Sponsor
Portland State University. Social Work and Social Research Ph. D. Program
First Advisor
Stephanie Bryson
Term of Graduation
Summer 2024
Date of Publication
6-5-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Social Work and Social Research
Department
Social Work
Language
English
Subjects
policewomen, Progressive Era, social work history, training schools
Physical Description
1 online resource (xii, 242 pages)
Abstract
Corrections, the work of surveilling, policing, and managing the deviant, is foundational to US social work history. This relationship, sometimes referred to as "care and coercion," has shifted in form and visibility over time. Popular histories of Progressive Era social work privilege narratives of progress, often relating to child welfare and juvenile justice reform. These narratives ignore a wealth of scholarship challenging the logic and outcomes of reform, and ignore social work's influence on policing and prisonwork in the early twentieth century. Many of social work's current pursuits to reform the criminal-legal system (e.g., police social work, residential treatment) are strikingly similar to and not always conscious of Progressive Era experiments in corrections.
This three-paper dissertation explores social work's relationship to prisons and policing in the Progressive Era United States (1890-1930). Specifically, I explore how a burgeoning social work identity and unstable discourses of police and prisonwork helped shape the carceral state. The first paper describes social work's relationship to corrections, as told in peer-reviewed social work articles. To help address silences in the social work literature, the next two papers use archival research to explore the lives and work of two social workers. The second paper profiles Lola Greene Baldwin, a social worker and policewoman in Oregon who changed the carceral landscape of the Pacific Northwest and built templates to expand policing and prison projects across the country. The third paper profiles Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith, a social worker and prison warden in Texas who increased her state's capacity to imprison women and girls alongside a decade-long effort to reclassify and reimagine the prison as a school. Taken together, these papers help situate policing and prison work within an American social work tradition and invite critical questions about the limits of reform.
Rights
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Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/42496
Recommended Citation
Harrell, Sam, "Social Workers as Police and Prison Wardens in the Progressive Era" (2024). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 6685.