Carceral Separation: Challenges in Disentangling Police from Social Services

ABSTRACT A significant body of research illustrates deep entanglements between criminal-legal and social service systems, including through longstanding collaborations between police and social service providers. Recent efforts to develop social service-oriented alternatives to police seek to disrupt this entanglement by reducing or eliminating police involvement and carceral approaches in areas of public safety that could be addressed by care-based services. This paper explores how social services separate from police and carcerality, along with challenges during separation processes. Through an ethnographic study on the design and implementation of three programmatic service areas in Minneapolis—behavioral health crisis response, community-based violence prevention, and group-based violence prevention—this paper proposes the concept of “carceral separation” to describe processes to establish greater independence from police and carcerality. Three distinct types of carceral separation are investigated: displacement, differentiation, and disengagement. Leveraging institutional hybridity theory, I argue that, across all three cases and separation types, carceral separation is challenging due to the centrality of police and carceral logics in the public safety field and services themselves. These findings reveal how deeply entrenched police and carcerality remain, even in efforts to establish greater independence, and provide crucial insights for scholars and practitioners seeking to reconfigure relationships with them.