Abolition: Law & Disorders

“Abolition is a movement to end systemic violence including the interpersonal vulnerabilities and displacements that keep the system going. In other words, the goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people before profits, welfare before warfare, and life over death.”

—Ruth Wilson Gilmore

As a social worker and mental health professional (who also happens to be a long-time advocate for abolition) I wholeheartedly believe that policing is antagonistic to the best of my profession’s values and aspirations. When it comes to police and prisons, I agree with Angela Y. Davis when she states:

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”

Professor Davis talks about abolition as primarily concerned with “re-envisioning” and “building anew.” Social services and mental healthcare, too, needs to be re-envisioned and built anew. Sadly, my own profession has a long history of bolstering systemic violence — often focusing on the control and surveillance of oppressed bodies, rather than supporting their health and well-being.

The way mental health professionals are trained to assume an expert role (backed by the state) with a focus on treatment and diagnosis of disorders tends to disappear human beings and regulate them to the cages of pathology and stigma — if not the literal cages within medical and carceral institutions. Social problems, such as racism, cissexism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and classism, become hidden and displaced by diagnostic and treatment frames that ignore the role of systemic violence and oppression, including intergenerational and collective health and well-being.

A central value of my approach (and what brought me to social work and mental health) is healing. It needs to be pointed out that treatment of psychopathology, which is the traditional focus of psychotherapy, is not the same thing as healing. Rather than simply the removal of distress and trauma, healing requires cultivating overall physical, mental, and social well-being. An example of re-envisioning around healing is Shawn Ginwright’s article, “The Future of Healing: Shifting From Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement,” where he writes:

“Healing centered engagement offers an important departure from solely viewing … people through the lens of harm and focuses on asset driven strategies that highlight possibilities for well-being. An asset driven strategy acknowledges that young people are much more than the worst thing that happened to them, and builds upon their experiences, knowledge, skills and curiosity as positive traits to be enhanced. While it is important to acknowledge trauma and its influence on … people’s mental health, healing centered strategies move one step beyond by focusing on what we want to achieve, rather than merely treating emotional and behavioral symptoms of trauma. This is a salutogenic approach focusing on how to foster and sustain well-being. Based in positive psychology, healing centered engagement is based in collective strengths and possibility which offers a departure from conventional psychopathology which focuses on clinical treatment of illness.”

As is the case with healing justice practitioners, Ginwright highlights how a healing centered approach is explicitly political and culturally grounded, and therefore includes both social action and collective healing. (I recommend reading the entire article here.)

The difference between treatment and healing is an important one, and shouldn’t be dismissed as semantics. Policing and carceral institutions have had a close relationship with the treatment of psychopathology in the disappearing of human beings. As a transgender woman, my existence has historically been treated as both criminal and pathological. We find this linkage between policing and mental health in the term “disorder,” where being transgender has been considered both a disorderly conduct (a crime) and a mental disorder (a psychopathology). The goal was literally to remove transgender and gender nonbinary (TGNB) people from society, and we continue to see this desire to remove TGNB people with the reactionary MAGA-empowered movements and the policies of the Trump administration. So it’s easy to understand how mental health professionals can be accomplices, if not stand-ins, for policing and carceral systems. Policing is obviously not about healing, and there is nothing inherently healing about an approach that focuses of treatment of pathology.

In contrast, the healing approach is seen in the work being done to affirm the identities, and support the social belonging, of TGNB people. Without the collectively-oriented work in the social, cultural, and political spheres that has removed structural and institutional barriers to gender affirming access to care, community, and public spaces, little progress would be possible in terms of individual healing for TGNB people. That is, the possibilities for any of us to experience the fullness and possibilities of well-being, including joy, happiness, connections, validation, trust, hope, dreams, aspirations, and so on, are restricted by the institutional and systemic violence.