Volume 34, 2018
Justice: Social, Criminal, Juvenile
Chloë Taylor
Pages 29-49
Anti-Carceral Feminism and Sexual Assault—A Defense
A Critique of the Critique of the Critique of Carceral Feminism
Most mainstream feminist anti-rape scholarship and activism may be described as carceral feminism, insofar as it fails to engage with critiques of the criminal punishment system and endorses law-and-order responses to sexual and gendered violence. Mainstream feminist anti-rape scholars and activists often view increased conviction rates and longer sentences as a political goal—or, at the very least, are willing to collaborate with police and lament cases where perpetrators of sexual violence are given “light” or non-custodial sentences. Prison abolitionists, on the other hand, have tended to insist that most lawbreakers are non-violent and that the “dangerous” are “few” (Morris, “But What About the Dangerous Few?”; Carrier and Piché, “Blind Spots of Abolitionist Thought in Academia”), thus avoiding serious engagement with the widespread phenomenon of sexual violence (Critical Resistance and INCITE, “Gender Violence and the Prison-Industrial Complex”). Despite the prevalence of carceral feminism, to my knowledge no feminist scholar has explicitly embraced this label, and the closest I have found to a defense of carceral feminism is feminist legal scholar Lise Gotell’s “critique of the critique of carceral feminism” (Gotell, “Reassessing the Place of Criminal Law Reform”). For this reason, it is with Gotell’s article that I primarily engage in defending anti-carceral feminism and prison abolitionism even in the difficult case of sexual assault.