Pinkwashing Prisons

Statistics illustrating the rise and institutionalization of mass incarceration in the United States are startling. One particular subset of this data has caught the attention of many: the number of women who were incarcerated increased dramatically between 1980 and 2022, and at double the rate of men.

As Michelle Alexander and others have demonstrated, incarceration rates do not accurately reflect behavioral differences between demographic groups; rather, they reveal patterns in the discretionary decisions of those empowered to enforce criminal law. Still, many reform-minded people have been moved by this data to formulate ways that governments can punish women differently than men. In other words, they have called to make punishment practices “gender responsive,” positing that traditional punishment practices were “designed for men” and should be changed to attend to the purportedly “unique needs” of women.

As a result of gender-responsive punishment practices, people identified as women by the system may spend less time incarcerated or even avoid incarceration altogether, while people who are identically situated but of a different gender will not. We see such practices at work in recidivism risk assessment instruments, used across jurisdictions to guide determinations about the length and location of a person’s sentence. For example, the Federal Bureau of Prisons uses separate “male” and “female” risk assessment instruments to determine a person’s eligibility for early release under the First Step Act. Meanwhile, the Hawaii legislature recently authorized a three-year pilot program for Women’s Court, a specialized criminal court that allows some women to complete treatment and programming instead of being incarcerated. In other jurisdictions, women who are not diverted from incarceration may be detained in special women’s facilities, often featuring cottage-style housing on campuses modeled after higher education institutions and offering increased visits with family, access to outdoor and communal spaces, and programs and services not regularly available elsewhere.

These may seem like reasonable and even laudable reforms, especially in light of well-documented ways in which traditional punishment practices cause harm. There is also a growing awareness of how the criminal system targets women, and particularly women of color and transgender women. However, in my recent article, “Punishing Gender,” I draw on abolition feminist principles to show how these arguably well-intentioned efforts to improve the punishment experience for some people ultimately supports a system that is worse for all.

Abolition feminism understands that “the movement to end gender and sexual violence . . . can never be isolated from the work to end state violence,” including the violence perpetuated by criminal system actors, institutions, and practices. It merges the abolitionist dedication to building a world in which incarceration does not exist with the feminist commitment to ending gender-based violence and subordination in all of its manifestations.

As Angela Y. Davis, Priscilla Ocen, India Thusi, and others have laid bare, punishment is and has historically been applied in deeply gendered ways, to the detriment of many women and girls. Moreover, the population of people who are subjected to criminal punishment in the United States is comprised overwhelmingly of men. However, while the history of the U.S. punishment system is gendered, it is also deeply racialized. To say that the atrocities to which we subject people under carceral control were “designed for men” obscures the role of race, racism, and white supremacy in shaping the criminal punishment system. Focusing only on gender thus provides a limited understanding of the factors that shaped the U.S. punishment system, and this narrow perspective subsequently restricts the impact of the reforms it produces.

The vision of womanhood that emerges from gender-responsive literature is also exclusionary and vastly oversimplified. The gender-responsive framework presumes a binary gender system, and therefore ignores the existence of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people. To the extent that gender-responsive reform proposals mention people of genders beyond male and female, they do so in passing, as a seeming afterthought. A proposed gender-responsive jail in New York City, for example, would include “gender-expansive people,” who are presumed to have needs and experiences that align with those of cisgender women.

Some of the needs said to be unique to women are those associated with prevailing norms of femininity and therefore reify traditional gendered stereotypes. A gender-responsive jail in San Diego, for example, offers certificates in gardening, sewing, and culinary arts. And a gender-responsive prison in Iowa allows the women it incarcerates more freedom to alter their clothing, reflecting an assumption that that they do so because they care about their appearance (and that men would only do so to signal gang affiliation).

These and many other purportedly “gender-responsive” needs are simply not unique to people of any gender. For example, many gender-responsive reforms attempt to facilitate relationships between incarcerated women and their children. Approximately half of people subject to incarceration are parents of minor children, and the overwhelming majority of these incarcerated parents are fathers. Incarcerating parents is harmful to children, their families, and their communities—but these harms arise regardless of the gender of the parent. To say the need to facilitate relationships between incarcerated parents and their children is unique to women not only affirms traditional associations of women with caretaking but also is, quite simply, false.

