They Know The Terror: Family Policing and Abolition

This podcast was hosted by Millennials are Killing Capitalism.

Dorothy Roberts discusses her latest book Torn Apart: How The Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build A Safer World. 

Roberts speaks about how family policing or the so-called child welfare system functions within a larger carceral web in the United States. She talks about the geographic zones of family policing and discusses the origins of our family policing system in slavery, settler colonialism and Elizabethan poor laws.

She also discusses the deep ableism that undergirds the family policing system and talks about how family policing has been a frontline for the war on drugs. She talks about how the system overwhelmingly disrupts predominantly Black and Brown families in the US, along with those of poor white people, noting that it also criminalizes children and is in many ways indistinguishable from other parts of the prison industrial complex.