[…]because social work embodies an ethic of care, dignity, and human need, it is often recruited into reformist systems. When the government finally recognizes the damage of its own failed policies, it frequently turns to social workers—and the profession’s language of compassion—to mitigate harm and make its systems look more humane. Social work becomes carceral not only when it operates inside punitive institutions, but when it becomes accountable on their terms. When the work is organized around assessing risk for courts, monitoring families for agencies, proving compliance, or translating hardship into categories institutions can sort and act on, care becomes inseparable from control. The profession’s ethical language remains, but its function shifts. It begins to stabilize people on behalf of the state rather than standing with them against the harm the state is producing.

Many social workers, organizers, scholars, and directly impacted families have rightly named this contradiction and pushed the profession toward an abolitionist critique of its role in perpetuating systems of punishment, surveillance, and family policing. I share that horizon.

But as a social worker, supervisor, and teacher, my concerns are practical: What kind of social work can help move us away from carceral logic in the daily reality of courts, detention, family policing, and civil legal crisis? And what kind of accountability can keep social work practice from creating the very harms it is trying to prevent?