Feminism and the Carceral State: Gender-Responsive Justice, Community Accountability, and the Epistemology of Antiviolence


 
 
 
Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 
 

 
Volume 3 | Issue 1 Article 3 

 
  
 

2017  
 

Feminism and the Carceral State:  
Gender Responsive Justice, Community  
Accountability, and the Epistemology of  
Antiviolence 
 
Brady T. Heiner  
California State University, Fullerton, bheiner@fullerton.edu  

 
Sarah K. Tyson  
University of Colorado, Denver, sarah.k.tyson@ucdenver.edu 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
Recommended Citation 
Heiner, Brady T. and Sarah K. Tyson. 2017. "Feminism and the Carceral State: Gender-Responsive Justice, Community 
Accountability, and the Epistemology of Antiviolence."Feminist Philosophy Quarterly3, (1). Article 3. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3. 



 
 

Feminism and the Carceral State: Gender-Responsive Justice, 
Community Accountability, and the Epistemology of Antiviolence 

Brady Heiner and Sarah Tyson 
 
 
 
Abstract 

Building on recent feminist scholarship on the complicity of feminist 
antiviolence movements in the build-up of mass incarceration, this essay analyzes 
the epistemic occupation of feminist antiviolence work by carceral logic, taking the 
Gender-Responsive Justice and Community Accountability movements as 
countervailing examples. Both strategies claim to be a feminist response to violence. 
Gender-Responsive Justice arises from feminist criminology and has genealogical 
roots in the American prison reformatory movement. Community Accountability 
stems from grassroots intersectional and decolonial feminisms that are 
fundamentally at odds with the professionalization and state-centrism of the 
mainstream antiviolence movement. We argue that Gender-Responsive Justice is a 
form of carceral humanism that repackages carceral control as the caring provision 
of social services, while Community Accountability advances a radically creative 
abolitionist and decolonial project of an irreducibly epistemological order. 
 
 
Keywords: feminist theory, mass incarceration, prison abolition, decolonization, 
critical criminology, feminist epistemology, community accountability, critical prison 
studies, feminist criminology, Angela Y. Davis, Kristie Dotson 
 
 
 
Introduction 

It can be hard to imagine a world without prisons (Davis 2003, 9–10, 105–
106; Garland 1990, 4; Morris and Rothman 1995, vii). Prisons not only confine 
millions of bodies and occupy vast swaths of land in the United States,1 they also 
                                                           
1 Critiques of settler colonialism from Native American and Indigenous studies and 
other fields persuasively argue that the occupation of land is an important part of 
the formation, expansion, and legitimization of settler colonial polities like the 
United States. Prisons offer a particularly salient manifestation of U.S. state-
formation and violence through territorial occupation. As such, the U.S.’s massive 
incarceration project should be understood as a moment of an ongoing colonial 
process of dispossessing Native peoples and eliminating Indigenous lifeways. To 

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have captured, confined, and inhabited our collective capacities for thinking, feeling, 
imagining, and acting. The practice of incarceration conceals the prison’s historical 
contingency, and crucially, it masks the inadequacy of incarceration as a response to 
social problems. In the words of community accountability theorists, incarceration 
has effected an epistemic occupation such that many of us encounter profound 
difficulty imagining and conceptualizing the redress and prevention of violence 
(including state violence) without recourse to the heteropatriarchal violence of the 
state (Durazo et al. 2012b, 2; see also Brown 1992; Brown and Halley 2002; Kim 
2015; Richie 2012, 88–89; Smith 2012, 41). As a result of this epistemic occupation, 
it can even seem wrong to consider non-carceral responses to violence, because 
dominant neoliberal logic delineates only one intelligible schema of accountability 
for violence—that of an individual (non-state) agent—and only one general form of 
legitimate response: state-centric punishment (whether confinement, execution, or 
other form of physical, civil, or social death). Alternative forms of community 
accountability and redress that break from state-centric carceral systems appear 
baffling, irresponsible, even monstrous. The choice seems to be confined to either 
ensnaring an individual with the punitive arms of the state or fomenting complete, 
unaccountable disorder. 

In this essay, we focus on the epistemic occupation of feminist antiviolence 
work by this carceral logic. Recent feminist scholarship has articulated the multiple 
ways in which feminist movements—including, if not especially, feminist 
antiviolence work—have been complicit in the build-up of mass incarceration and 
the proliferation of state violence (e.g., Bevacqua 2000, Gottschalk 2006, Kim 2015; 
Richie 2012). Building on this scholarship, we examine a strategy that has come to 
be known as Gender-Responsive Justice (GRJ), which seeks to reduce state violence 
against women in correctional settings while also responding effectively to the 
needs of incarcerated women who have experienced violence prior to incarceration. 
Our second aim is to highlight the epistemic de-linking (Mignolo 2007), world-
constituting, and community-building possibilities opened up by radical 
intersectional feminist antiviolence theory and practice. To accomplish our second 
aim, we look at the very different strategy of Community Accountability (CA), which 
seeks to abolish state violence, including prisons and policing, while also ending 
violence within communities.  

                                                           
obtain an imaginative sense of the territorial and geographic extent of the U.S. 
carceral state, see data artist Josh Begley’s “Prison Map” project: 
http://prisonmap.com/about. On settler colonialism and its connection to histories 
of confinement, see, e.g., Corntassel (2012a), Deer (2015), Goldstein (2014), Ross 
(1998), Veracini (2010), and Wolfe (2006). 
 

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Both strategies of addressing violence have arisen in roughly the same time 
frame (i.e., since the 1990s), both have largely been developed and led by women, 
and each claims to be a feminist response to multiple modalities of violence 
(domestic, internecine, civic, governmental). However, their respective theoretical 
frameworks, methods, aims, social locations, and effects could hardly be more 
divergent. One, GRJ, arises from interventions in feminist criminology and has 
genealogical roots in the American prison reformatory movement of the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The other, CA, stems from a radical 
intersectional feminism that is fundamentally at odds with the professionalization 
and state-subsumption of the mainstream antiviolence movement. One has 
predominantly been elaborated by professional white women within departments 
of correction and criminology, the other largely by women of color in grassroots 
antiviolence organizations. One fuels policy initiatives to expand the reach of the 
criminal justice system, the other advocates and organizes for the abolition of the 
prison industrial complex.  

