People

How did you come to work at the intersection of legal systems and social work?

Corey Shdaimah: I came to social work after practicing law, where I found myself wondering about the co-construction of relationships between lawyers and people they serve that can both be helpful and harmful. One theory that resonated with my thinking about helping relationships within bureaucratic and legal systems is Michael Lipsky’s “street level bureaucracy”. Street level bureaucrats are people at the frontlines of policy implementation, who work face to face with the individuals that they are supposed to control or help. Even though SLBs have circumscribed options because they work in hierarchical structures with limited resources and conflicting mandates, they have a lot of power over people that they surveil. This depiction of being situated between having a lot of power and very little power is compelling.

I also think that most people act rationally and ethically within the bounds of what they consider possible, whether they are professionals who implement policy or the people they regulate or serve. However, policy is often made with the idea that people are irrational or unethical actors, and so we have to convince them not to do “bad things” without really understanding why people do them. Given that we can’t always know what motivates people and it’s likely some combination of these, I prefer to believe in a world where most people are motivated by their caring for others. If we set that expectation, then maybe we will get that response. Whereas if we set an expectation that we have to punish people into submission, then we create systems that make it harder for people to be kind and to do right by themselves and others by making their resources even more limited and making them even more desperate.  So that's a fundamental interest that I always tapped into in law practice and it was confirmed for me when I came to social work in my dissertation research on legal services lawyers and clients.

A combination of opportunities and my own interest led me to focus on particular areas at the intersection of law and social work including sex work, which is criminalized in the US, and dependency courts. I look at state or county/city level reforms designed to make systems more responsive to professional stakeholders including judges, lawyers, and caseworkers or probation officers and those in the system, such as children, parents, foster parents or folks arrested for criminalized sex work.

 

Can you talk a bit about your current projects?

Corey Shdaimah: I’m working in two areas. The first is a series of projects for the Maryland Foster Care Court Improvement Program (FCCIP) where I conducted interviews with parents whose children have been removed under Child in Need of Assistance processes. The FCCIP wants to learn what facilitates and impedes parents’ engagement, as part of a series of projects looking at the experiences of various dependency court stakeholders including young adults, kinship caregivers, and foster parents. The other project is with people who worked with or participated in a Philadelphia’s Project Dawn Court (PDC) and Baltimore Specialized Diversion (SPD) Program. This is a follow-up on an ethnographic study of PDC and SPD from 2011-2014. In this study, I’m trying to understand how peoples’ thoughts about the program have evolved over time as they look back and in light of recent calls to defund the police and the class, gender, and racial inequities in our criminal legal systems, as well as in response to a national movement around what are called progressive prosecution practices that are taking place at least in Philadelphia where I did my research.

 

What do you see as the social justice implications of the work you do?

Corey Shdaimah: The social work Code of Ethics tells us that whether we work as a researcher, therapist, case manager, community organizer or lobbyist, we must strive for social justice, equity, and anti-oppressive practice. Grounded in a view of human beings as inherently worthy and capable, we should ask how can we build systems where everyone can thrive; that support human agency, rather than reduce people's capacity to act; and that are in tune with people's self-identified goals and aspirations? Social work has a problematic history of social control and oppression, and so we also need to apply our Code of Ethics reflexively both in regard to past and current harms. Social work has a commitment to self-reflection, and I'm seeing that among many of my colleagues and students at the SSW. 

 

Another way that social work can add to a social justice perspective is through the person-in-environment lens. The criminal legal system, child welfare, and other state agencies under neo-liberal regimes focus on how to change individuals to get them to behave the way want.  But if that individual’s actions and behaviors are facilitated and constrained by the systems in which we live and work, then we need to see how existing structures and societal factors influence people's behaviors. Our current legal systems ignore structural issues like poverty and lack of living wage employment; social work reminds us that you can't ask people to change in a vacuum. We also tend to ignore the fact that people have multi-faceted and complex lives, and that they make decisions based on not how they perceive the options available, but in light of their multiple identities and obligations? That also ties into why people do what they do. On the flip side, policy work in a vacuum tends to ignore individual suffering. Social work at its best doesn't say one is more important than the other, but that we need to - at least collectively - pay attention to both.

