcement—all under the premise of maintaining order or addressing risk (Washington et al. 2021; Detlaff et al. 2023). In doing so, they often replicate the same systems of punishment that abolitionist frameworks seek to dismantle. Even when school social workers provide meaningful support, they are still embedded in institutional structures that reward surveillance and disciplinary enforcement over trust-building or community care. Kim (2020) names this duality as carceral creep—the slow, often unnoticed absorption of punitive strategies into the operations of care systems. This includes not only the overt use of policing but also the internalization of carceral logics in documentation practices, behavior monitoring, and exclusionary interventions.

While some school systems may frame these strategies as protecting students or promoting safety, the data tells a different story. Disciplinary policies disproportionately target Black, disabled, and neurodivergent youth, reproducing the school-to-prison pipeline under the guise of behavioral intervention (Skiba et al. 2014; Strayhorn 2021). As Critical Resistance (2021) argues, simply removing police from schools does not undo this harm if carceral logics remain intact in the institutional design of education itself. Creeping carcerality functions not only through direct contact with police, but through how youth are read as threats, labeled as risks, and managed as problems.

These logics intensify in moments of crisis. In schools, child welfare, and clinical settings, social workers are often required—by law or by institutional policy—to involve police or invoke emergency protocols that rely on coercion. In cases of suspected maltreatment, psychiatric crisis, or domestic violence, social workers may call for involuntary holds, facilitate child removals, or coordinate with law enforcement as a default response (Kim 2018; Ritchie 2017; Roberts 2022). These actions are framed as necessary for protection but frequently escalate harm—especially for youth and families who already experience the state as a site of violence. What gets lost in these moments is the possibility of care outside the state, outside coercion, outside the logic of containment. Schenwar and Law (2020) describe these responses as “prisons by another name,” arguing that even when the language shifts—from jail to treatment, from punishment to support—the logic of confinement remains.

To understand carceral seepage and creep in youth-surveilling systems is not merely to critique bad policy—it is to expose the underlying architecture of control that passes as care. It is to show how the figure of the “at-risk youth” becomes the target of surveillance, how institutional definitions of safety become indistinguishable from strategies of containment, and how social work’s presence in these systems often facilitates rather than disrupts criminalization. Abolitionist social work insists that it is not enough to reform the punitive edges of care systems. Instead, it demands that we rethink the foundation—rejecting interventions that predict, pathologize, and punish youth for surviving systems that have already failed them.

This means building forms of youth support that are not rooted in prediction, exclusion, or surveillance. It means divesting from systems that treat youth as problems to be managed and investing in relationships, mutual aid, and infrastructures of care defined by communities themselves. Abolitionist social work challenges us to name creeping carcerality not as an unfortunate side effect, but as a central feature of how the state controls racialized youth under the guise of protection. And it demands that we refuse it.

4. Circuits of Youth Containment: Toward an Abolitionist Critique of Social Work

Social work is often viewed as a helping profession rooted in care. Yet in youth-serving settings, its practices frequently mirror and extend carceral control. Youth who interact with systems such as child welfare, education, and juvenile justice do not experience these institutions as separate or neutral, but as an interconnected circuit of surveillance, regulation, and punishment—what might be understood through Foucault’s ([1975] 1995) notion of the carceral continuum, where disciplinary power bleeds across institutional boundaries. In this continuum, power is not centralized in any single system but distributed across a network of institutions tasked with monitoring and correcting “deviant” behavior. For youth of color, particularly Black, Indigenous, and Latinx youth, this means that care systems often operate not as sanctuaries but as sites of control.

The social work profession, deeply embedded in these institutions, plays a pivotal role in maintaining what Wacquant (2009) calls the carceral-assistential complex—a regime where welfare and punishment are not oppositional but entwined. Social workers often act as liaisons between systems that purport to provide aid and those that enforce discipline, especially for youth already made vulnerable by poverty, racism, housing instability, or trauma. In attempting to intervene and disrupt these circuits of harm, social work inadvertently reinforces them, channeling youth into the very systems from which they need protection.

This is particularly evident in how youth labeled as “at risk” are processed through predictive surveillance. Whether through risk assessments in child welfare, school behavioral tracking systems, or probation-based supervision regimes, youth are routinely flagged, monitored, and managed based on the presumption of future deviance. These predictive logics—marketed as “preventive care”—reflect what Richie and Martensen (2019) describe as carceral services: supportive interventions that function in tandem with punitive systems. For example, foster youth—disproportionately Black and Indigenous—are often placed under the gaze of multiple institutions: group homes with surveillance infrastructure, schools with embedded school resource officers, and social workers trained to identify noncompliance or behavioral disturbance as signs of criminality (Baughman et al. 2021). As Carla Shedd (2015) has shown, young people who inhabit overpoliced neighborhoods and under-resourced schools internalize the inevitability of carceral contact, often experiencing these institutions as extensions of the same state power.