Drawing conceptual resources from grassroots antiviolence activists, we 
argue that GRJ is a form of carceral humanism (Cullors et al. 2015; CURB 2007; 
Kilgore 2014), a discursive strategy of rebranding or repackaging carceral control as 
the caring provision of social services. We argue that GRJ initiatives essentialize 
gender and ultimately tend toward the proliferation of violence and the expansion 
of the U.S. carceral state by making arrest and confinement necessary steps to 
receiving “wraparound rehabilitative and reentry services,” which effectively 
positions the criminal justice system as the neoliberal gatekeeper of social services. 
CA approaches, by contrast, operate with an intersectional conception of gender, 
make a more thoroughgoing, systemic critique of violence, and strengthen 
community relationships by helping people build skills for nonviolent conflict 
resolution without state intervention. In other words, CA questions the fundamental 
logic of incarceration. In doing so, CA opens up epistemic and imaginative space for 
alternative responses to violence and demonstrates how violence can be redressed 
and prevented by people within their own communities without recourse to the 
punitive apparatuses of the state.  

In the final section of this essay, we offer an explicitly philosophical analysis 
of the political and epistemic challenge to carceral logics that the theorists and 
practitioners of CA articulate. From the fields of social epistemology and decolonial 
thought that address questions of oppression and the politics of knowledge (e.g., 
Alcoff and Potter 1992; Anzaldúa 1999; Code 1995, 2004, 2008; Collins 2000; Fricker 
2007; Medina 2012; Mignolo 2007, 2009; Mills 1999; Pohlhaus 2011; Sullivan and 
Tuana 2007), we draw upon black feminist epistemologist Kristie Dotson’s analysis 
of epistemic oppression and resistance to conceptualize the epistemic occupation of 
feminist antiviolence work in terms of the resilience of epistemological systems 

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(2014, 119). We also offer an account of the triple-loop epistemic processes through 
which the theory and practice of CA works, not merely to solve problems within the 
frame of existing criminal justice schemas, nor to modify those schemas in response 
to persistent problems, but to create new possibilities for thought and action by 
transforming and expanding the shared epistemic resources that constitute our 
social imaginaries. In short, we conceptualize the irreducibly epistemological 
ingenuity in virtue of which CA renders the feminist project of prison abolition 
thinkable and feasible. 
 
Gender-Responsive Justice and Feminist Criminology 

GRJ was initially a response to an earlier feminist reform of prisons. In the 
late 1980s, on the heels of the “awakening of criminology from its androcentric 
slumber” (Daly and Chesney-Lind 1988, 17–18), many radical and socialist feminist 
criminologists began to critique the equal treatment or parity model of criminal 
justice that had been championed by early (liberal) feminist criminologists in favor 
of a gender-responsive model of criminal justice. Early feminist criminologists, 
influenced by second-wave liberal feminism, challenged the “separate spheres” 
assumptions operating in law, criminological theory and research, and criminal 
justice practices. Conceptualizing women’s emancipation in terms of the 
achievement of formal legal and social equality with men in the public sphere, 
advocates of the parity model of criminal justice defined gender equality as equal 
treatment of men and women in juridical and carceral settings. They also in large 
part allowed male experiences and punishment regimes to function as the norms 
toward which the procedural and carceral treatment of women ought to conform.  

The prison industry’s response to parity-based legal challenges to the 
repressive and neglectful conditions of incarcerated women was to argue that equal 
treatment of incarcerated women required the construction of new equal prisons 
for women. Some in the parity movement supported such proposals, arguing that 
although equal treatment may hurt women in the short run, in the long run, it was 
the only way to guarantee that women would ever be treated as equal partners in 
economic and social realms (Covington and Bloom 2000, 3). As the historical record 
indicates, the prison industrial complex swelled in the spirit of punitive equity for 
women.  

Combined with the concurrent upsurge of retributive and incapacitative 
punishment philosophies and policies and the rise of mass incarceration, liberal 
feminist demands for gender parity in sentencing and prison conditions often led, 
paradoxically, to increased incarceration and more repressive conditions for 
women—a trend that critical feminist criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind terms 
vengeful equity. “Vengeful equity . . . emphasizes treating women offenders as 
though they were men, particularly when the outcome is punitive, in the name of 

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equal justice” (Chesney-Lind 2002, 91; on the idea of vengeful equity see also Bloom 
and Chesney-Lind 2000; Chesney-Lind 1991, 52; 1998; 2006, 17–20; Daly and 
Chesney-Lind 1988, 32; see also Davis 2003, 60–83). In fact, the conjunction of the 
parity model of criminal justice and the war on drugs contributed to women 
becoming the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population, increasing by 
125 percent throughout the 1990s, nearly 1.5 times the rate of men (Lipsitz 2012, 
1770; Sentencing Project 2015, 1).  

 

 
 

Sources:  Chesney-Lind (1998, 66) & Rafter (1990, 181–182) 
 
Every year more than three million women go to jail or prison in the United 

States (a number which does not include trans women incarcerated in men’s prisons 
and jails), giving the U.S. the deplorable distinction of confining more than one-third 
of the worldwide total of incarcerated women (Richie 2002, 137; Walmsley 2015). 
And this exponential expansion in women’s incarceration, writes Chesney-Lind, has 
soared “untethered from women’s crime rate.” That is, it is the result of punitive 
public policy decisions, not an increase in women’s involvement in serious crime 
(2006, 17; see also 1998).  

