Root cause of mass incarceration is an insufficient amount of government policies that address the negative racial stereotypes the criminal justice system. Racial stereotypes and biases lay at the foundation of our criminal justice system. In our current criminal justice system there are no legal penalties for a police officer allowing racial prejudice to influence their work. In many instances police are encouraged to use their best judgment when it comes to making stops and arrest. The complications with leaving it up to an officer’s judgment is that we have currently have no way of knowing if an officer’s judgment includes racial prejudice or resentment. Even if an officer did not have racial resentment it is proven that we all have racial biases so without training on bias in policing, those biases will inform the way officers interact with citizens.
Racial stereotypes have cast people of color as dangerous or more prone to criminal activity, because those stereotypes inform police work people of color have an increased likelihood of being stopped by the police. Research has verified that people of color are more often stopped for traffic violations than whites. A 2016 study analyzing police arrest in San Francisco found although Black people only made up 15 percent of all police stops they made up nearly half of all police searches after stops. The study also found that many of these stops proved unwarranted “Of all people searched without consent, Black and Hispanic people had the lowest ‘hit rates’ (i.e., the lowest rate of contraband recovered) and whites were found to be carrying contraband at nearly two times the rate as blacks” (Pattillo, Weiman, & Western, 2006). This study reveals that even though people of color were less likely to be carrying contraband they are were more likely to be stopped.
This indicates that if police stopped all ethnicities in the same frequency that they stop people of color we would see a change in the disproportional representation of people of color in the criminal justice system. “In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These young men are part of a growing under caste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society.” (Alexander 2010) Racial bias and its impact on policing have led to a drastic increase in the number of black and Latino people being incarcerated.
127 our experts are availableright now
According to John Rawls’ Liberty Principle: Each person has an equal right to the most extensive system of personal liberty compatible with a system of total liberty for all (Berrick 2018). Following the civil war, many states and local governments passed a series of laws that enforced racial segregation. These laws came to be known as the Jim Crow laws. Through these discriminatory laws, black Americans were relegated to a subordinate status for decades following their freedom from slavery. These laws lasted from 1877 all the way up until the 1950s deeply impacting not just the personal experiences of black Americans but also shaping the systems that they live under. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the book’s decades ago, but today a staggering percentage of the African American community remain in prisons marked as felons and forever denied basic civil and human rights including the right to vote; the right to serve on juries; and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits.
Nearly all states (forty-eight of the fifty) bar incarcerated felons from voting; most (thirty-three) bar either parolees or probationers, or both, from voting (Pattillo, Weiman, & Western, 2006). Today in the U.S. millions of people have been relegated to second-class citizenship because of their criminal status, waiting in the margins unable to participate in society the way other citizens do. The current criminal justice system and the structure of mass incarceration rob citizens of their basic rights which undermines their dignity and demeans their personhood. Incarcerated people like every other human being deserve to be seen as valuable and treated with dignity. In Rawls view all people are free and dignified, mass incarceration inhibits personal freedom and violates Rawls liberty principle which qualifies it as a social injustice.
The school to prison pipeline primes students to be victimized by the criminal justice system. The social worker can work to ameliorate this inequality through micro-level practice, specifically as a school social worker. “School social workers understand the intersection of influences, including psychological factors; trauma; SES; physical and mental health; child welfare; race, ethnicity, and culture; gender identity and sexual orientation; families; and communities can have on child development and youth outcomes” (McCarter, 2017).
School social workers’ can help schools better understand the various factors of student behavior. Their knowledge and training can be used to enhance student support service teams in creating better systems for addressing student behavior. Social workers vital to addressing existing and potential disparities for children and can be incredibly effective in creating school positive anti-discriminatory climates necessary in addressing STPP. School social workers can use their multi-disciplinary education to help schools incorporate evidence-based positive school discipline practices. One of those practices which have roots in the criminal justice system is restorative justice.
Many school social workers have been on the forefront of the restorative justice movement which seeks to reform school discipline. Rather than focusing on punishing and creating offenders, restorative justice emphasizes community and repairing harm by creating pathways for community dialogue and peer accountability. These measures have been particularly powerful for young black men who hold disproportionately high suspension and expulsion rates across the country. There are evidence-based practices that school staffs can use to keep schools safe without suspending or expelling students who are already at high risk of academic failure and social workers can advocate for schools to implement them (McCarter, 2017). Often there are barriers that prevent clients who have been marginalized by institutions like education, from advocating for themselves or getting the resources they need. Through casework, the social worker builds trust with clients and acts as a resource broker.
