Feminisms Against the Carceral State

Washington, D.C.’s first-ever March to Stop Violence Against Women kicked off just after dusk on April 29, 1978. A boisterous crowd of roughly 800 people—diverse in age, race, class, gender, and sexual identity—snaked through the city’s adjacent neighborhoods of Adams-Morgan and Dupont Circle. The marchers carried flashlights, whistles, and handmade signs, and their chants articulated the event’s central message of “self-determination for women, power for women, [and] self-defense for women.” An extensive list of principles and demands drawn up by the organizers advocated “community sanction” for rape and abuse and solutions “involving empowerment of women, education of men, and community action” rather than “criminal justice.” The demonstration represented a coalitional effort between the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, the Task Force on Abused Women of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, and the D.C. Area Feminist Alliance. More than sixty other local groups endorsed the statement of principles and demands. The march was the culmination of the city’s first annual Anti-Rape Week, a community education project organized by the Black feminist leadership of the Rape Crisis Center.

Once gathered at Dupont Circle Park, the demonstrators listened to an array of speakers and musicians. Among them was Linda Leaks, who delivered “revolutionary greetings” from Dessie Woods, a Black woman serving a twenty-two-year prison sentence in Georgia for killing an armed white man who had attempted to rape her and her friend. Leaks, a local member of Woods’s national defense committee, told the crowd that the incarcerated woman’s story belonged to a long legacy of white men’s sexual violence against Black women that was rooted in chattel slavery. Just a month earlier, Rape Crisis Center staff members Deirdre Wright and Nkenge Touré had traveled to the Georgia Women’s Institute of Corrections to interview Woods as part of the center’s work to help disseminate her story and urge feminists and progressives to take action on her behalf. To the organizers of the march, Woods’s case, and others like it, exemplified the need for a feminist anti-violence agenda that took seriously the perilous entwinement of capitalism, racism, and sexism in the criminal legal system.

All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence is a history of activism by, for, and about incarcerated domestic violence survivors, criminalized rape resisters, and dissident incarcerated women in the 1970s and early 1980s. In and outside of prisons across the United States, grassroots women activists participated in collective actions that illuminated the connections between interpersonal violence against women and the racial and gender violence of policing and imprisonment. These mobilizations were spearheaded by radical women of color and antiracist white women, many of them lesbian-identified. They cultivated a left anti-violence politics that was defined by a critique of state violence; an understanding of race, gender, class, and sexuality as mutually constructed systems of power; and a commitment to coalition organizing. In short, they developed an anti-carceral feminism. This current of activism both challenged an emerging conventional wisdom about the causes of, and remedies for, violence against women and played an important role in the making of the prison abolition movement of the 1970s.

Anti-carceral feminism grew in the cracks of prison walls and in between many social movements, including those for racial and economic justice, imprisoned and institutionalized people’s rights, and gender and sexual liberation. By building coalitions that transected these social justice struggles, activists produced a broad and layered understanding of violence against women that encompassed the structural violence of social inequalities, the violence of state institutions and agents, and interpersonal forms of violence, including rape and battering. This expansive analysis directly clashed with the “tough-on-crime” ethos of the 1970s and the mainstream women’s movement’s increasing embrace of criminalization as a frontline solution to interpersonal violence. As this history demonstrates, violence against women was—as it still is—a highly charged political claim rather than a transparent descriptor, and the ascendance of law-and-order feminism was a deeply contested process.

All Our Trials tells a story of resistance to state repression of gender and sexual deviance and nonconformity. The chapters chronicle organizing efforts forged by, and in alliance with, women whose social locations and practices placed them beyond the pale of dominant notions of feminine respectability and state protection and in the way of state harm: those who were Black, Indigenous, Latina, immigrant, poor, gender and sexual outsiders, labeled crazy or mad, or involved in the sex trade. Feminist coalitions that foregrounded criminalized and incarcerated women produced new knowledge. They analyzed the relationship between state abandonment and state violence in communities of color. They theorized the entanglements of carceral and psychiatric power. They critiqued the racial constitution of gender and sexual norms and their brutal enforcement in locked institutions. As veteran Black feminist organizer Linda Burnham reminds us, “the struggle for social transformation [is] a powerful generator of theoretical insight,” as it affords opportunities for “collective, mass-based inquiry.”

Much scholarly and public attention has been devoted to grasping the multilayered political and economic roots of the massive U.S. carceral boom. Whereas some scholars point to the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs as the principal engine, others look further back to the pivotal moment of the 1960s War on Crime. In 1965, amid Black urban uprisings and insurgency—and in the context of the civil and voting rights acts of 1964–65 and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society platform—Congress passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which made local law enforcement a federally subsidized and increasingly militarized affair. Three years later, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act authorized the creation of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) within the Department of Justice. It quickly grew into a sprawling federal agency and the infrastructural backbone of the new anticrime initiative.

Under the tenets of restoring law and order and modernizing policing, the LEAA’s principal function was granting millions of dollars to states each year to update and expand police weaponry, hire and train new personnel, and facilitate communication and coordination between local, state, and federal law enforcement. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the LEAA played a decisive role in building up carceral state power—most acutely exercised in low-income, urban, Black communities—by shaping, seeding, and subsidizing tens of thousands of local- and state-level crime control initiatives. Just on the heels of unprecedented civil rights legislation intended to dismantle Jim Crow forms of racial exclusion, the racial state’s capacity to surveil, police, and imprison swelled to new heights.