Feminist critique of the parity model has been diverse. Since the 1990s, there 
have been calls for the abolition of women’s incarceration entirely, in some 
instances as part of proposals for generalized prison abolition, in others as a staged 
experiment in abolition, which would eventually be extended to men (e.g., Carlen 

6 8 10
13

20

37

71

104

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 1995

Number of Women's Prisons in the 
United States, 1930-1995

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1990; 2010, 292; Chesney-Lind 1991, 64–65; Critical Resistance and INCITE! 2006; 
Davis 1996; 1998a; 1998b; 2003, 75). Much more influential on penological practice, 
however, has been the (re)turn to “separate spheres” punishment schemes in the 
form of gender-responsive justice. The GRJ model is a criminological appropriation 
of the feminist ethic of care; its guiding principle is that gender makes a 
criminological difference, that women differ from men in their “pathways” to crime, 
in their social, psychological, and material issues and needs, and in their experiences 
of confinement. For instance, the majority (61 percent) of women currently 
imprisoned in the U.S. are confined for minor illegalities such as property, drug, or 
public order offenses. 

 
 

 
Source:  Sentencing Project (2015, 1) 

 
While largely lacking histories of perpetrating violence, incarcerated women 

are prevalently survivors of violence. Studies by Human Rights Watch and the U.S. 
Department of Justice indicate that nearly half of all incarcerated women had been 
physically or sexually abused prior to their imprisonment, and over one-third had 
been abused prior to the age of 18—roughly twice the percentage among the 
general population of American women (Harlow 1999; Human Rights Watch 1996, 
32; Richie 2000). In fact, sexual abuse is one of the primary predictors of girls’ entry 
into the juvenile justice system, a fact which the Human Rights Project for Girls and 
the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality recently framed as “the 
sexual abuse to prison pipeline” (Saar et al. 2015). And in a perverse twist of justice, 

Rise in Women’s Incarceration in the United 
States, 1980-2014 

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many women and girls who experience sexual abuse are criminalized and 
incarcerated because of their victimization (e.g., when victims of sex trafficking are 
arrested on prostitution charges). 

 

 
 

Source:  Kajstura and Immarigeon (2015) 
 

 

 
 

Source:  Sentencing Project (2015, 4) 
 

5
6
7
8
8
9
9
11
13

16
127

Denmark
France

Italy
Netherlands

Norway
Belgium

Luxembourg
Canada

United Kingdom
Portugal

United States

Incarceration Rates of Women 
Among Founding NATO Countries, 2015

Incarceration Rates
(per 100,000)

54%

19%
15%

11%

37%
28%

24%

9%

Violent Property Drug Public Order

Incarceration Offense Type in United 
States, by Gender, 2014

Men Women

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In light of the distinctly gendered dimensions of the lives of incarcerated 
women and girls, GRJ maintains, against the gender parity model of criminal justice, 
that equality of treatment ought not be defined in terms of sameness of treatment. 
Rather, GRJ devises a “women-sensitive” correctional model that emphasizes 
women’s “empowerment,” a carceral environment based on safety, respect, and 
dignity, and relational programming that addresses issues of substance abuse, 
trauma, and mental health, and that promotes healthy connections to children, 
family, and community (Bloom et al. 2002; TFFSW 1990). 

Prima facie these principles seem to aim at unobjectionable feminist goals. 
And yet, three of the six goals of GRJ cited by feminist criminologists in their report 
for the National Institute of Corrections, which provides the empirical and 
theoretical foundation for GRJ policies adopted by corrections departments 
nationwide, are “to make the management of women offenders more effective,” 
“enable correctional facilities to be more suitably staffed and funded,” and 
“decrease the likelihood of litigation against the criminal justice system” (Bloom et 
al. 2002, v). In other words, half of the goals seek to increase carceral efficiency and 
system funding, and decrease system vulnerability to legal critique—objectives 
explicitly aimed at strengthening and shoring up the carceral intensity and reach of 
the prison industrial complex.  

Like the gender parity movement that preceded it, and which it was designed 
to replace, the separate-spheres feminist demand for gender responsiveness in 
sentencing and prison conditions has—yet again—fueled government proposals for 
carceral system expansion. For instance, the same feminist criminologists who 
contracted with the National Institute of Corrections to create the Gender-
Responsive Strategies Project also contracted with the California Department of 
Corrections and Rehabilitation to produce The Master Plan for Female Offenders: A 
Blueprint for Gender-Responsive Rehabilitation, which claims that “the ‘mega prison’ 
approach, which was designed primarily to incapacitate and punish violent [read: 
‘male’] offenders, is not effective for the majority of female offenders who are 
nonviolent” (CDCR 2008, 9). Instead, “a robust system of community correctional 
facilities” is needed (CDCR 2008, 10). Abolitionist feminists label such modifications 
as “gendered tweaks to carceral business as usual” (Buchanan 2012, 1685), attempts 
to construct “kinder, gentler, gender-responsive cages” (Braz 2006, 87), and refer to 
GRJ as “carceral humanism” (Cullors et al. 2015; Kilgore 2014) and the “gender-
responsive prison expansion movement” (Chandler 2010). In the words of 
abolitionist human rights advocate and formerly incarcerated woman Misty Rojo: “If 
the state actually cared about women as it claims, it would stop building new gender 
responsive cages, close down the existing ones, and allow the imprisoned mothers, 
sisters and daughters to return to their families and build real community-based 
programs to support them” (2014). In sum, both of these opposing trajectories of 

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feminist critique—i.e., the gender parity movement and the separate spheres 
movement—have been subject to the same epistemic occupation. Demands for 
equal treatment and gender-responsive treatment alike have given rise to the same 
outcome: demands and plans for building more prisons. 

Critical feminists also point to the way GRJ relies on a “flexible rationality of 
empowerment” that is variously and contradictorily employed to legitimate both 
carceral and feminist strategies (Hannah-Moffat 2004a). For instance, GRJ theorists 
acknowledge that most criminalized women are oppressed by intersecting 
structures of race, class, and gender, but then conceptually and programmatically 
ignore these social and material realities in devising responses to these women. 
Employing a neoliberal discourse of individual pathology and personal responsibility, 
GRJ proposes “corrective” interventions predicated upon “empowering” individuals 
to make better choices and become more productive, self-regulating agents in order 
to curb their own criminal behavior and transcend the conditions that cause 
criminality (Davis 1996; Hackett 2013; Hannah-Moffat 2000; 2004b; 2006; Nixon et 
al. 2008). GRJ thus conjoins with neoliberal strategies of governance that abdicate 
state accountability for social welfare and societal responsibility for social justice by 
individualizing social problems and constructing criminalized individuals as burdened 
subjects blameworthy for their confinement within intersecting structures of 
oppression. Lost is the feminist critique of social structural processes—i.e., the 
materialized effects of past collective or institutional actions and decisions that 
cumulatively produce differentials in the kinds and range of options that individuals 
have for their choices (Young 2011, 43–74). 