When the school or the family comes to them with needs they connect them to beneficial information or resources. In the school climate this could mean referring a child who has been presenting aggressive behaviors in the classroom to a counselor who can help them address the source of their anger. In instances where a child is being treated without respect or their agency is being limited the social worker could at as an advocate and represent the child and family and address the problems that they are facing at the school. “Social workers are uniquely qualified to assist with building a race analysis, facilitating courageous conversations, and fostering cultural understanding that can help shrink the social distance, whether real or perceived, among stakeholders” (McCarter, 2017).
This delivery of support on a case-by-case basis stems from Mary Richmond’s development of casework practice, which originates from the idea that care has to focus on the individual (Tannenbaum & Reisch, 2001). This intervention underscores the value of service, which states that social workers help people address social problems without expecting anything in return (“NASW Code of Ethics”). A school social worker needs to show cultural humility and be comfortable creating relationships with youth in crisis and their families. Their respect and dignity for the client should be foundational to the work that they carry out and a strengths-based approach is needed to ensure the client is empowered while their needs are being met.
Because power and privilege are always important factors to consider in social work consistent training and evaluations are necessary for this role and would allow for the social worker to ensure that their power and or prejudices aren’t playing a role in their work with clients. In creating interventions, the social worker must remain mindful of the power they have in deciding what clients get what resources, they must ensure that all interventions are collaborative. An advantage of this micro level intervention in combatting mass incarceration is that its preventative nature has the power to keep young people away from the criminal justice system altogether. This approach is relational and enables the social worker to look at the client’s needs and use their entire network (i.e. School, family, friends, church) to help the client succeed.
The social work profession can address mass incarceration at the macro-level by being a community change agent through policy advocacy. As an initiator, the social worker recognizes the larger systematic problems in the criminal justice system, so in this approach, they would analyze and create policies that address and eliminate the causes of mass incarceration. The social worker provides research and recommendations to help advocates and policymakers in the work of criminal justice reform.
For example, the policy advocate could advocate for mandatory racial bias training for all police officers in a certain community. They could also advocate for the police forces to hire officers that are reflective of the community they are policing. Mass incarceration affects entire communities and societies so polices to address it must include both the incarcerated and their communities. There must also be greater collaboration between prison officials and officials in child and family welfare services, educational and job training programs, and mental and public health agencies (Pattillo, Weiman, & Western, 2006).
In collaboration with different helping agencies, the social worker can use a problem-solving model to identify the root causes of mass incarceration, gather community input, create policies that ameliorate the causes, and lobby for those changes with elected officials. Policies that target mass incarceration could include getting rid of prison sentences for non-violent drug offenses, advocating for community-based policing, restoring voter rights to the incarcerated, and creating more economic opportunities for the previously incarnated upon release. The social worker would use their ability to assess and analyze policies in combination with community participation to see the best ways to get effective legislation passed that addresses’ inequality in the criminal justice system. In this way, the social worker acts as a spokesperson and advocate for their clients.
Community engagement and political action interventions branch from Jane Addams’ settlement house movement, where the focus is on targeting environmental factors (Tannenbaum & Reisch, 2001). This intervention underlines the value of social justice by pursuing social change on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups (“NASW Code of Ethics”). This social work practice upholds dignity and worth of all persons and commitment to clients (“NASW Code of Ethics”). An advantage of this approach is that it addresses the issue of mass incarceration for a larger percentage of those impacted. In all work with vulnerable people, it’s critical to acknowledge power and privilege in social work practices.
As a policy advocate, the social worker is making decisions that often impact entire communities, so it’s important to practice cultural humility and to create policies that acknowledge and work with community assets. To manage their power and privilege the social worker must ensure that they are always representing the communities voice rather than their own. To do so they must remain engaged with the community and their goals and be comfortable putting their needs first even if the communities needs conflict with the social worker’s goals. With knowledge, it would be tempting for a social worker to assume that they know the best solutions for the people they are serving, but in creating policy social workers must consult with the communities and create clear pathways for community ownership and leadership of the policies that directly or indirectly impact them.
