Dorothy Roberts: Dismantling the Carceral Web

In this keynote address at the University of Hawai‘i’s Justice Innovations Summit, sociologist and legal scholar Dorothy Roberts explains how child welfare policies have trapped poor families of color in a web of carceral control rather than providing them meaningful protection and assistance.

Building on her critique of child protective services, legal sociologist Dorothy Roberts shows how agencies set up to protect children in fact tear families apart and subject children to greater harm. Family management by government agencies in the United States has long been entwined with racism and coercion of the poor, Roberts shows. They often make decisions based more on bias than evidence, and they have the authority to remove children but not to support families. After a career trying to change child welfare agencies from the inside, one state at a time, Roberts explains why she thinks the system needs more radical change.

Keywords: Child Welfare, Racism, Family Law, Systemic Abuse, Stereotypes, Mandated Reporting, Criminalization of Children, Carceral Logic, Transformative Justice, Hope Movements

Dorothy Roberts is an endowed professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. A specialist on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare, she is the author of more than 100 articles and five books, including her latest, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families.

Event Sponsors: Hawaiʻi Friends of Restorative Justice, Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, Life Comes From It, International Institute for Restorative Practices, Justice Innovations Summit, Matsunaga Institute for Peace, Prison Engagement Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Scholars Strategy Network, UH Better Tomorrow Speaker Series, Università degli Studi dell’Insubria, William S. Richardson School of Law, Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice

BTSS website: http://manoa.hawaii.edu/speakers/
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