 

Are there other ways that your social work perspective plays a role in your work?

Corey Shdaimah: Yes. Social work value base also tells us to center people as experts in their own lives. This has social justice implications for everything, including the kind of research that we do. So asking why are you planning a PDP that isn't talking to people who are going to be arrested and “offered” services under this program? It makes no sense from an efficacy perspective: if we don't know how and why people make decisions about their actions, how do we intervene? More importantly, we are ethically bound to consider programs that we develop or evaluate from the perspective of the people who have the most to gain or lose from them.

 

Are there social work perspectives that can add to the field generally?

Corey Shdaimah: Having been socialized as a lawyer and teaching mixed groups of law and social work students, one of my general observations is that law students tend to ask questions like: “what are the rules?”, “how do I do this?” Whereas social work students often ask questions like “is this the right thing to do?”, “is this just?, “is this fair?”.  These kinds of questions that social work students ask should come first. So the professional socialization to ask these fundamental questions adds a valuable voice. Rather than assuming that we have the right goals, let's ask about those goals and then we can figure out the “how.”

 

How do you envision a critical collaborative centering on legal systems?

Corey Shdaimah: I'm working in areas that seem different, but I see a lot of overlap. Child welfare and criminal legal systems are class street level bureaucracies in that they are under-resourced, have conflicting goals, and a tremendous amount of power over folks. They are experienced as punitive, even though child welfare systems is supposed to be ameliorative, and children may be removed for good reason and supposedly only when necessary. These systems are experienced, if not by the same individuals, disproportionately by people from low-income, urban communities, particularly African American communities. And they are systems of control.  So getting people together who look at different aspects across different kinds of systems to look for patterns or convergences can be fruitful. For example, it allows us to think, “Well, maybe this is not just about saving children because we see similarities across systems that are supposed to be fundamentally different.” It can help to identify systemic injustices, and perhaps better understand the exponential and intersecting impacts of these systems of control. 

Ongoing dialogue also allows us to challenge each other. It’s been important to me to be part of groups that are collegial, meaning we are kind to each other, but we also hold each other accountable. When I say us, I mean folks at the UMB SSW, our collaborators, and anyone else who wants to join us, especially any community partners who might want to work with us.

Finally, I have an interest in creating platforms that may be valuable to students, faculty and staff to lift up each other's work and provide a space for support and brainstorming. That can be around applying for a grant, writing a paper, research ethics or methods, or thinking about how our School acts within or around legal systems. I hope this can be a resource hub, and a way to really uplift and share the wonderful work that I hear that people are doing that we don’t always know about. We are doing exciting work at the UMBSSW, and have an important opportunity to lead in framing these ethical challenges for ourselves and the broader community

How did you come to work at the intersection of legal systems and social work?

Inbar Cohen: In 2004, I started working in the sexual assault crisis centers in Israel. There are nine centers. I worked for eight or nine years in Haifa, which is a northern city in Israel. Afterwards I worked at the center in Tel Aviv, which is a large metropolis, at the center of Israel. In the  Tel Aviv sexual assault crisis center, I was the head of the witness assistance program. The program was based mostly on volunteers who escorted victims through sexual assault criminal proceedings. Another part of my role was to improve the working relationship between legal practitioners and sexual assault victims. I facilitated courses for legal practitioners, mainly prosecutors and judges, regarding the emotional effect of sexual assault and its effect on victims' ability to testify in court and on the way they’re perceived by the court. That started my interest in implementing mental health knowledge within criminal proceedings.

What interested me even more was how mental health professionals testify in court. I gradually started receiving calls from mental health professionals, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists that had to testify in court regarding the victims' emotional state or regarding theoretical questions such as PTSD.  What was astounding to me was that they were very much preoccupied with the same questions, anxieties, and fears the victims were dealing with, such as what if they don't believe me in court or should I retain the services of a lawyer. When you think about a professional that testifies regarding professional issues, you don’t think that they would be afraid of the testimony, after all it's a professional testimony. It's not as if you're testifying about your own traumatic experience, but they are.