Probation-based interventions—a term referring to the regulatory conditions imposed on youth to avoid confinement—represent a clear example of this convergence. These conditions, such as curfews, behavioral compliance, or mandatory school attendance, are often nearly impossible to meet in under-resourced environments. Minor infractions like missing a class or breaking a curfew can lead to formal legal penalties, not because of severity but because of constant institutional oversight (Feld 2018; Annamma and Morgan 2021). Meiners (2007) and Ewing (2018) underscore that youth labeled as “troubled” or “disruptive” are rarely offered space for healing. Instead, they are routed through a complex maze of disciplinary mechanisms where social workers, educators, and probation officers become interchangeable actors in a carceral state masquerading as a social safety net.

These dynamics are further intensified when students are removed from traditional schools and funneled into alternative institutions—what Meiners (2007) has called the “school-to-prison nexus.” These settings often lack the basic resources that might support struggling youth, instead reinforcing punitive structures with increased surveillance and minimal educational opportunity. Youth who circulate through these institutions often experience them not as educational spaces, but as training grounds for compliance. The very actors tasked with support—social workers, teachers, and administrators—become part of a political order that rebrands punishment as rehabilitation.

The instability youth face in these systems—multiple placements, school disruptions, inconsistent adult advocates—only amplifies their vulnerability to legal entanglement (Detlaff et al. 2023; Gibbs et al. 2023). As youth are pushed out of classrooms or flagged for intervention, the chances of contact with the juvenile or adult legal system increase. Those aging out of child welfare, with no meaningful transitional support, face heightened risks of homelessness, unemployment, and incarceration (Doyle 2007; Dworsky et al. 2013; Sacker et al. 2021). This life course trajectory illustrates not simply the failure of care systems but their role in reproducing racialized containment under the guise of support.

Abolitionist social work must resist this circuitry of control by rejecting predictive logics, challenging institutional dependencies on exclusionary discipline, and divesting from collaborations with the legal system. This means imagining care beyond state mandates—grounded instead in youth-led initiatives, restorative justice, and trauma-informed, culturally responsive practices that treat youth not as threats but as agents deserving of dignity and self-determination. Scholars like Meiners, Shedd, and Ewing push us to recognize how institutional design, not individual pathology, produces criminalized identities. Their work calls for a reorientation of social work toward abolition—not as metaphor, but as method.

5. Reimagining Care in Youth Work

If youth-surveilling systems are saturated with carceral logics, then care—real care—cannot be found in their current design. For youth, particularly those racialized as Black, Indigenous, disabled, queer, or poor, what is labeled as “support” often arrives tethered to surveillance, coercion, and conditional compliance (Baughman et al. 2021). In this landscape, reimagining care work within social work means refusing the premise that institutions grounded in control can deliver liberation. It means creating structures of support that are not merely trauma-informed or culturally responsive in name, but which actively divest from punishment and restore autonomy to those most impacted.

Rather than functioning as risk managers or enforcers of behavioral compliance, social workers in youth-centered spaces must become co-strategists in liberation—partnering with young people, not pathologizing them. Abolitionist care models offer a blueprint. These models emphasize mutual aid, peer-based mentoring, youth-led organizing, and community-rooted healing spaces that prioritize trust, relational safety, and collective accountability over correctional logic (Kaba 2021; Toraif and Mueller 2023). In practice, this could mean replacing school-based disciplinary referrals with student-run conflict resolution circles, embedding social workers in youth arts collectives and movement spaces rather than administrative offices, or supporting youth-led responses to harm that do not trigger surveillance or state intervention.

Such reimagining begins with rejecting the professional posture of expertise-over-others and replacing it with—bearing witness to harm without instrumentalizing it. It requires asking youth what safety looks like to them, what repair feels like in their bodies, and what futures they imagine outside of the surveillance of school resource officers, behavioral trackers, or mandated check-ins. Rather than viewing youth through deficit-based lenses, abolitionist care builds from the strengths and survival strategies they already possess, honoring their ways of knowing, healing, and resisting.

Trauma-informed approaches are often framed as alternatives to punitive intervention, yet without structural transformation, they risk becoming repackaged forms of control. For example, behavioral threat assessments used in schools claim to be trauma-informed while simultaneously producing data to justify heightened surveillance (Skiba et al. 2014; Eubanks 2018; Ross et al. 2022). Genuine trauma-informed care in youth settings must address the root causes of trauma—displacement, incarceration, policing, school exclusion—not just its symptoms. This means creating predictable, youth-governed environments; ensuring access to culturally affirming mental healthcare; and developing infrastructures of collective healing that exist outside the reach of carceral institutions (Ritchie 2017).