The particular (and contradictory) conjunction of carceral and caring logics 
and procedures that GRJ embodies also prompts a rethinking of prominent 
conceptions of neoliberalism. For instance, in his influential account of neoliberalism 
and the rise of the carceral state, Loïc Wacquant argues that since the mid-1970s 
the United States has restructured the government of poverty through an overall 
reengineering and “(re)masculinizing” (2009b, 15) of the state “that couples welfare 
services and criminal justice administration under the aegis of the same punitive and 
paternalist philosophy” (2010, 83–84). “Wedding the ‘invisible hand’ of the 
deregulated labor market to the ‘iron fist’ of an omnipresent and intrusive punitive 
apparatus” (2009a, 1), this alleged (re)masculinization process constructs a “causal 
and functional linkage between two sectors of the bureaucratic field”: on the one 
hand, a systematically atrophied social-welfare sector, which replaces the right to 
welfare with the obligation of restrictive workfare; on the other hand, a 
hypertrophically expanding penal sector (2009b, 19). Wacquant refers to this 
coupling of welfare-turned-workfare and the carceral state as the carceral-
assistential complex, the aim of which he argues is to discipline, “surveil and 
subjugate, and if need be chastise and neutralize, the populations recalcitrant or 

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superfluous to the new economic and symbolic order” (2009a, 83; see also 2001, 97; 
2010, 83–84).  

Wacquant makes two claims in his account of the carceral-assistential 
complex of neoliberalism upon which our feminist analysis of GRJ sheds further 
light. First, he contends that in the (re)masculinization of the state “the punitive and 
panoptic logic that propels criminal justice seeps into and erodes the shielding 
capacities of the welfare sector” (2010, 84; emphasis added). In addition to the 
transformation of welfare into disciplinary workfare, he points, for instance, to the 
inflection of the practices of child protective services in ways that “turn them into 
adjuncts of the penal apparatus” (2010, 84–85).2 However, GRJ is exemplary of how 
the carceral logic of criminal justice has not only invaded the welfare sector, it has 
explicitly colonized and incorporated state welfare within the confines of state and 
federal departments of corrections. Furthermore, contrary to Wacquant’s assertion 
that the carceral-assistential complex is ordered by “a gendered division of labor, 
with its carceral component handling the men while its assistential component 
exercises its tutelage over (their) women and children” (2009a, 83–84; see also 
2009b, 14–17; 2010, 83–84), GRJ is exemplary of how, for many women, especially 
those women of color whose strategies of survival are routinely and systemically 
criminalized, state assistance is (and always has been) deeply imbricated with 
carceral and colonial technologies. 

Throughout penal history, liberal optimists have repeatedly and recurrently 
claimed that prisons are really assistential technologies of rehabilitation (Morris and 
Rothman 1995). However, prison is primarily and essentially organized for punitive 
exclusion by disciplinary containment. The essence of a prison is its carceral logic, 
and this logic inevitably erodes, if not subverts, all custodial attempts at therapy, 
rehabilitation, or human development (Brenzel 1980; Carlen and Tombs 2006, 340; 
Freedman 1984, 89–142; Rafter 1990, 74–82). And, because of its intrinsic coercion, 
the carceral environment produces harm and ruptures in relationships that create 
the need for a unique set of social resources and therapeutic interventions to help 
people cope with the trauma of imprisonment itself. Pat Carlen and Jaqueline 
Tombs, radical feminist criminologists from England and Scotland, respectively, 
expose the contradictory conceit of what Carlen (2002, 2005) calls the 
“therapunitive prison.” 

 

                                                           
2 As intersectional (particularly Black and Indigenous) feminist scholarship makes 
clear, the practices of child protective services, contrary to Wacquant’s historical 
narrative, have always operated as colonial and carceral technologies. See, for 
example, Deer (2015, 67–75, 84–86) and Roberts (1997, 2001, 2012, 2014). 
 

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[The gender-responsive justice model] obscures the fact that therapeutic 
programming in prison is always buttressed by all the old punitive and 
security paraphernalia of previous centuries of creative penal governance; 
and that such an accretion and layering of disciplinary modes and 
containment strategies effortlessly produce the mixed economy of the 
therapunitive prison in which any isolated therapeutic attempts to reduce 
the debilitating pains of imprisonment are inevitably undermined by the 
punishing carceral context. (Carlen and Tombs 2006, 339) 
 
It is surprising that contemporary GRJ feminists fail to appreciate that 

prisons—however reformed—cannot and will not bring about the hoped for, even if 
misguided, therapeutic transformation of individual criminalized women. It is 
especially surprising in light of early criminological formulations of gender 
responsiveness, which, prior to adopting the neoliberal conceptual framework of 
individualistic therapy and case management, had an explicitly intersectional 
analytic focus on structural social processes. For instance, at the inception of the 
radical feminist critique of the logic of parity in criminal justice in the 1990s, when 
Meda Chesney-Lind, one of the most prominent voices of GRJ in feminist 
criminology, called for a “return to an appreciation of the differences between 
women and men prisoners” and an embrace of a separate-spheres logic as a 
strategy for challenging the parity-driven pattern of mass incarceration, she 
proposed “using the special and unique needs of women offenders to argue against 
their imprisonment” (1991, 59; emphasis added). 

