By Madeline Price (she/they)

Content warning: discussions of sexual and intimate partner violence, police brutality and death.

Feminism’s relationship with the criminal justice system leaves a lot to be desired: there is the constant tensions between the rates of First Nations and Indigenous women who die in police custody, with the calls for harsher prison sentences for Harvey Weinstein and fellow abusers. There is the blur of lines between the groups calling for justice, with those calling for transformative and community justice or justice without the use of prisons (known as prison abolition). There is a constant pull and push between those who advocate for harsher penalties, and those who advocate for the demolition of the prison industrial complex itself.

Whilst it is a complex issue, surely building a new feminist reality around justice should be simple?

Or, is it as Alex Press notes with regards to the #MeToo movement: that “directing a movement’s energy into the criminal justice system doesn’t build the power we need to stop sexual violence: it allies us with a system that’s incompatible with liberation.”

Carceral Feminism

Carceral feminism is the idea that increased policing, prosecutions, imprisonment, harsher sentences and stronger laws are the primary solution to violence against women. It is a common sentiment amongst those calling themselves sex-work abolitionists (we prefer to refer to them as sex-work-exclusionary-radical-feminists, or SWERFs), who argue against decriminalising sex work and instead criminalising the purchase of sex (which in practice, results in the isolation of workers from their systems of supports, prevents them earning a living, and increases instances of violence against sex workers). It is also quite common amongst feminists engaged in the law and justice space: arguing for harsher penalties and stronger laws against those engaging in acts of sexual and domestic violence against women.

Fundamentally, carceral feminism ignores a few hard truths: that police are often those who cause the violence, that prisons are always sites of violence, and that intersectional factors (such as race, class, gender identity and immigration status) leave certain women more vulnerable to criminalisation than the (often) white, middle-class feminists advocating for carceral feminism itself. Elizabeth Bernstein, who coined the term, further emphasises that such carceral feminism “restricts feminist horizons to the individual and the punitive, rather than the collective and redistributive.”

What this looks like in practice is simple, as Alex Press explains:

“Today, nearly half of all states [in the US] have a mandatory arrest law, which requires that if someone places a call to law enforcement about domestic violence, the police must arrest someone in response.

In practice, this sometimes leads to victims being arrested. The decision is based on the officer’s perception of the situation, as well as any police record the victim or the perpetrator may have. But officers’ perspectives may be skewed: studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, significantly higher than the 10 percent of families in the general population, according to the National Center for Women and Policing.

Moreover, there is a well-established pattern of police officers committing rape and sexual assault against those they arrest. Sexual misconduct is the second most commonly reported form of police misconduct. (A 2015 investigation by the Buffalo News concluded that an officer is accused of sexual misconduct every five days.) Given such statistics, empowering police to adjudicate domestic violence is indefensible.

Even the act of calling 911 itself can ruin a victim’s life. The Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond records in his book Evicted how female tenants are often forced from their homes for making 911 calls about domestic violence since landlords often use police calls to their property (on any subject) as grounds for removal. What’s more, “nuisance” property ordinances allow police to punish landlords if too many 911 calls are made from their properties. Landlords are sometimes told to evict the source of the calls, even if that person is a domestic violence victim using 911 as a lifeline.”

In the United Kingdom, the practice of carceral feminism was even more blatantly obvious when, in 2017, the Metropolitan Police arrested a woman on immigration charges after she came to them to report a rape and sexual assault. To put this into context, in England and Wales alone, over half of the women in prison have experienced emotional, physical or sexual violence, and 46 per cent have experienced domestic violence. Further, black women are three times more likely to be arrested than white women, and are massively over-represented in the UK prison population.

In Australia, carceral feminism regular rears its ugly head in relation to First Nations women: as of June, 2019, there were 578 women in custody, with more than 13 per cent identifying as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander (in comparison to the less than one per cent of the state who identify from a First Nations background). Further, of those in prison in Victoria, 46 per cent of all women and 55 per cent of incarcerated First Nations women, are unsentenced, increasingly due to a tightening of the state’s bail laws, which result in more women charged with minor offences and denied bail.

In Western Australia, laws existed where people with no criminal convictions were imprisoned if they do not have the capacity to pay a fine. As noted by the Sister’s Inside Free the People Campaign, these imprisoned people were overwhelmingly single, Aboriginal mothers, many of whom did not have the financial capacity to pay a fine for a minor infringement.

Taking justice into our own hands

So if carceral feminism is not the direction to go for our justice needs when rebuilding our feminist realities, where should we direct our energies?  

Distributive Economic Solutions

As noted by Alex Press, “sexual harassment and assault are pervasive in our society because extravagant wealth and absolute poverty are pervasive… to reduce this violence, we must reduce inequality [and] [w]e must be precise in our designation of what is at the root of this scourge: power.”

