Abstract

Carceral social workers have to balance ambivalences between the interest of incarcerated people and the criminal justice system. The professional ethics of social work practice provide some answers to this challenge. Nevertheless, they are strongly based in a humanist understanding of our world. We therefore set out to explore how social work practice in carceral settings unfolds and how we could understand it, not only from the perspective of traditional social work ethics but from one of posthuman care ethics. We mobilise this perspective to go beyond a traditional professional and ethical view of social work practice to ask what would be required in a carceral setting to acknowledge (incarcerated) people fully in their entanglement with the world and how spaces could open up for potential to unfold and flourish. We base our analysis and thoughts on fieldwork conducted in an open prison in Switzerland.