Chesney-Lind made four specific normative proposals to feminist 
criminologists at that time that are a far cry from the contemporary complicity of 
GRJ with the punitive expansionism of carceral humanism. First, she argued that 
feminist criminologists “should demand a moratorium on construction of women’s 
prisons in the United States with the ultimate goal of abolishing women’s prisons” 
(63, emphasis added). Second, she argued that, in order “to make decarceration 
thinkable,” feminist criminologists must shift their research from an individualistic 
focus on “offender profiles” to an analysis of the ways that patriarchy and the 
intersections of race, class, and gender govern the patterns of women’s 
incarceration (64, emphasis added). Relatedly, she advocated that feminist 
criminologists shift from studying criminalized women to studying the system that 
locks them up (64). Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Chesney-Lind proposed 
that feminist criminologists look to the grassroots at women “outside the academic 
mainstream” who are leading community initiatives and “fugitive research” agendas 
that chart out sustainable, non-carceral, life-affirming alternatives for addressing the 
needs of criminalized women (the overwhelming majority of whom are poor, of 
color, and survivors of violence). “In seeking to identify promising community 

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initiatives in decarceration,” she argued, “we must make sure that these function as 
alternatives rather than as mechanisms to expand state control over the lives of 
women” (64, emphasis added). 

How could feminist demand for gender-responsive justice, in the form of 
prison abolition and grassroots community alternatives, morph into a movement for 
state-centered gender-responsive prison and carceral expansion? To answer this 
question, GRJ must be understood as one element in the larger story of the 
occupation of the feminist antiviolence movement—an occupation which is at once 
organizational, political, and epistemic.  
 
The Occupation of the Antiviolence Movement 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, antiviolence activists focused on rape, 
organized self-defense classes, took guerilla action against alleged rapists, 
inaugurated Take Back the Night collective actions, founded rape crisis centers and 
organizations, then built alliances across these organizations, and lobbied for legal 
reforms (Bevacqua 2000, 66–102). Like the early (academic) formulations of GRJ, 
these early (grassroots) forms of organized feminist resistance to rape were driven 
by rapidly growing theorizations of patriarchy as the wellspring of violence against 
women. Only by dismantling patriarchy, many activists argued, could rape be 
stopped. Many theorized the state as a patriarchal structure that must be massively 
restructured, if not done away with entirely (Bevacqua 2000; Brown 1992; Davis 
1981; Gottschalk 2006).  

During the late 70s and early 80s, however, radical critiques of social and 
political institutions gave way to approaches that focused on the state, particularly 
law enforcement, to respond to violence against women (Bevacqua 2000; Brown 
1992; Davis 1981; Gottschalk 2006; Kim 2015). Beth Richie offers an account of how 
that occupation became appealing to a certain segment of the antiviolence 
movement: 

 
Academic research [on gendered violence and antiviolence intervention] 
followed funding streams, which emerged from legislative reforms that were 
less interested in social justice than social services, law enforcement, and 
explaining individual behavior. The emphasis was on creating generalized 
conclusions which, at best, focused on gender as a unifying category, but did 
not very effectively account for race, class, age, or other differences. From 
this conservative academic perspective, poor women who are raped, 
lesbians who are harassed, and battered women who break the law are 
understood as ‘troubling cases’ or ‘isolated incidences’ rather than social 
phenomena related to forms of structural inequality that extend beyond 
gender. (Richie 2012, 88) 

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Part of the reason legitimacy and state funding were so strongly tied to law 

enforcement has to do with the development of the larger victims’ rights movement 
in the United States. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), for 
instance, was established in 1968 as part of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe 
Streets Act, which many regard as “the master plan for the national war on crime” 
(Gottschalk 2006, 85; Kim 2015, 7). LEAA was specifically intended to address the 
treatment of victims and witnesses by law enforcement (Gottschalk 2006, 85). By 
the time the anti-rape movement began critiquing and organizing resistance to law 
enforcement responses to victims, LEAA was well enough established within the 
Department of Justice to fund studies and programs. One study concluded in 1974 
that the responses of law enforcement and hospitals to victims were tantamount to 
a second assault (Gottschalk 2006, 125). However, while the report supported local 
programs to address the needs of victims, it specifically called into question the 
work of rape crisis centers as too feminist (125). As Marie Gottschalk notes, “With 
the help of LEAA money and other public financing, the government successfully 
absorbed many of the independent rape crisis centers and services, with their 
radical, volunteer, grassroots orientations, into its professional, hierarchical 
bureaucracy” (125).  

In the U.S., mobilization against domestic violence was organized later than 
the anti-rape movement and proved to be even more susceptible to cooptation.3 
Ultimately, Gottschalk, Kim, and Richie identify both branches of the antiviolence 
movement (i.e., the anti-rape movement and the anti-domestic violence movement) 
as major contributors to the build-up of the carceral state. As the editors of a special 
issue of Social Justice on Community Accountability describe this transformation: 
“the politics of antiviolence work . . . were dislocated and repositioned into the 
repressive state’s powerful, and largely successful, conservative agenda” (Durazo et 
al. 2012b, 2). 

Many women of color objected to and resisted the cooptation of the 
mainstream antiviolence movement. Amidst the ascendency of carceral solutions to 
violence against women, they continued to organize and risked confronting violence 

                                                           
3 It is noteworthy that the convergence of the U.S. anti-domestic violence 
movement with the state occurred, as Mimi Kim’s recent historical and 
ethnographic research evidences, despite the contestatory orientation of the early 
mobilization against domestic violence and the critical perspective that many 
movement participants maintained toward state cooptation and subordination 
(2015, 7–8). See Gottschalk 2006 for an analysis of the movement’s susceptibility to 
cooptation. 

 

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on multiple levels. (INCITE! 2006, 3). Despite the risk, feminists of color resisted the 
epistemic, organizational, and political occupation of the antiviolence movement 
and developed many of the abolitionist alternatives to GRJ that we discuss in the 
next section. These women, working outside and against the mainstream and 
outside of state funding streams to government, non-profit, and academic 
institutions, have tended to work within grassroots social justice organizations. 
Indeed, engagement in social justice praxis is a key element of Black feminist 
analysis. As Richie argues, a shared assumption of Black feminist theory is “that 
scholarly work should be in service to activism and that the beneficiaries of research 
findings, policy recommendations, or theoretical insights should be those most 
affected.” (2012, 131). Richie emphasizes that those most affected in the work she 
does are Black women experiencing gendered violence, for whom state agencies 
and institutions are sources of violence in their lives rather than protectors from it. 
By prioritizing activism and gearing scholarly work toward the benefit of those most 
affected and burdened by multiple intersecting forms of racialized gender violence, 
Richie and other women-of-color feminists remain strongly disinclined to permit 
state violence to recede into the background of their analyses. In other words, 
Richie shows us how to resist the political dislocation of antiviolence scholarship, 
advocacy, and organizing, and to refuse the subsumption of such work within state 
agendas and institutional practices that are complicit in the perpetration and 
perpetuation of violence. Antiviolence frameworks that center those who are 
burdened by multiple intersecting schemes of violence will provide greater reason 
and motivation to resist epistemic, organizational, and political occupation—no 
matter how tempting the grant or the perceived legitimacy offered by state support. 

