A critical anthology exploring the debates, conundrums, and promising practices around abolition and social work in academia and within impacted communities.

Within the field of social work—a profession that has been intimately tied to and often complicit in the building and sustaining of the carceral state—abolitionist thinking, movement-building, and praxis has become a resonant and transformative approach. Scholarship and organizing have helped to name and examine the realities of carceral social work, as well as the many ways in which social work has perpetrated criminalization and punishment through family regulation, juvenile justice, anti-violence efforts, immigration control, and more. In this new context, the editors and contributors to Abolition and Social Work ask: Is abolitionist social work possible, or even the goal?

While there is a long history of more liberatory social work, the nexus of abolition and social work is new and in need of inquiry, reflection, and shared practice. Abolition and Social Work offers an orientation to abolitionist theory for social workers and explores the tensions and paradoxes in realizing abolitionist practice in social work—a necessary intervention in contemporary discourse regarding carceral social work, and a compass for recentering this work through the lens of restorative justice and reimagining wellness, social welfare, and care work.