The Discursive Construction of Risk: Social Work Knowledge Production and Criminalized Women

Given the concurrent phenomena of mass incarceration and neoliberal evolutions in the welfare state, it is inevitable that criminalized women will encounter social workers in their everyday lives. Under the conceptual lens of governmentality, social workers play a central role in reinforcing and interrupting processes of criminalization. This critical discourse analysis examines knowledge production in social work as an important site of engagement with criminalized women. Findings indicate that social work privileges a psychological discourse and that the logic of risk has supplanted holistic approaches to understanding criminalized women. This, I conclude, reflects a neoliberal political climate and aligns social work with carceral institutions in troubling ways. Although the discourse of risk seems firmly entrenched in the contemporary social work lexicon, it should not be treated as infallible or inevitable. This analysis propels a shift in emphasis toward discourses that invite political and ethical engagement with the carceral state.