Affilia, 2024, 39(1), 42-58

Prison abolition has emerged as a new framework for critical analysis, policies, and practices with implications for social welfare. Mobilized through a series of social movement events and formations from the late 1990s, prison abolition has taken on public prominence since the summer of 2020 and unprecedented U.S. and global protests of racialized police violence. While proponents of abolition have called for the dismantling of the carceral state or that sphere of the state represented by policing, jails, and prisons, the implications for the welfare state have been less clear. This conceptual article provides an overview of the welfare state and its development since the New Deal, outlining critical debates regarding its contributions to well-being as well as its punitive functions. Building upon David Garland's categories of welfare state sectors, the article offers an initial framing and set of analytical questions for further inquiry into abolitionist informed frameworks and strategies with regard to the welfare state. (Authors' abstract).

"This article offers an initial examination of the relationship between abolition and the welfare state. The article begins with a brief re-introduction to the welfare state and its history in the United States, offers an introductory analysis on the relationship between abolition and the welfare state, highlights feminist welfare theories and feminist abolitionist critiques, and sets forth a series of questions that is intended to catalyze further inquiry, study, and action for social work and for abolitionist and welfare state activists and scholars, more generally. As practitioners and scholars of abolition feminism with an emphasis on gender-based violence and the abolitionist theories and practices of transformative justice, the authors recognize the contributions of feminist abolitionist scholarship, especially in addressing the critique of the carceral state, while expanding the analysis to more explicitly explore the implications for the welfare state." Record #8472