So my PhD focused on sexual assault criminal proceedings that required mental health professionals to testify in court on behalf of the prosecution and the defense. I interviewed mental health professionals and legal practitioners, such as prosecutors, defense attorneys and retired judges. I found that mental health practitioners perceived legal proceedings as theatrical and not authentic. They compared it to therapy as being this authentic space and court being over-dramatized and theatrical, and rehearsed. The way they dress, how they address each other. It can feel very archaic, as it involves archaic language.

Many of the mental health practitioners experienced court testimony as  aggressive, demeaning, and sometimes even traumatic. This enabled me to form an understanding regarding what enables a person to testify in a way that fulfills legal requirements, but doesn’t result in a person being traumatized or hurt. On the legal practitioners’ part, there were legal practitioners that thought that implementing mental health knowledge in criminal proceedings could result in damaging due process. They didn't have much appreciation regarding mental health knowledge. Most of the lawyers perceived mental health knowledge as being imperative to legal proceedings as long as it fit legal requirements. What surprised me regarding the legal practitioners was that some thought that implementing mental health knowledge was so imperative that it changed their legal discretion into a therapeutic-legal one. I named it the ‘theralegal” discretion, where therapeutic considerations occasionally became more important than legal considerations. For instance, there was this prosecutor that said that she doesn’t think that therapy records should be admissible in court, although they are very important to her case, because they might discourage victims from going to therapy and asking for help.

Basically what I found was that the implementation of mental health knowledge in legal proceedings affects legal thinking, discursion and conduct.

 

Can you talk a bit about your current projects?

Inbar: What’s interesting in my eyes in how the interchange between these two very different worlds, mental health and law, affects both of them. In my PhD, I studied how mental health knowledge affects legal thinking and procedure. And now in my post-doc, I want to study how the legal sphere, legal discourse, and legal language affects therapy when conducted under a court order. And what I focus on in my research with Dr. Corey Shdaimah, who is a world-renowned expert in the field, is on prostitution diversion programs (PDPs), specifically Project Dawn, in Philadelphia. PDPs divert away from criminal proceedings. People can be charged with prostitution and get sentenced and punished, or they can be diverted to a rehabilitative processes, such as in PDPs. It sounds nice to social workers’ ears, but what is interesting is what happens when therapy becomes a way to punish people. What are the goals of this therapy? Who decides about the goals of this therapy? The client? Is he or she even perceived as a client? When therapy is punishment, how does it affect the relationship between the therapist and the client? And what constitutes success? Now, I know what constitutes success when you ask a lawyer. When you ask a lawyer, it will be her stopping engagement in prostitution. But when you ask a therapist, “what is success in your eyes?”, then you have different outcomes. Like for example, not endangering herself, not endangering her children, or not being poor. When you ask a social worker "what you have to do to achieve this goal?", then he or she will answer that you need to conduct individually centered intervention as well as promoting social change in the community and in society. Because most of the people that are engaged in street level prostitution are located within  marginalized groups, they’re mostly poor, and have limited access to education. So you have to address all of these macro problems.

            Now when you ask lawyers how you help people that engage in prostitution or sex work, most of them will say, “well, you have to help them through therapy.”  But that’s not enough. You have to address it by applying a social lens, and I apply in my study a social work lens. What is unique about social work, compared to psychology for example is its multi-layered perception regarding multi-layered problems, which include the individual centered intervention, but also the macro or social intervention. Even though the therapists in these programs are not always social workers, applying a social work macro lens to examine therapy within PDPs is much better suited than any other therapeutic lens.

 

So you started to talk to talk about the social work lens. Will you explain how your social work perspective plays a role in your work? How does or could social work add to the field generally?

