Social Work, Criminal Justice and their reconfiguring relationships

This paper aims to explore the reconfiguring relationships between social work and criminal justice, focusing mainly on developments in Anglophone jurisdictions. After briefly describing the nature, forms and functions of criminal justice social work itself, it provides a discussion critical and comparative research concerned with the character and development of CJSW itself as a set of social and penal practices. The analysis of this body of work leads the authors to call for a thoroughgoing re-examination and re-invigoration of the relationships between criminology, criminal justice and social work.