Victoria Copeland, Alan Dettlaff: How Carceral Violence Persists Through the Surveillance, Punishment, and Regulation of Families

Although conceptualizations of the carceral state have become more expansive in recent years to include systems beyond prisons and policing, the child welfare system has often eluded this conceptualization due to a societal perception that it protects vulnerable children from harm.

Despite this, the system has continued to function as a system of social control informed by carceral logics. Families become trapped within this extensive system of surveillance, many who receive little reprieve from the issues that brought them to the system’s attention.

Once involved in the system, families are forced to comply with services focused on regulation of the behaviors deemed to be harmful or risky, while the system employs an escalating series of punishments to ensure compliance including the forcible separation of children from their families. In this paper, we analyze these functions of surveillance, regulation, and punishment, adapting and extending penal techniques described by Kohler-Hausmann (2019) to position the child welfare system as an arm of the carceral continuum used to maintain the oppression of Black communities.

As such, we use the term family policing to more accurately capture the carceral functions of the child welfare system and the role it plays in the lives of families.

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