One way to transform the structural power that perpetrators hold over their victims (and thus reduce the need to rely on unequal systems of criminal justice to prevent and punish interpersonal violence) is through distributive economic solutions. In particular: redistributing wealth amongst all, expanding social safety nets to allow survivor’s to escape their abusers, providing citizenship to undocumented immigrants, and strengthening the powers of unions (so working women have recourse against retaliation for speaking up against abuses of power and violence).

These distributive economic solutions (with particular priority being given to the redistribution of wealth) can be coupled with several other techniques for building an alternative feminist reality: transformative justice, creative interventions and, where required, vigilantism.

Transformative Justice

Unlike the current prison system focusing on an individualist adversarial and punishment system of justice, transformative justice seeks to build collective and communal support, intervention, accountability and transformation. It is a way of addressing an individual act of harm that relies upon community members, instead of the police, the law or the government.

Transformative justice asks:

·       What do people need when they have experience and/or been affected by violence?

·       How can we best support people in a process of healing and accountability?

·       When people have been harmed, what do they want and need from the person who has done them harm?

·       What might an active process of taking responsibility for harm that we have caused, contributed to, and/or been complicit in?

·       What might accountability look like that is not grounded in punishment, revenge and reactive rage, and is oriented toward change and transformation?

·       How can we disrupt, shift and transform everyday systemic oppression and violence without reproducing the power structures that produce it?

Mia Mingus, who co-founded the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, works regularly with sexual assault survivors and finds that transformative justice works because “frequently, survivors don’t want to recriminalize the responsible party because they are in community together.” As Mingus notes, “what we hear most from survivors is that they don’t even want an ‘I’m sorry’. They just don’t want it to happen again.” 

At its core, transformative justice asks us to develop accountability from the perspective of the person or group harmed, and within the context of a community that could actively support a process of accountability.

Or, as Kim Tran simply puts it: “it is a movement based on the belief that all people are valuable.”

Creative Interventions

Similar to transformative justice is the concept of creative interventions. Creative interventions assumes that the relationships, families and communities in which violence occurs are also the very locations for long-term change and transformation.

It further assumes that those most impacted by violence, are the most motivated to challenge violence.

Vigilantism

In conjunction with distributive economic solutions, transformative justice and creative interventions, is this concept of community vigilantism.

Take, for instance, the Gulabi Gang (known also as the Pink Gang) in India’s largest province, Uttar Pradesh. The Gulabi Gang are a community-driven group of more than 400 000 women, who aim to protect the powerless from abuse, fight corruption to ensure basic rights of the poor in rural areas, and discourage traditions like child-marriages.

At their core, they work to:

·       Stop child marriages;

·       Persuade families to educate girls;

·       Train women in self-defence;

·       Oppose corruption in administration;

·       Raise awareness about the evils of dowry;

·       Register protection orders against sex-offenders and abusive partners;

·       Publicly shame molesters; and

·       Encourage women to become financially independent.

As a community-driven collective, founded upon the principles of transformative justice coupled with vigilantism, they demonstrate the direction that feminist-led principles of justice could encapsulate in an alternative feminist reality.

Building this reality

In building this feminist reality, one thing remains clear: a justice system which incites violence, is no justice system at all.

But a justice system that is community-driven, outside of the confines of the criminal justice system, does not perpetuate violence and encourages accountability, is one that holds stead in a future feminist reality.

To help work towards this reality, visit:

Organisations:

·       INCITE!: a network of radical feminists of colour organising to end state violence;

·       TransformHarm: a resource hub about ending violence outside of systemically violent institutions;

·       Sisters Inside: an organisation responding to the needs of criminalised women and girls holistically and justly;

·       Flat Out: a state-wide homelessness support and advocacy service for women who have had contact with the criminal justice and/or prison system; and

·       Justice Action: a movement representing people locked in Australian prisons and hospitals 

Activists to follow: 

·       Dr. Baz Dreisinger;

·       Debbie Kilroy;

·       Patrisse Cullors;

·       Essie Justice Group;

·       Nusrat Choudhury; and

·       Angela Davis.

Further resources: 

·       Fumbling Towards Repair: a workbook intended to support people who have taken on a formal community accountability process to address interpersonal harm and violence;

·       Why Black Girls Are Targeted for Punishment at School: a TEDWomen talk by Monique W. Morris, author of Pushout: The Criminalisation of Black Girls in Schools;

·       Working for Justice: a handbook of prison education and activism;

·       What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants: an article by Teen Vogue;

·       Is Prison Necessary: an article focusing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore; and

·       A World Without Bars: an exploration of the prison abolition movement in Australia.