Reclaiming Social Work from the State

Few places make the overlapping structural forces of reformist control more visible than the Bronx—a borough of New York City shaped by decades of policy decisions that concentrated disadvantage, disinvestment, and punishment. Even reforms framed around protecting the most vulnerable often generated more poverty, housing instability, and food insecurity.

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994—the biggest crime bill in the history of the United States—was one such reform, pitched as a necessary measure to protect the public. In practice, the $30.2 billion crime bill disproportionately targeted Black communities, including those in the Bronx. Alongside New York City’s infamous stop-and-frisk regime, the crime bill helped fuel mass incarceration—which was already well underway—and condemned tens of thousands of Bronx residents to a lifetime of racist surveillance and policing.

These “reforms” did little to make communities safer, and their intergenerational effects have been devastating. Worse, they compounded the harms that misguided mid-century infrastructure projects had already inflicted—chief among them the Cross Bronx Expressway, which displaced at least 40,000 residents and contributed to environmental health crises that persist today.

It is in reformist policies that we can see how insidiously structural violence can persist and even expand. These policies often involve social workers or social work principles as frames of reference. Over the years, reforms have been instituted in New York that call for greater access to treatment, alternatives to incarceration, supportive housing, and other interventions where social workers play a critical role in determining eligibility or for evaluating performance within these new systems.

In other words, 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?

There is a longer and richer tradition of social work than the one most visible in state systems. It is a tradition that understands people not as risks to be managed, but as whole human beings whose struggles are inseparable from the policies that structure their lives.

Following that tradition starts by accepting a reality that public defenders know intimately: interactions with the state do not stay in their lanes. A criminal case, family court case, or arrest can threaten housing, employment, immigration status, and family unity all at once. Systems intersect, and when they fail, they fail simultaneously.

That is why social work in holistic defense—a model of public defense that treats a client’s legal case as only one part of the problem—offers a model for how to move the profession away from the carceral logic and contradictions that plague it. In this model, social workers are accountable first to the people we represent and to their goals, not to the state’s demand for order, compliance, or proof of worthiness. This model requires discipline. It means asking, repeatedly, whether what looks like support is expanding a person’s freedom or merely making them more legible to institutions that would punish them. It means refusing to confuse poverty with neglect, trauma with pathology, or instability with unfitness. It means making sure advocacy does not become another way of managing people for the court, but a way of defending people against the harm those systems produce.

What does that look like in practice?

In criminal defense, it means refusing to accept the flattened picture the system often offers of the person before it. Criminal courts are structured to reduce people to the worst allegation against them and then treat every hardship in their lives as further proof of instability or dangerousness. Social work can easily be pulled into that logic, turning pain into performance and hardship into institutional evidence. Holistic defense, by attempting to understand a person in their entirety, insists on honoring context and dignity. It helps secure treatment, housing, benefits, and stability not as conditions of worthiness, but as part of what people need to remain whole in the face of a system designed to isolate and punish them.

In family defense, this means refusing one of the most damaging equations in U.S. public life: poverty as neglect. It means helping courts see the difference between danger and deprivation. It means working to preserve family unity by securing the material conditions that allow families to thrive—housing, income, childcare, treatment, educational support, and community-based resources that do not come with punishment attached. It also means staying alert to how easily “support” can become another form of policing. Done right, social work helps families resist the state’s tendency to confuse surveillance with support, maximizing their well-being within a broken system, while we work toward a better one.

In detention and deportation defense, it means resisting the moral sorting that immigration systems impose so easily. In that setting, social work cannot merely document vulnerability for institutional consumption. It must help stabilize the person and defend the life detention is trying to unravel. That may mean gathering support for release, strengthening family and community ties, addressing urgent needs, and making visible the full consequences detention or deportation would carry. It also means refusing the idea that some people must prove their worthiness to remain with their families while others can be treated as disposable.

In civil defense, it means addressing a reality head-on that the state works very hard to hide: that entering the legal system is often the greatest contributing factor to losing housing, income, employment, education, and other life necessities. Protecting housing, preserving benefits, and securing economic stability are not peripheral interventions. They interrupt the chain of harm that lets one system failure become many.

