12 minute read
The Carceral State
Incarceration and the role of social work in the system
STORY BY TYNAN POWER
ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
Close to two million people are currently incarcerated in the United States. During 2020 and 2021, the incarcerated population dropped due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the numbers are climbing again, and with them the number of individuals, families and communities impacted by incarceration.
“When social workers think about intersectionality in the context of clinical work, they need to think about incarceration as one of those intersections,” said Jackie Cosse, M.S.W. ’16, who is completing a Ph.D. at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work.
“One part of that is thinking about risk of incarceration—who is more likely to be arrested and prosecuted, who is more likely to benefit from the carceral state— but it’s also about incarceration as part of family stories and social environment.”
Whether or not they work directly with people in prisons, social workers play a variety of roles with people impacted by incarceration— and in a profession that is part of the carceral state.
Social Work With Incarcerated Populations
“On any given day I am challenged to intervene on a micro, mezzo and/ or macro level and to be mindful of person-in-environment and contextual behavioral factors while working to support incarcerated people,” said Levin Schwartz, M.S.W. ’11, who works as the assistant superintendent of clinical and reentry services at the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office (FCSO) in western Massachusetts.
“In the 1960s an erroneous perspective led to carceral environments being divorced from our care continuum—somehow people who are incarcerated were thought of as different than the people in the community, when in fact they have been, and most will likely be again, our neighbors and community members,” said Schwartz. “This divide has blunted the ability for carceral systems to stay up to date with modern treatment modalities.”
Schwartz points to the Medicaid Inmate Exclusion Policy (MIEP), enacted in 1965, which prohibits Medicaid from being accessed for the care of incarcerated people, even if they otherwise qualify.
“To manage treatment costs, many correctional facilities nationwide offer low-quality care that inadequately follows established clinical guidelines,” said Schwartz.
Another limitation is the use of protocols such as Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT) and Charting a New Course.
“At best, systems that choose to use these outdated treatment protocols, choose a method of treatment that shames and blames people struggling with trauma and addiction, and at worst, these systems weaponize flawed and outdated ‘evidence based’ treatments to promote stigma and bias of people in the justice system,” said Schwartz.
To measure outcomes, the primary metric is the rate of recidivism.
“The more often a person has been incarcerated, the more likely they are to recidivate. The carceral system has compounded the problem by inadvertently reinforcing institutionalized narratives and fusion with a ‘criminal’ self-identity in clients,” said Schwartz. “There are few people more fused with their self story than folks who are incarcerated.”
Creating Space For Reflection And Choice With Mindfulness
Schwartz has witnessed dramatic improvements during his time at FCSO. A study analyzing 10 years of data, in 3-year cohorts, found that people who were released from FCSO in 2011 had a recidivism rate of 53% three years after release, but that dropped to 32.2% for the 2015 cohort—a 39.2% improvement. Schwartz attributes this to the effectiveness of modalities that include mindfulness-based treatments, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Mindfulness, in particular, can help people during and after incarceration.
“Put simply, being mindful is the action of creating space between stimulus and response. In that space there is choice—how do I choose to respond to this situation, rather than reacting impulsively,” said Schwartz. “Mindfulness based treatment is a transdiagnostic model, meaning that it is a helpful treatment beyond any one diagnosis and works to support the well being of people and to successfully navigate adversity in any form.”
Amber Kelly, Ph.D. ’14, is an associate professor at Quinnipiac University and an adjunct associate professor at SSW, who also teaches trauma-informed mindfulness-based programs in prisons.
“One of the reasons I went back and got a Ph.D. is because of what I was learning while teaching these MBSR classes,” said Kelly. “Women were using practices of mindfulness specifically to deal with symptoms around psychological trauma—interpersonal trauma that they had lived and dealt with prior ever to coming to prison, as well as the traumatization they experienced while incarcerated. They often didn’t have the resources and contacts to use available systems of help and support, like substance use treatment or psychological treatment or otherwise. Many didn’t have family systems and community systems that were able to support them and so they landed in prison—because often that’s the way we take care of people with problems in our country, unfortunately.”
Kelly thinks it’s crucial to acknowledge the context of incarceration and the carceral state.
“When we walk in saying, ‘I would like to teach a meditation course in prison,’ that means I’m teaching a meditation course in the context of state violence, interpersonal violence, community violence, economic oppression, and racial and gender oppression,” said Kelly. “If I’m asking someone to sit with the difficulty that’s coming up in their own bodies, minds and hearts, we need to be explicit about where some of those difficulties are coming from.”
Ripple Effects Of Incarceration
Marian S. Harris, Ph.D. ’97, is a former adjunct professor, doctoral student clinical supervisor, research adviser at SSW, a 2015 Day Garrett Award winner and a professor at the University of Washington Tacoma. She has devoted most of her illustrious career to child welfare research, including studying the effects of incarceration on children and families.
According to Harris, many children of incarcerated parents end up in the child welfare system—especially if their incarcerated parent is their mother.
“This [separation] impacts a child’s attachment relationship,” said Harris. “It impacts the child’s development across the lifespan. One thing that’s very important for children when a dad or mom is incarcerated is to maintain that attachment relationship.”
In her new book Children of Incarcerated Parents: Silent Victims, Harris captures many stories of people who have been incarcerated and their families—including the story of one grandmother who spent over $15,000 for her son to talk with family by phone via collect calls, in addition to the costs for her to drive his infant daughter to visit him in a prison located hundreds of miles from the family’s home.
