Family Policing and the Carceral Web: A Call for Abolition | 24th Annual Edwards Memorial Lecture

The 24th Annual Edwards Memorial Lecture, "Family Policing and the Carceral Web: A Call for Abolition," was delivered by Professor Dorothy Roberts (University of Pennsylvania) at Hart House, University of Toronto on January 19, 2023.
Professor Audrey Macklin, CrimSL Director, opened the lecture with a welcome and gave brief introductory remarks before inviting Roberts up to the podium.
Abstract
In Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families-and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, acclaimed legal and social science scholar Dorothy Roberts draws on decades of research and activism to expose the foundational racism of the child welfare system. She argues that it is a “family policing system” that is deeply entangled with criminal law enforcement in a carceral web, designed to put Black families under intense state surveillance and regulation, to drive Black children to juvenile detention and imprisonment, and to promote a carceral logic that impedes needed social change. She calls for dismantling this destructive system as we reimagine how to support families and keep children safe.
About Dorothy Roberts
Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on race, gender, and class inequities in U.S. institutions and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive freedom, child welfare, and bioethics. She is the author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997/Vintage, 2017), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2001), and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011), and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families-and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022), as well as more than 100 articles and book chapters, including “Race” in the 1619 Project book.
Roberts has served on the boards of directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Black Women’s Health Imperative, Center for Genetics & Society, and National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and her work has been supported by fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Fulbright Program, Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Northwestern Institute for Policy Research. Recent recognitions of her work include 2022 election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; 2022 Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize; 2021 Rosie Jimenez Award, Abortion Liberation Fund of PA; 2019 Honorary Doctor of Law Degree, Rutgers University-Newark; 2019 New Voices for Reproductive Justice Voice of Vision Award; 2017 election to the National Academy of Medicine; 2016 Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award; 2015 American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award.
About the John Ll. J. Edwards Memorial Lecture
The annual Edwards Memorial Lecture is delivered in honour of Professor John Llewellyn Jones Edwards, the founder of the U of T Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies.
This lecture was presented by the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and co-sponsored by Woodsworth College and the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto.
About the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at University of Toronto
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