The steep growth of carceral state capacity not only placed more police in urban communities of color and aided in the repression of Black and radical activists, but it also created new political opportunities for the feminist anti-rape and battered women’s movements that emerged in the early 1970s. Feminist efforts to politicize rape and abuse galvanized a multitude of local programs: by the middle of the decade, more than 500 rape crisis centers and refuges for abused women had been established throughout the country. These grassroots projects typically offered a combination of peer-based counseling, support groups, hotlines, and shelter; some included self-defense classes and community education programs. All embraced a philosophy of radical self-help and mutual aid, and many included staff who self-identified as survivors of rape and battering. The resources needed to provide around-the-clock shelter and other forms of crisis support led many activists to pursue government funding, and one of the most readily available sources was the LEAA.

Feminists who built these institutions from the ground up weighed the possibilities and contradictions of relying on criminal justice funds to keep their doors open. Some evinced a fundamental mistrust of the criminal legal system, pointing to persistent patterns of institutional racism and class bias as well as the repression of left-wing social movements. Most were concerned that such a relationship could undermine values and practices they had fought to prioritize, such as survivor self-determination, layperson expertise, and participatory decision-making. And those working to amend rape and domestic violence laws questioned the strategic value of developing a client relationship with the state as they sought to reform the police and courts. Police and prosecutors often dismissed accusations of rape and battering, blamed victims for inviting assault by dressing or acting provocatively, exposed women’s entire sexual histories to public scrutiny to degrade their credibility, avoided “domestic disturbance” calls, and, as was the case with Dessie Woods, prosecuted women who used violence in self-defense.

Scholars have argued that 1970s and 1980s feminist anti-violence movements contributed to the making of mass incarceration through support for “get tough” policymaking on rape and domestic violence. Feminist advocacy efforts helped put sexual and domestic violence on the national crime control agenda by speaking the language of crime victims’ rights and pressing for more punitive responses, such as mandatory arrest policies and stiffer sentencing. In analyzing this process of state incorporation, scholar-activist Beth Richie points to the significance of the anti-violence movement’s early rhetoric of it can happen to any woman, which she and others refer to as the everywoman construction. Grassroots activists initially developed this formulation to make plain that rape and battering were pervasive cultural phenomena and not matters of individual pathology. By deploying it, they sought to debunk racist, classist, and imperialist stereotypes that such violence was inherent in and confined to particular racial groups, classes, or nations. Yet as feminists “won the mainstream but lost the movement” between the 1970s and 1990s, as Richie puts it, this construction inadvertently took on a new valence—it can even happen to white, middle-class, gender- and sexual-conforming women—and helped to reroute resources and energies into improving law enforcement and judicial interventions and away from a community organizing approach.

The 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is a stark example of how feminist anti-violence advocacy became a lever for expanding the carceral state. The new law earmarked unprecedented federal funding for programs dedicated to serving sexual and domestic violence victims. Yet the lion’s share of this funding was—and continues to be—funneled to criminal legal system agencies and survivor-serving nonprofit organizations willing to partner with them. Moreover, VAWA was just one component of the largest crime bill in U.S. history. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act allocated nearly $10 billion for new prison construction, put 100,000 more police officers on the street, applied the three-strikes rule to a variety of federal crimes, and terminated government funding for incarcerated people to pursue postsecondary education. Hence, an act promising to curb violence against women simultaneously authorized the expansion of institutional violence against racially and economically marginalized communities, which include many victims of domestic and sexual violence.

The enshrining of carceral feminism in a crime bill that provided unprecedented federal subsidies for more police and prisons catalyzed a resurgence of anti-carceral feminist organizing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Existing and new organizations scattered throughout the country, largely led by feminists of color, experimented with violence prevention and intervention strategies that fought rather than corroborated the growth of the U.S. prison–industrial complex—a term popularized by the reemerging prison abolition movement. This was my entry point into grassroots anti-violence activism. And it was through my participation in social movements that I became interested in the questions at the heart of All Our Trials. I wanted to learn how feminist anti-violence activists conceptualized and contended with racial criminalization on the front end of mass incarceration. What kinds of ideas and practices had taken shape beyond the purview of state incorporation and feminist mainstreaming? Where was the women’s prison on the landscape of 1970s feminisms?

All Our Trials shows that, in tandem and in tension with what are now termed carceral feminist approaches, activists also refused criminalization and confronted its many violences. By shifting the focus to spaces and places at the edges of the mainstream anti-violence movement—participatory defense campaigns, women’s prisons, multi-issue coalitions, and radical print culture—we see how the process of state cooptation was neither unchallenged by some activists nor unwitting on the part of others.

In the nearly fifty years since Dessie Woods was sentenced to prison, the need for a transformational anti-violence politics has only become more acute. Despite the growing chorus of activist groups, advocates, and scholars that has demonstrated the contradictory consequences of pursuing tough-on-crime approaches to sexual and domestic violence in a prison nation, it has been enormously difficult to dislodge the notion that police and prisons deliver safety from gendered forms of violence. Indeed, the promise to protect women, children, and LGBTQ people from violence remains a quintessential alibi for expanding U.S. carceral power. All Our Trials returns to the first years of the making of the contemporary carceral state to excavate the ideas and actions of activists who imagined otherwise. The culture of opposition they created resonates with and offers a usable past for activists working in today’s prison abolition, antiracist, and feminist movements.

Adapted from the Haymarket Books edition of All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence by Emily L. Thuma. © 2024 by Emily L. Thuma.

_{Image: “Free Dessie Woods!: Smash Colonial Violence” for the National Committee to Defend Dessie Woods, Atlanta, Georgia. Published by Inkworks Press, Berkeley, circa 1980. Digital image courtesy Lincoln Cushing / Docs Populi.}

Contributors

Emily L. Thuma Emily L. Thuma is an associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma and author of All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence.

Topics

• Foundations

Tags

• carceral feminism
• domestic violence
• public history