“Believe it or not, talking by phone via collect calls is a multi-million dollar business in addition to the billion dollar business of privatization of prisons in many states in this country,” said Harris. “These businesses are a disadvantage to incarcerated parents, their children and caregivers.”
Harris notes some prisons include child-friendly visitation rooms, which are more welcoming to children. Residential prison nurseries also are important, but remain rare.
“I’ve met babies at the Washington State Correction Center for Women’s residential nursery and it is just phenomenal to see them with their moms, which is where a newborn should be: in the arms of their mothers. Because that’s how babies attach,” said Harris.
Even after incarceration, the challenges of reentry include obstacles to housing and employment, which continue to destabilize families.
“The Public Housing Opportunity Extension Act of 1996 specifically says that you cannot get Section 8 housing if you have been evicted and arrested for a drug offense,” said Harris. “To me that is just wrong and social workers need to be advocating for change.”
Limitations On Research
Limitations on research with incarcerated populations can pose challenges for social workers. This results in both less existing research about efficacy— especially defined in ways beyond “recidivism”—and fewer opportunities to conduct research.
“My whole dissertation topic ended up being a trauma-informed version of the MBSR program based on the modifications we had made in the prison, but the research was in the community because, with the levels of bureaucracy, it would have taken 20 years to research any intervention,” said Kelly.
“On one hand, there is a very good reason: people who are incarcerated are a ‘protected population,’” said Kelly. “Because people are vulnerable, we want there to be extra sets of protections around being able to do research, especially intervention research. On the other hand, there’s the state bureaucracy of any prison system. It’s always very complex, very hierarchical.”
“In the past, there has been research that’s been done on prisoners—on people of color—without their consent,” said Harris. “Human subjects’ consent to participate in research is to protect the prisoners. Prisoners have to consent. For me, I’m typically going to want to write about research findings, therefore, in my consent form I ask permission to record responses to research questions and allow participants to review their responses after transcription is completed and to make any changes they feel are needed, and also get their consent to report findings in aggregate without any identifying information in journal articles, conference presentations, etc.”
“What is the point of doing the research, if you don’t use it to inform others and make life better for people?” said Harris.
Advocating For Change
The high toll incarceration takes on families has made Harris acutely aware of the circumstances that lead to arrest.
“A large percentage of women go to prison for some type of drug offense,” said Harris. “And it’s not them out on the street selling drugs. It’s not them using drugs. They’re either married to or partnered with a man who is involved with drugs.”
“We’re sending people to prison because, even though we have a large number of states where marijuana is legal, federal drug laws have not changed. Social workers need to be advocating for changes in drug laws.”
Jackie Cosse is focusing her Ph.D. research on another group of unjustly incarcerated people: survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). According to Cosse, survivors are often criminalized as a result of mandatory arrest/prosecution policies and systemic injustices that determine who controls the narrative and who is perceived as a victim.
“If I am a deaf person in a relationship, and my partner is hearing, when the police get called, my partner has control over the narrative,” said Cosse. “The same thing is true if I’m Black or if I’m a person of color.”
Cosse has found that there is a surprising amount of resistance within the field of social work to the idea of abolition—especially when talking about IPV. The end of the 20th century saw a surge in attention paid to domestic violence and using the legal system as a means to protect women, but that movement primarily served women who were white, cisgender, heterosexual and upper or middle class. When victims don’t match that image, there’s a greater risk that they will be criminalized themselves.
“Studies have shown that up to 90% of women imprisoned for killing men were abused by those very same men,” explained Cosse. “In one study of 150 women incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Center in New York State, 94% reported severe physical or sexual abuse during their lives, 75% reported severe physical violence from an intimate partner—and over half of this group reported that their partner threatened to kill them.”
For marginalized populations, the relationship between incarceration and experience of violence is especially apparent.
“Of the 172,700 women currently incarcerated in the United States, twothirds are women of color,” said Cosse. “Black/Latine women and Black/Latine transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming (TIGNC) people are the most criminalized for survivorship in the United States. Then if you look at the largest survey of TIGNC people in the country, with over 27,000 people surveyed, more than half reported they had experienced some form of IPV.”
“Many people don’t understand that safety for some is coming at the price of the incarceration of many, many other people,” said Cosse.
Social workers have a reason to be invested in systemic change.
“Social work is an extension of the carceral state,” said Cosse. “We serve as an extension of criminalization. As an example, think of mandated reporting. In some states, it’s a criminal offense if you don’t protect your children from domestic violence. If I’m working with a survivor or if I’m working with a kid where there’s abuse happening, I am mandated to report it. What does that mean? And what does that action end up leading towards for the survivor or the child?”
“We have to think of the ‘whatever to prison’ pipeline in any institution that we’re working in—that is part of abolition,” agrees Kelly. “I was a medical social worker in pediatric intensive care for a long time and noticed that the way the child welfare system functioned, they were working as an arm of the police. If I wasn’t careful, I could have been also. Instead, I chose to act as an advocate for children and families. You really have to think about the policies and protocols that are followed and why, and be skillful in advocating for changes to some of those policies and protocols along the way.”
“Even if you are not an abolitionist, you probably don’t want all social problems to be handled by prisons. We know policing and incarceration are not the best solutions to social problems,” said Kelly.
Even for those working within the prison system, the ideal is to find better solutions.
“The reality is what we are trying to do is work ourselves out of a job,” said Schwartz. “I would love to see a day where the interventions we have implemented have taken root in the community in a way that ‘catches’ people when they fall—well before they end up in jail.” ◆