Inbar: I think that when a social worker in a social work agency—not in a rehabilitative service and not in a correctional facility—approaches a problem, they approach it in a multilayered view. Most prostitutes come from disadvantaged circumstances. They have multiple challenges that all need to be addressed. Courts conduct themselves on a case-by-case basis, but social work does not do just that. Many social workers do that, but social work as a profession does not do just that. So when you approach a problem, you approach it on a social level—social, social work, it’s in the name—not just on the person. You should create meaningful connections with people but you should also and always apply a social perspective. So a social worker would address the educational facilities, work related options, social change, and poverty—not just by addressing a certain person’s ability to go to work, but how they can change it on a policy level. So social work can contribute to how therapy is perceived in PDPs by applying multilayered perceptions. And that is radical because most rehabilitative programs in correctional facilities or in legal facilities do not approach these problems through a social lens. It’s criticizing themselves, the establishment, so there’s this contradiction of terms. And this is what social work should do and how it broadens the scope of how therapy and rehabilitation should be perceived. This is social work’s contribution. It’s not criminology, it’s not psychiatry, it’s not psychology. It’s social work’s contribution. No other profession perceives these problems as being socially constructed like social work.

 

How do you envision a collaborative hub or collaboration fitting into your work or the field overall?

Inbar: What's challenging about an interdisciplinary field of research and profession is that it doesn’t quite belong to any profession. It’s psycho-legal, psycho-social-legal profession. So is it legal? No. Is it social work? No. It’s both. It’s being bilingual. That’s a good thing, but also makes it very challenging—to find the right venue to publish your articles, to find the right supervisor, to find the right collaborators. Because people tend to study only one field, and those of us who are crazy enough to study both fields are very few. So we have to have a group in order to collaborate. Interdisciplinary research has a very important contribution because it broadens the scope of inquiry and the scope of both legal thinking and legal inquiry and social work thinking and social work inquiry. Because of that, you should foster these interdisciplinary areas because they broaden the scope of the discipline itself. That is why it's imperative to have a peer group of interdisciplinary folks that will enrich each other, help each other, conduct other studies, until it becomes a discourse by itself—not social work, not legal, but a discourse by itself. And then you have other interdisciplinary discourses, and that’s how this discursive world evolves.

How did you come to work at the intersection of legal systems and social work?

Nancy Franke: In 2005, when I was a junior in college, I took a philosophy course called Gender and Identity, through which students were expected to do some sort of volunteering with a local organization. I volunteered at a transitional house for women who had just been released from prison. It was pretty accidental that I ended up there, rather than in a shelter or an after school program, but I worked with the women and supported them with everything from resume writing to apartment hunting to figuring out how to regain custody of their children. While I was there, I simultaneously read a great deal about US prison systems. The more I learned, the further and further I fell down into this rabbit hole and was naively astonished that this wasn't something people were talking about every day. The next semester I took another philosophy class called Imprisonment, Identity, and Liberation, which was an Inside-Out course, meaning half of the students were traditional college students and the other half were incarcerated at the time of the course. We read Foucault and Sartre and talked about philosophy as it intertwined with and was experienced through incarceration.

Six years later, I returned to school for my masters in social work and had an internship in a reentry program called the Goldring Reentry Initiative (GRI).  I worked with people pre- and post-release from the Philadelphia jail system, while also learning about the reentry process, broader criminal legal systems, and how to navigate these systems from a macro and clinical social work perspective. After I graduated, I became the Associate Director of the GRI and then became the Director, where I worked for another five years. In the GRI, we collaborated with the Public Defender’s Office, the District Attorney's Office, probation and parole, and folks in the courts. We partnered with one judge to petition for the early release of people incarcerated in the Philadelphia jail system. The program supported 100 people a year as they left jails and returned to the community while training 15 MSW interns. The GRI’s job was simple yet complex: to support people with whatever they wanted and needed to get out and stay out. 

The more I understood about how criminal legal systems casually and continually inflicted a barrage of injustice on people who were often poor, often Black and brown, and often marginalized, the less I could imagine myself working in any other field.  People who are entangled in criminal legal systems are exactly the people who social work purports to defend and support. Social work is a very obvious and necessary lens through which to interrogate and push back against criminal legal systems.

 

Tell me a little bit about your current projects.

