This work presents a mathematical programming approach for elastoplastic constitutive initial boundary value problems. Considering associative plasticity, the local discrete constitutive equations are formulated as conic programs. Specifically, it is demonstrated that implicit return-mapping schemes for well-known yield criteria, such as the Rankine, von Mises, Tresca, Drucker-Prager, and Mohr-Coulomb criteria, can be expressed as secondorder and semidefinite conic programs. Additionally, a novel scheme for the numerical evaluation of the consistent elastoplastic tangent operator, based on a first-order parameter derivative of the optimal solutions, is proposed.