Restorative and transformative justice frameworks provide concrete tools for disrupting the carceral logics embedded in youth services. These approaches create space for accountability and harm repair without relying on punishment or exclusion. Within schools, this could involve facilitated peer dialogs, family-centered mediation, or the incorporation of youth truth-telling circles into everyday routines. Importantly, these approaches must resist co-optation. Restorative justice, when stripped of its political roots and institutionalized as a behavioral management tool, risks becoming another mechanism for labeling and sorting youth. Abolitionist practice demands that restorative processes be grounded in youth power—not compliance metrics.

Structural support is also essential to abolitionist care. No amount of emotional healing can substitute for housing, food, stable education, or freedom from police harassment. Social workers must therefore fight alongside youth to secure material resources and dismantle the structural conditions that produce harm. This includes organizing against the criminalization of truancy, resisting child welfare policies that punish poverty, and advocating for public investment in youth centers, housing cooperatives, and worker-led mutual aid networks. These are not ancillary concerns—they are foundational to any practice that claims to care.

This transformation cannot be done within the current systems—it must come from outside, or at the very least, around and against them. Youth already create these networks: from bail funds and grief circles to abolitionist art collectives and TikTok-based harm-reduction campaigns. Social workers must follow their lead, not redirect their energy toward more “appropriate” or “sanctioned” forms of engagement. As Ewing (2018) reminds us, youth resistance is often framed as deviance because it does not fit within adult-imposed systems of recognition. But it is in these acts—refusing school, skipping mandated therapy, organizing walkouts—that youth articulate their own politics of survival and care.

Finally, to reimagine care is to reckon with the profession’s history. Social work cannot absolve itself through inclusion training or ethics statements alone. It must engage in active divestment—refusing partnerships with police, rejecting surveillance-based service models, and dismantling internal hierarchies that reproduce harm. It must partner with organizations that center youth agency, such as the National Black Youth Justice Network or local groups building youth-led abolitionist spaces. Abolitionist care is not a technique—it is a commitment to a different world, one in which young people are not managed but nurtured, not surveilled but believed, not corrected but trusted to build the conditions for their own safety.

In this vision, care is not soft power. It is a radical act of solidarity that seeks to dismantle the conditions that make coercive “help” seem necessary. Social workers who take abolition seriously must move toward this horizon, understanding that the most profound care may lie not in what they do for youth, but in how they make space for youth to do it for themselves.

6. Discussion: Reimagining Youth Social Work Through Abolitionist Praxis

Abolitionist social work in youth contexts is not merely a critique of punitive systems—it is a generative, imaginative practice rooted in care, accountability, and the radical belief that young people deserve lives free from surveillance, coercion, and premature criminalization (Kim et al. 2024; Kaba 2021). While past literature has thoroughly documented the harms of the juvenile legal system and the entanglements between education, child welfare, and incarceration, this paper extends those critiques by foregrounding how everyday youth-surveilling practices—whether in schools, shelters, behavioral health, or child protection—can operate as conduits of carceral seepage. As such, abolitionist youth work must center relational practices that dislodge these logics while building the conditions for collective thriving.

The examples offered throughout—carceral creep in educational and child welfare settings, the probationization of foster care, and the normalization of surveillance under the guise of support—highlight how even well-intentioned youth-serving programs are structured around compliance and control. Yet young people have always developed practices of resistance and refusal in response. Abolitionist youth social work must begin by learning from these responses. From student walkouts protesting police in schools, to foster youth organizing for placement stability and autonomy, to peer-led healing circles in juvenile facilities, youth are already enacting the world we claim to want to build. The role of the abolitionist social worker is not to manage, reform, or rescue youth—it is to stand beside them, follow their lead, and support the infrastructures they build to sustain each other.

To that end, one avenue of abolitionist praxis lies in the development of youth-led systems of care. While restorative and transformative justice models are increasingly referenced in education and child welfare, many are adult-controlled or court-mandated. What remains underexplored is how these models might look when fully designed and implemented by young people themselves, especially those with lived experience of surveillance, exclusion, or confinement. Youth participatory action research (YPAR) models offer one entry point, enabling young people to investigate the systems that govern their lives and co-develop interventions rooted in their own knowledge (Cammarota and Fine 2008). Embedding YPAR into school social work, group home programming, and even diversion programs could provide an alternative framework where young people are not only clients of care but architects of it.

