Revolutionary Social Work Podcast: Abolish Family Policing

Alan Dettlaff didn’t use the word abolition until 2018 — the year he invited Angela Davis to speak to his students and started reading abolitionist theory. What he found was that everything he had read about prisons applied equally to child welfare.

In this episode of the Revolutionary Social Work Podcast, Alan joins Ace and Alicia to explain how the family policing system — the forcible separation of families, almost always in response to poverty rather than actual harm — is a carceral institution. He connects it directly to prison abolition, policing abolition, abolition of ICE, involuntary mental health systems, and Palestinian liberation, arguing that abolitionist work is one large movement to end carceral systems wherever they appear. He also takes on social work’s professional organizations, calling their commitment to racial and social justice ‘entirely performative’ given their silence on Gaza, and explains why he believes electoral politics through either party cannot resolve the structural problems of empire, imperialism, and capitalism. We discuss:

• How Angela Davis radicalized Alan Dettlaff’s thinking about child welfare as a carceral system
• The upEND Movement: building alternatives to family separation as a response to poverty
• Why abolitionism must connect family policing, prisons, ICE, and Palestinian liberation
• Social work’s performative stance: NASW, CSWE, and schools of social work silent on Gaza
• How elites distract people from the structural problems of empire and capitalism
• Independent media recommendations: Democracy Now, Breaking Points, Social Work Activist Collective

About Dr. Alan Dettlaff: Dr. Dettlaff is a social work professor, abolitionist, and co-founder of the upEND Movement and Toward Liberation. He is the author of Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System and began his career as a caseworker before moving into abolitionist practice.