This is the political importance of individual-level intervention. Helping one person keep their home, avoid detention, reunify with their child, or stabilize after arrest is a way of disrupting the state’s ability to convert one crisis into deeper and more permanent system involvement. And stopping one person’s spiral into further surveillance and punishment means a whole family, a whole community, is protected from these devastating consequences. It is how social work can help defend people in the present while disrupting the carceral logic that tries to keep people trapped in systems of management and control.

A social worker can be situated in a public defender office, committed to abolitionist principles, and still feel the pull of the same habits that have long made the profession vulnerable to co-optation. The pressure to translate a person’s life into a story a court will reward. The temptation to confuse guidance with direction, or support with management. The quiet return of paternalism under the banner of professionalism, expertise, or strategy. These pressures do not disappear simply because the framework is different. If anything, they become more important to confront.

Sustaining social work within a holistic defense framework requires more than the right intentions or values. It requires constant questioning, and reexamination of itself: Who is this work serving? Is a particular intervention expanding a person’s choices, or narrowing them in ways an institution will find reassuring? Are we helping someone articulate their own goals, or are we reshaping those goals into something more legible to power? Are we making room for the full reality of a person’s life, or reducing it to the pieces a court or agency is prepared to recognize?

Sometimes that contradiction appears in the smallest strategic choices. A court may be more receptive to a parent, a young person, or a neighbor if their life can be narrated in the right terms: compliant, remorseful, exceptionally sympathetic, already on a path the system recognizes as redemption. But holistic defense asks us to be careful about what is lost in making someone legible that way. The question is not only whether a narrative will work. It is whether it asks the person to surrender too much of their autonomy, complexity, or dignity in exchange for relief.

A better practice must hold that line: fighting for the best possible outcome without reinforcing the idea that freedom belongs only to those who can perform worthiness to the state.

At The Bronx Defenders, where I practice, some of the resources for resisting that drift is structural. Interdisciplinary practice makes it harder to collapse a person into a single need or a single institutional story. Working alongside attorneys and advocates creates more space to test assumptions, challenge narrow framings, and return to the larger question of what will protect the person from cascading harm. Holistic defense also resists the fragmentation that gives carceral logic so much of its power. When a criminal case is understood only as a criminal case, or a family court case only as a question of parenting, systems can impose narrow judgments and call them neutral. Bringing the full context into view makes those judgments harder to sustain.

Just as importantly, holistic defense can help return social work to its proper scale. Not every crisis calls for professional intervention. Not every hardship should be translated into diagnosis. Sometimes resisting co-optation means stepping back, listening longer, and refusing to let expertise override self-determination. Sometimes it means recognizing that what a person needs most is not more guidance, but resources, time, and trust to make decisions about their own life.

What sustains such a practice, then, is not purity. It is not the fantasy that one can work near punitive systems without contradiction. It is a willingness to stay active in struggle with those contradictions rather than hide behind the language of abolition. Holistic defense offers resources for that struggle: interdisciplinary collaboration, person-centered advocacy, a broader understanding of what legal system involvement does to a life, and a refusal to confuse the state’s interests with the needs of the people it harms.

The history of the Bronx shows so clearly what happens when government treats public health and public safety as problems to be solved through oversight instead of investment. The model I’ve been describing shows how social work can tap into the profession’s liberatory tradition of helping people stay housed, with their children, out of cages, and rooted in their communities. In a moment shaped by widening inequality, punitive policy, and the erosion of civil protections, this year’s National Association of Social Workers’ theme, Uplift, Defend, Transform, is not simply a slogan. It names both our responsibility and our direction. Social workers are not peripheral to justice; we can be among its most necessary architects.

_{Image: Josep Martins/ Unsplash}

Contributors

Carolyn Strudwick Carolyn Strudwick is the Managing Director for Social Work Practice at the Bronx Defenders and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• criminal legal system
• public defenders
• social work