Although this commitment to centering those whose social position renders 
them more vulnerable to multiple, intersecting forms of violence (Crenshaw 1989, 
1991) could be seen as a safeguard for researchers against cooptation, it should be 
noted that the people who have maintained a critique of state violence have largely 
been people whose experience (in virtue of structural social position or 
interpersonal affiliation) does not allow state violence to recede as a problem. 
Indeed, the continuum of alternatives to law enforcement and prisons that we will 
discuss in the following sections have largely been developed by people who have 
lived and continue to live close to state violence and, thus, do not see the police or 
other mechanisms of the state as potential solutions to the violence in their lives.  

 
The Community Accountability Critique of the Criminalization of Gendered and 
Intimate Violence 

To appreciate the epistemological ingenuity of CA theory and practice and to 
understand the alternatives that CA activists and theorists imagine and create, it is 
necessary to understand the CA critique of dominant practices of criminalization and 

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punishment. CA theorists and activists critique the current mainstream response to 
gendered violence for engaging in what Norwegian criminologist and prison 
abolitionist Nils Christie (1977) referred to as conflict theft. Once criminalized, a 
harmful encounter between individuals is recast as the commission of crime by a 
perpetrator against the state—a reconstruction that effaces survivors of violence, 
relegating them to the status of observers of an adversarial process administered by 
criminal justice professionals. This displacement usurps the potential for conflict to 
serve as an occasion for activity, healing, norm-clarification, and community 
consolidation by stripping the survivor and her/his community of the power to set 
goals, negotiate boundaries, and assume a determinative role in the accountability 
process (CARA 2006; Christie 1977; Durazo 2012, 78; Durazo et al. 2012a, 3; Heiner 
2015, 40–42).  

The dominant penalizing process also tends to reinforce conceptions of the 
survivor as forever wounded by the experience, profoundly inhibited from, if not 
incapable of, building a meaningful life after experiences of harm (CARA 2006). 
Survivors are often isolated and deprived of important avenues for moving forward. 
Moreover, a survivor can be “objectified or minimized as a symbol of an idea instead 
of an actual person” (CARA 2006, 251). The highly stylized role of plaintiff—a status 
achievable only if the police choose to investigate the report of assault and a 
prosecutor decides to pursue the case—prevents the survivor from having input into 
the process. The survivor is objectified, treated as passive and helpless—a process 
which paternalistically constructs and legitimizes the state as protector. For the 
state to take on this role, the community must be disappeared, the person who 
experienced the harm reduced to a victim, and the person who committed the harm 
transmuted into a monster. 

Conventional criminal justice processes also relegate the aggressor to the 
status of a passive object of state retribution and management—a silent spectator 
of a discussion of how much pain he or she caused and ought to, in turn, receive, 
rather than a participant in a dialogue regarding how he or she could actively 
contribute to restoring equilibrium and well-being (Christie 1977). The aggressor is 
also often represented as monstrous, bestial, and/or predatory, which constructs 
the person who has committed harm as an Other, too dangerous to stay in the 
community (CARA 2006; Hudson 2006). Through this process of “generative 
scapegoating,” the masculinist institutions of the state are made to appear as a 
necessary safeguard and protector against such monstrous danger (Girard 1987).4 

                                                           
4 For a non-reductionist historical materialist account of oscillating representations 
of criminality and their co-constitutive relationship to social crisis, see Melossi 
(2000). 

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Treating survivors as forever damaged, while individualizing, pathologizing, 
and dehumanizing aggressors, mystifies the web of relationships within which harm 
occurs (CARA 2006; Durazo 2012). In doing so, current criminal justice responses 
obscure the ways that social norms and practices, as well as law enforcement 
interventions themselves, produce and contribute to the potential for violence. As 
Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), a Seattle-based CA organization 
makes this point: “If we separate ourselves from the offenders by stigmatizing them, 
then we fail to see how we contributed to conditions that allowed violence to 
happen” (CARA 2006, 251). Rather than increasing community safety, carcerality 
perpetuates the norms and practices that contribute to violence within the 
community (CARA 2006; GenerationFIVE 2007; INCITE! 2006; Richie 2012; Tyson 
2015). In other words, criminal justice responses treat non-state violence as 
individual pathology that calls for the incapacitative disappearance or rehabilitative 
reformation of criminalized subjects, rather than as a social practice (connected to 
state violence), the abolition of which will require the invention and proliferation of 
alternative social institutions and practices (Durazo 2012; GenerationFIVE 2007; 
Richie 2012; Tyson 2015; Young 1990), or, in the case of Native peoples, the 
decolonial resurgence of traditional Indigenous ones (Corntassel 2012a, 2012b; 
Corntassel et al. 2009; Ross 1998, 11–33; 2002).  

From the perspective of many Native Americans, the criminalization and 
labeling of Native Americans as “deviant” by the legal mechanisms of the U.S. 
government must be understood as complexly connected to the history and ongoing 
processes of settler colonialism (Corntassel 2012a; Deer 2009; Goldstein 2014; 
LeFevre 2015; Ross 1998; Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006). U.S. settler colonialism has 
variously constructed Indigenous lifeways as “savage” in the service of dispossessing 
Native peoples of their homelands, delegitimizing Indigenous sovereignty, and 
pathologizing and eliminating the alternative normative orders presented by 
Indigenous relational, place-based forms of existence (Coulthard 2014; Ross 1998). 
Reflecting on the historical and persistent collision of Native and settler colonial 
worlds and their respective legal systems of justice, Luana Ross (Confederated Salish 
and Kootenai Tribes) argues, “The mechanisms of Euro-American law either are 
incapable of recognizing the cultural and legal separateness of Natives or are 
deliberately designed to destroy that independence” (1998, 29; see also 32–33; 
2002, 133). 