Nancy: I am currently a fourth year PhD candidate. I am involved in a number of projects connected to criminal legal systems. My dissertation, for instance, is focused on the impact of relationships and social networks on the post-prison well-being of people who were sentenced to life or long (over 10-year) sentences when they were children, meaning when they were 17 or younger. In the United States there are about 12,000 people who are serving life or de facto life sentences that began during childhood. In the last handful of years, there have been at least 700 people who have returned following juvenile life without parole sentences that have been overturned or changed. I am using a mixed-methods methodology that uses both a social network analysis component as well as qualitative semi-structured interviews to investigate this question of how relationships impact someone’s well-being following a life or long sentence that started during childhood.

I am also working on a few other projects. I'm working with Dr. Shdaimah on a follow-up study of her previous project interviewing stakeholders and participants in a prostitution diversion program. We are looking at lessons learned and how people think about this program in retrospect. We are currently writing a manuscript regarding roles of the team of stakeholders involved in prostitution diversion programs, and how stakeholders navigate the collaborative aspects of those programs despite common ethical and professional tensions.

Through the Promoting Smart Decarceration Grand Challenges of Social Work group, I am the co-lead of the Reentry Workgroup, and have been involved in two different projects around policing. The first is a systematic literature review about police assisted diversion that investigates past research on this topic. The second project is a qualitative study in which we have been interviewing the leaders and directors of law enforcement and police assisted diversion programs across the United States. We are in the midst of collecting qualitative data.

Another project I’m involved with is with Dr. Alexandra Wimberley. We're using qualitative data from her dissertation, which included people who had substance use disorders, had recently returned to Philadelphia from incarceration, and were HIV positive. In our current study, we are considering how respondents describe times in their lives when substance use impeded daily life and times when it did not.

 

How does your social work perspective play a role in your work, or what does or could social work add to the field, generally?

Nancy: If we think about social work’s core values according to NASW, then we can see a lot of ways in which social work values should and could play a role in research, practice, and policy within criminal legal systems and for folks who are currently or previously involved in criminal legal systems. For instance, social values center the dignity and worth of the individual. It is crucial that we work against policies and practice that are only about the bottom line and finding the cheapest way to put people in cages. We're also thinking about person-in-environment so, in terms of my work, thinking about the ways that individuals rely on one another to live their best lives, increase their well-being, and build community.

I also think that focusing on the knowledge that people with lived experiences have in relation to research, practice, and policy related to folks who are involved in the criminal legal system is crucial. As a white woman who has never been incarcerated myself, it is really important that I am intentional about my own shortcomings, my own biases, and realizing that there are certain things that I will never be able to know from reading, studying, and talking to people who were involved in criminal legal systems themselves. So being really clear about that for myself and using my own power to get out of the way and/or lift up the voices of people who have been directly impacted is fundamental to doing this work from a place that reflects the ideals of social work values.

Another social work value is competence related to social work practice. If we are going to say that social workers are competent enough to work with people under criminal legal system surveillance, we need to do a much better job of doing the research, figuring out what the best ways are to support people who are currently or previously incarcerated, or other people who are entangled in criminal legal systems from probation and parole to arrest and everything in between.

 

How do you envision a collaborative hub or space fitting into your work or the field overall?

Nancy: There is a great need to connect the dots in terms of who is involved in research and practice at this intersection of social work and criminal legal systems.  Part of the hub means finding my people and being strategic about collaboration and connection. There are a lot of individuals who are doing tremendous, tremendous work in social work as related to criminal legal systems, and I think connecting individuals so that our work is not done in silos and so that our work is building upon the work of other people is imperative.

Social work is often made up of white women and white men, many of whom have not been incarcerated themselves. Figuring out what that mutual support looks like, but also white people pushing each other and calling people in—not necessarily only calling people out—is necessary to address our inevitable biases and advance the research, practice, and policies that we contribute to daily.

To me, this hub is a way to build bridges between individuals who are already doing good work and fighting the good fight.  We have over 3,000 counties in the US, meaning we have over 3,000 criminal legal systems. They were not created through one single policy or law, but because of tens of thousands of policies and laws created over decades. There will not be one single solution that fixes the enormous problem of mass incarceration. Rather, we need creative approaches of intersecting foci to meet our social work ideals and truly honor the dignity and worth of the millions of people entangled in criminal legal systems.