A similar fallacy lurks behind the gender-responsive push for trauma-informed punishment practices, which primarily targets trauma caused by sexual assault. Proponents of gender-responsive practices regularly recite statistics regarding the rate at which women subject to criminal punishment have experienced sexual assault and then characterize trauma-informed practices as a need that is unique to women. Unfortunately, sexual assault is an experience that unites, rather than divides, people across gender. By positioning the traumatic impact of sexual assault as uniquely belonging to women, the gender-responsive framework erases the experience of people of other genders who have been assaulted and justifies providing trauma-informed services only to women. In so doing, the gender-responsive approach rehearses and reifies gendered myths about who embodies trauma—and who does not—and which kinds of trauma are validated.

In short: the gender-responsive framework engages a politics of exceptionalism that posits the purported needs of women as distinct—and distinctly deserving of attention—while simultaneously working against the abolitionist project of dismantling the carceral state. The policies and practices that emerge from this framework are inherently reformist reforms; they do not question the legitimacy of incarceration or seek to reduce and ultimately abolish the carceral shadow. Rather, they tweak certain punishment practices so that the experience and legacy of punishment may be slightly less harsh when applied to some women. These practices continue to vest authority in, and lend legitimacy to, traditional punishment practices as they are applied to everyone else. Indeed, by insisting that the traditional punishment practices were “designed for men”—and ignoring the existence of people of other genders—the gender-responsive framework suggests the current punishment practices are acceptable when applied to anyone but cisgendered women.

Abolition feminism not only reveals the conceptual and practical faults of the gender-responsive framework, but also helps illuminate a different path forward. It provides a lens through which we can understand and respond to the ways gender has been weaponized to marginalize and criminalize people, while refusing to be satisfied with changes that simply tinker at the edges of a deeply rotten system. Instead, an abolition feminist approach is dedicated to building systems that ultimately allow us to abolish prisons altogether, while in the meantime recognizing and demanding redress for the harms inflicted on all who are subject to carceral control. It is an inherently intersectional approach that insists that no single characteristic or identity renders any person more deserving of dignity, safety, or care than another. In other words, abolition feminism rejects dichotomous, either/or thinking that separates punished people into “perfect victims” and “criminals.” Instead it embraces a both/and orientation that understands the complexity of identity and experience.

The future-building project of abolition feminism could follow a number of different paths. Much of this work is already underway, with an emphasis on immediate support and protection for those who are currently subject or vulnerable to criminal punishment. For example, the New York affiliate of Survived and Punished works to free all criminalized survivors of gender violence through clemency campaigns. Love and Protect supports women and gender-nonconforming/nonbinary people of color who have been harmed by state or interpersonal violence in a variety of ways, such as the provision of financial assistance during and after incarceration and support for court proceedings and clemency petitions. The California Coalition for Women Prisoners engages in the participatory defense movement, while INCITE! supports organizing around a number of issues, including ending law enforcement violence and creating community accountability. Across these approaches, one vision of an abolition feminist future remains certain: it does not involve the building of new prisons. By demonstrating how prison replicates the power and control dynamics of abusive intimate relationships, abolition feminism insists that a carceral system is not, and can never be, feminist.

As I conclude in my article, the push for gender-responsive punishment practices is not inherently ill-intentioned. Viewed in the best light, it highlights the need to embrace an insight into how personal histories, including histories of trauma, can render people vulnerable to the harsh application of criminal law. But there is no reason to limit this insight based on gender. And if we are honest about the number of people whom the system targets who have experienced trauma, this acknowledgment can have only one result: radical decarceration and, ultimately, abolition.

_{Image: Adapted from photo by Mark de Jong / Unsplash}

Contributors

Erin Collins Erin Collins is a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. 

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• abolition feminism
• carceral feminism
• conditions of confinement
• reformist reforms