In this context, the theft of Indigenous conflicts by the U.S. settler colonial 
state reveals a specifically colonial dimension of conflict theft. For instance, 
addressing the U.S. federal government’s prosecution of instances of sexual assault 
within Indigenous communities, Sarah Deer (Muscogee) writes, “Defendants, if 
convicted, are held accountable by a foreign government using foreign mechanisms 
of justice,” which is part of denying “true community accountability—something 

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prized in tribal nations” (2009, 151). Indigenous scholars contextualize such conflict 
theft as part of a long history and ongoing process of occupying and destroying the 
political, epistemic, and organizational practices of Native communities (Deer 2004, 
2009, 2015; Ross 1998, 2002; Smith 2012).  

Highlighting the colonialism of U.S. incarceration, as Robert Nichols has 
recently argued, forces consideration of the ways in which the U.S. settler colonial 
state “aspires to impose an exclusivity and singularity of command and control that 
obliterates alternative normative orders beneath and beyond its aegis” (2015, 449). 
The fact that communities, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, are capable of 
producing and, indeed, do produce, alternative normative orders threatens the 
dominance of normative orders encoded in and reproduced by the U.S. settler 
colonial state (Corntassel 2012a, 2012b). To contain this threat, the settler system of 
criminal justice and other shape-shifting colonial entities treat alternative normative 
orders as disordered “states of nature” from which people must be saved by the 
civilizing influences of capitalism and the settler state. Criminalization is legitimated 
as a civilizing process—as rehabilitation and development. 

In reality, mass incarceration functions ideologically as a one-dimensionally 
punitive panacea that addresses only symptoms rather than the root causes of 
violence. In the process, mass incarceration actually exacerbates, deepens, and 
protracts the very problems that have led to spiraling numbers of imprisoned people 
by devouring the public resources needed to ameliorate those problems; producing 
mass-scale social and civic death; disrupting and disordering families, communities, 
and Indigenous nations; reinforcing gender binaries; and constructing an industrial 
complex that generates profits for corporations and careers for the politicians they 
fund. Moreover, in order to function, prisons require whole sectors of service 
employees and legal, administrative, and correctional bureaucracy whose 
livelihoods are built upon the commodification of people as criminals (Davis 1998a, 
2003; Durazo et al. 2012a; Gilmore 2007; Heiner 2015; INCITE! 2006). 

The theory and practice of CA emerges from a critical consideration of these 
expropriations, mystifications, and harms that the criminalization of violence enacts. 
Epistemologically, CA theory de-links from the epistemic occupation of mass 
incarceration by developing a multi-axis analytical framework that scrutinizes the 
interrelatedness of intimate, interpersonal, and community violence and the 
violence produced and sanctioned by colonialism and state and social institutions. 
Organizationally, CA strategies work to de-link from the settler colonial state and the 
prison and non-profit industrial complexes. Politically, they “seek to transform 
communities and political conditions rather than buttress oppressive institutions 
that replicate violence” (Durazo 2012, 82). 
 
 

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Guiding Principles of Community Accountability 
Given its critique of mainstream responses to violence and its multi-axis 

analysis of violence, CA theory shows the need for a multi-track vision in community 
accountability processes. Effective responses to violence must envisage the 
accountability of (1) the individual aggressor(s); (2) the community at large for the 
practices and discourses that cultivate a climate conducive or productive of gender 
violence (including rape culture, everyday misogyny, and the denial of leadership 
roles to women, transgender, and gender queer people); (3) violent, colonial, white 
supremacist, and heteropatriarchal social and state institutions; (4) the community 
accountability process itself; and (5) the survivor(s). To accomplish such complex 
work, while also resisting the colonial and carceral logics of the criminal justice 
system, CA organizations have developed guiding principles. These guiding principles 
are crucial to CA’s ability to undertake the social transformation that is required to 
move beyond ineffective reform of the current system and to address the root 
causes of violence. 

One of the central normative principles of CA processes is to foreground the 
moral personhood of all the stakeholders involved (CARA 2006; Durazo 2012). Such 
foregrounding involves respecting and prioritizing the self-determination of the 
survivor and allowing the survivor to choose to take part in generating 
accountability demands for the aggressor as well as the community (CARA 2006; 
Kelly 2012). The survivor’s vision and understanding of accountability matter in the 
process, unlike in current mainstream responses, in which the state’s decision to 
pursue a case can, at best, result in a narrow range of legally codified punitive 
responses without attention to the survivor’s desires. 

The community organizing work of CA also requires that aggressors be 
treated as subjects capable of accountability. Philly Stands Up, a Philadelphia-based 
CA organization, engages the aggressor in developing a plan for meeting the 
demands of the accountability process. When aggressors are treated in this way, CA 
practitioners maintain, “they are reluctant to back out because they do not see 
themselves as walking out on an externally imposed program” (Kelly 2012, 55). 

The decolonial, decarceral, and world-constituting work of CA not only 
involves de-linking from the settler state’s system of justice and the prison industrial 
complex of which it is a part. CA networks also de-link from the non-profit industrial 
complex, i.e., a system of symbiotic relationships between the state, philanthropic 
foundations, and social service and social justice organizations that fashions 
criminalized populations as “targets” for treatment, surveillance, control, and 
everyday management in ways that thwart the autonomous, collective organization 
of marginalized communities (INCITE! 2007; Nixon et al. 2008).  

A volume created by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, entitled The 
Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, provides 

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an illuminating historical analysis of the role that progressive philanthropy and the 
501(c)(3) non-profit model of social justice organizing have played in preserving 
existing social hierarchies and economic inequalities by derailing revolutionary 
decolonial social movements led by people of color and sublimating them into 
corporately structured reform movements largely led by professionally credentialed 
whites. The volume’s editors and contributors argue that the non-profit industrial 
complex (NPIC) is the symbiotic corollary of the prison industrial complex (PIC). 