Moreover, abolitionist youth work must confront how developmentalism itself can mask punitive control. The social work literature often emphasizes youth as “in development,” framing interventions in terms of correction, redirection, or behavioral management. Yet, as scholars such as Carla Shedd (2015) and Ewing (2018) have shown, marginalized youth—particularly Black youth—are often denied the very conditions of development due to racialized perceptions of risk, maturity, and deviance. Abolitionist praxis must challenge these developmental norms by affirming youth capacity, rejecting deficit framings, and centering interdependence over individual behavioral change. This could mean funding youth cooperatives instead of job readiness programs, supporting housing for youth heads-of-household rather than requiring adult supervision, or shifting from therapeutic surveillance to collective wellness practices rooted in culture and community.

Abolitionist youth work also requires an epistemological shift: away from diagnosing youth behavior through risk assessments and trauma scores, and toward relational accountability grounded in historical, political, and structural context. As Meiners (2007, 2016) argues, our understanding of harm and care must be contextualized within the racialized expansion of the prison nation, including how schools, courts, and child protection operate as interconnected systems of discipline. In this view, the question is not how to better identify “at-risk” youth but how to dismantle the conditions that produce such categories in the first place—and how to respond when harm does occur without reproducing punitive state logics.

Finally, abolitionist youth work must commit to radical solidarity, not professional neutrality. This means showing up in organizing spaces, challenging the expansion of youth carceral infrastructures (e.g., secure treatment facilities, school-based surveillance systems), and refusing roles that functionally align social work with punishment. It means building coalitions across disciplines and generations, working alongside youth mutual aid groups, educators, legal advocates, and movement organizations. And it means redefining care not as what the state allows, but as what communities—especially young people—demand.

The transformation of youth-serving social work will not come from within institutions alone. It will come from young people imagining new worlds and demanding that we catch up. Our task, as abolitionist social workers, is to make sure we do not stand in their way.

7. Conclusions: Imagining an Abolitionist Future for Social Work

Social work is at a pivotal juncture. Historically aligned with state control, the profession has too often functioned as an instrument of surveillance and punishment in youth-serving institutions. From schools that funnel students into the juvenile legal system to child welfare systems that fracture families under the guise of protection, social workers have been positioned as enforcers of carceral logic. As this paper has demonstrated, these systems do not merely reflect punitive practices—they are structurally carceral in their design and orientation, especially for Black, Indigenous, disabled, and economically marginalized youth. The reach of these systems is not incidental; it is systemic and intentional. However, abolitionist social work offers not just a critique but a possibility: that we might imagine, build, and sustain care infrastructures where punitive institutions are not simply reformed or made less harmful, but rendered obsolete.

Crucially, the goal of abolitionist social work is not merely to untether from policing, courts, and punitive welfare—it is to co-create a world where these systems no longer exist. Untethering is an urgent and necessary strategy for harm reduction, but it is not the endpoint. The ultimate aim is the full abolition of institutions that rely on surveillance, coercion, and removal as default responses to harm and need. An abolitionist future for social work centers life-affirming structures rooted in relational care, communal accountability, and youth-driven definitions of safety and support.

This future demands that we move beyond triaging the violence of carceral systems through temporary reforms or procedural improvements. Instead, social workers must actively participate in their dismantling and the construction of new systems that do not rely on forced compliance or state regulation. This includes replacing youth detention centers with community spaces that nurture creativity and healing, transforming schools into sites of democratic learning and restorative engagement, and abolishing family policing in favor of kinship-affirming, materially resourced networks of care. In this world, the role of the social worker is not to manage risk or report trauma to the state, but to facilitate access, redistribute resources, and support self-determination—especially for young people who have long been pathologized or criminalized by existing systems.

Importantly, abolitionist social work must let go of the assumption that care must be legitimized through professional credentials or institutional oversight. Mutual aid, youth-led organizing, and peer support networks have long provided the kinds of care that formal systems fail to deliver. Rather than claiming expertise over community knowledge, social workers must work alongside youth and communities, supporting the expansion of models that already exist beyond state control. As Ewing (2018) reminds us in her work on schools and systemic harm, imagination is itself a critical site of resistance. If we cannot imagine a world without punishment, we are condemned to reproduce it.

An abolitionist future for social work is not a fixed blueprint—it is an unfolding commitment to solidarity, creativity, and radical care. It asks us to hold space for what does not yet exist and to invest in the slow, collective work of building otherwise. As Erica Meiners and Mariame Kaba have argued, abolition is both a vision and a practice. It requires us to ask: what are we willing to give up to become free, and what are we ready to build in its place? For social work, this means letting go of carceral logics entirely—not just softening their edges—and investing in communities as the rightful stewards of their own futures.

The horizon of abolition is vast, but it begins with a shift in how we understand our role: not as mitigators of harm within broken systems, but as co-conspirators in creating the conditions where those systems are no longer necessary. That is the challenge—and the promise—of an abolitionist future in social work.