Search Results (3)

Community members seeking alternatives to policing have played a substantive role in promoting safety and responding to harm for decades. The Survival Line was formed as a volunteer-run hotline to respond to community members’ concerns about neighborhood crime or police misconduct. It was established in the summer of 1970 as a mechanism for gathering data while also referring callers to community resources like pro bono attorneys and low-cost social services. It ran as a 24/7 hotline staffed entirely by volunteers from the Action for Survival coalition, a group of community-based organizations, which included the Chicago Urban League. Using historical analytic methods, this study asks the following: what function did this citizen-run hotline serve in 1970s Chicago? This study mobilizes archival research methods to analyze call records, meeting minutes, publicity materials, and internal memos from the Chicago Urban League and its Survival Line archives. This archival analysis found that the Survival Line served multiple functions; it was a non-state response to urban crises, a vehicle for Black solidarity, and a mechanism for gathering data on crime and police misconduct in the city. By functioning as an alternative to policing and state responses to crime, a vehicle for Black neighborhood solidarity, and a data collection mechanism, the Survival Line was at the core of an impactful micropolitical intervention upon urban crises in 1970s Chicago. As a historical example of community-driven violence and crisis response, this hotline has implications for contemporary social work—specifically for direct practice, community organizing, program design and evaluation, and community-based participatory research. Full article

Reflecting upon Mary Richmond’s early call for formalized social work training to address the historical struggles of the field, this analysis examines how American social work education has addressed the paradoxes of help and harm present in the field for more than a century. We examine how, under the guise of benevolence and care, social work has exerted social control and contributed to gendered criminalization. We use the term carceral complicity to extend the concept of carceral social work, illustrating how carceral complicity has contributed to women’s criminalization through the embedding, enacting, and invisibilizing of carceral logics in social work. In addition to describing how carceral complicity has been addressed in social work education, we illustrate the gendered nature of carceral complicity, highlighting how women have historically and contemporarily been positioned as both the proprietors and the recipients of carceral complicity. In line with recent scholarship, we suggest that through a transformative approach to social work education we may disrupt carceral complicity and support liberatory futures. Full article

This archival study explores the life and work of Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith (1885–1942), a Progressive Era social worker and prison warden. Specifically, I explore the first phase of her career as a House Physician at the Virginia K. Johnson Home in Dallas, Texas (1911–1915) and as the first Superintendent of the Texas State Training School for Girls in Gainesville, Texas (1916–1925). Using archival research, I detail three conflicts that defined Dr. Smith’s superintendency: her fight to reclassify a youth prison as a school, her challenges to a Ku Klux Klan-dominated legislature, and her refusal to cede authority to a State Board of Control. Together, these conflicts led the Board to terminate Dr. Smith’s position, an outcome that would replay twice more before she retired from prisonwork. I argue that when most reformers made significant concessions, compromising their visions to maintain state funding and political allyship, Dr. Smith stood out for her record of refusal. And yet, like other reformers, she left Texas with the capacity to imprison more women and girls than ever before. Full article