Alan Dettlaff is a professor of social work and co-founder of the upEND Movement, a collaborative effort to abolish the family policing system and build alternatives centered on healing and liberation. He began his career as a social worker inside the family policing system, where he worked as an investigative caseworker and administrator. These experiences now ground his scholarship, which focuses on exposing and ending the harms produced by this system.
For more than two decades, he has researched and written about how racism and racial bias are embedded in the family policing system and how these forces drive the disproportionate separation of Black children from their families. He is the author of Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition (Oxford University Press, 2023) and a co-founding editor of Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to advancing abolitionist ideas and practices in the field. His work is rooted in a commitment to social justice and to the abolition of systems that govern, punish, and separate families.
