Facilitating the Carceral Pipeline: Social Work’s Role in Funneling Newcomer Children From the Child Protection System to Jail and Deportation

Abstract

This article examines the intersections of the child protection, immigration and criminal systems, and the carceral logics that undergird all three systems. Taking seriously Patricia Hill Collins’ (2017) call to analyze “intensified points of convergence” (p. 1464), we analyze the role of social work in perpetuating carceral systems and the tools that feminist social work provides for disrupting them. Using a case analysis of a foster child in Halifax, Canada, who in 2018 was faced with deportation after social workers failed to secure his citizenship status, we argue that a pipeline exists between child protection and a growing “crimmigration” system. The carceral logics of this pipeline not only draw from anti-Black, Islamophobic, and settler colonial histories of oppression, but they also position certain noncitizen families as unassimilable and requiring of state intervention rather than social supports. With this carceral pipeline in mind, we then draw from feminist anticarceral and intersectional approaches to consider a range of resistance strategies. Ultimately, we argue for a transformative justice approach that goes beyond reforming the pipeline and instead takes seriously the insights of abolitionist movements as an alternative to purely reformist approaches.

Introduction to Special Topic on Anticarceral Feminisms: Imagining a World Without Prisons

“…Another set of articles by Mountz (2020) and Bergen and Abji (2020) investigate the carceral logics of the child welfare system and the ways in which they serve as a pipeline to the PIC. Mountz brings to attention queer and trans youth of color rarely featured in now ubiquitous pipeline metaphors.…”

“…Bergen and Abji (2020) explore a highly publicized case of child welfare neglect in Canada and social workers’ complicity in the threatened deportation of a racialized youth who was funneled through the foster care system. Drawing on the linkages between the carceral state and the child welfare system, their account vividly demonstrates what they identify as the “carceral pipeline for non-citizen youth.” Through deconstructing this case, Bergan and Abji discuss the deep complicity of the child welfare system in the state’s surveillance of immigrant bodies and how removal of children who are deemed at risk of future abuse and neglect, coupled with the child welfare workers’ failure to secure a child’s citizenship, can impose further harms including detention and deportation.…”

Punishing Survivors and Criminalizing Survivorship: A Feminist Intersectional Approach to Migrant Justice in the Crimmigration System

“…Likewise, the population of non-status migrants in Canada is a smaller percentage of the population compared to the US, and rates of deportation and detention are also much lower in the Canadian case. 5 Yet, as I and others have argued, processes of crimmigration and the related securitization of migration have nevertheless shaped migrant precarity in Canada, and certainly shaped the tragic circumstances surrounding Lucía's death (Abji, 2016;Bergen & Abji, 2020;Bosworth & Turnbull, 2014;Goldring & Landolt, 2013;Molnar & Silverman, 2018).…”

“…Crenshaw defines structural intersectionality as the co-constitution of gendered, racialized, and classed structures of state power in law (see also Bhuyan, Osborne, Zahraei & Tarshis, 2014;Maynard, 2017;Walia, 2013). I apply this approach to extend crimmigration scholarship, providing a reading of Lucía's case that is informed by my own fieldwork and interviews with service providers working within the anti-violence against women sector in Toronto, Canada (Abji, 2016(Abji, , 2018Abji, Korteweg & Williams, 2019;Bergen & Abji, 2020). I argue that what gets criminalized in such cases is not only irregular migration, but also the strategies of survivorship that racialized and migrant women have developed to address the multiple forms of violence in their lives.…”

Social Work With Criminalized Women: Governance or Resistance in the Carceral State?

“…A growing body of social work scholarship concerns itself with carceral expansion and critiques the ways in which carceral logic infiltrates everyday social work practice (Bergen & Abji, 2020;Jacobs et al, 2021;Jarldorn, 2020;Kim, 2013;Mehrotra et al, 2016;O'Brien et al, 2020;Valenzuela & Alcarzar-Campos, 2020). Such infiltration is neither neutral nor natural: it reflects both neoliberalism's stranglehold on the profession and social work's historical situatedness in a positivist school of criminological thought regarding practice with criminalized populations (Roberts & Springer, 2007;Wilson, 2010).…”