 
While the PIC overtly represses dissent, the NPIC manages and controls 
dissent by incorporating it into the state apparatus, functioning as a ‘shadow 
state’ constituted by a network of institutions that do much of what 
government agencies are supposed to do with tax money in the areas of 
education and social services. (INCITE! 2007, 9) 
 

Critical of this destructive symbiosis and the persistent threats of incorporation, 
cooptation, and subordination, CA networks promote non-reliance on 
professionalized experts and institutions and resist the pressures “to commodify 
concepts and practices, to adapt to funder-driven appeals to create institutionally 
identified or ‘trademarked’ approaches and best practices, and to incorporate CA 
efforts into the state institutions [that CA networks] have been resisting” (Kim 2012, 
32).  

The fluidity and flexibility common to CA networks can be seen in the 
strategic ways they use and approach non-profits in community organizing. For 
instance, Creative Interventions, an Oakland-based CA organization with 501(c)(3) 
status, began with the deliberate strategy of striving for a limited institutional life 
cycle, emphasizing the life of the models, tools, and technologies they could 
develop, rather than the non-profit organization itself, which they aimed to 
ultimately dissolve. As Kim writes, “our aim was to contribute other informal and 
formal indigenous formations that were relevant to a community’s local context” 
(Kim 2012, 24). CARA enacted a strategy of creating and maintaining a “dual 
identity”—a disguised one for its public and foundation funders, and an authentic 
one for its constituents. By engaging in a kind of tactical code-switching that is 
common practice among people of color and poor people navigating spaces 
dominated by white, middle-class, and wealthy people, CARA developed ways to 
frame its work to state and foundation agencies in a more palatable cloak of reform 
(e.g., referring to its community organizing and mobilizing work using the service-
oriented language of “community engagement” with “underserved communities,” 
omitting mention in grant reports of the community teach-ins they conducted, 
which aimed to undermine institutional oppressions that directly contribute to 
sexual violence). “While we remained consistent in our political work and ideas and 

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our final accountability to our constituents,” writes CARA activist Alisa Bierria, 
“oppressed people develop creative strategies for survival as we move across the 
boundaries of our own communities and communities we do not identify as our 
own” (Bierria 2007, 157–158). The strategic uses that the CA movement makes of 
non-profits are tightly linked to the liberatory aims of CA work, its commitment to 
mass movement building and to centering men, women, and gender non-
conforming people of color in its analysis and organizing practice (Bierria 2007, 153–
155; INCITE! 2007, 15). 

CA de-links from the professionalization of the mainstream antiviolence 
movement in favor of drawing on the skills and resources of the community and 
building its capacity for responding to and preventing violence. As Mimi Kim writes, 
“The people closest to the violence have the greatest motivation to end it and the 
greatest knowledge regarding its dynamics, context, and the elements that might 
lead to change” (Kim 2012, 20). We see here a rejection of the idea that people need 
state intervention to keep them safe from others. Instead, CA theorists and activists 
tend to treat people’s proximity to violence, and the trauma that may be 
experienced because of that violence, as a source of motivation, and even skills, to 
be used in transforming the community to reduce violence. 

Hence, the emphasis for CA is on collective grassroots work. While 
communities have many resources for responding to violence that are not utilized in 
current mainstream responses, the possibility for violence also exists within those 
communities. That is, the practices, norms, and structure of a community may all 
have had a role in the violence. Thus, communities, too, must be transformed 
through CA processes. Such transformation through collective grassroots work 
requires multidimensional holism (Kim 2012) and a commitment to the unfinished 
(Mathiesen 1974). 

Multidimensional holism entails “the consideration of multiple perspectives, 
including those of survivors, community allies, and those doing harm, in the 
process” (Kim 2012, 19) and “consensus through collective negotiation of goals” 
(21). Rather than handing the conflict over to a patriarchal power that will 
adjudicate the proper outcome, CA invites the people close to the violence to 
respond to that violence together. CARA writes, “Organizing for accountability 
should not be just about the business of developing a strategy to address the 
aggressor’s behavior, but also about creating a loving space for community-building 
and real care for others” (CARA 2006, 252). But this guideline does not assume that 
everyone in a community will share the same analysis of the violence that has 
occurred and does occur within it. Rather, CA processes require developing 
participants’ understanding of how and why violence happens; this understanding 
helps to develop epistemic and political resources within the community. 

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Indeed, CA theorists and activists are well aware that resistance to 
transformation is part of the process—resistance on the part of aggressors, 
survivors, community allies, and the state (CARA 2006; GenerationFIVE 2007; Durazo 
2012; Kelly 2012; Kim 2012, 21). CA activists thus speak of creating plans for safety 
during the CA process and creating plans for the aggressor’s response to being held 
accountable, as well as considering the consequences of engaging in a CA process, 
rather than turning to the state (CARA 2006; GenerationFIVE 2007; Kelly 2012). 

A commitment to the unfinished requires recognizing that “community 
accountability is a process, not a destination” (CARA 2006, 255). Community 
accountability processes are themselves forms of community-building (Bierria 2007, 
161). There must, therefore, be an open goal-setting process that cannot be 
determined in advance (Kim 2012, 21). Commitment to the unfinished is closely tied 
to the way CA theorists and activists tend to understand their antiviolence work to 
be in the service of abolition and liberation. As Durazo writes: “Just as prison 
abolition is more than an anti-prison project, community accountability is more than 
an antiviolence project. It is a liberation project that creates the potential and space 
for autonomous radical transformation in our lives and communities, seeking to 
transform the roots of violence” (Durazo 2012, 79). Rather than understanding 
abolition and liberation as states to be achieved, CA activists and theorists tend to 
describe CA work as a liberatory process, even when it is not clear what will happen. 
In The Politics of Abolition (1974), Thomas Mathiesen closely articulates the 
concepts of abolition, the unfinished, and freedom: “Abolition . . . takes place when 
we break with the established order and at the same time face unbuilt ground. . . . 
Abolition and the very first phase of the unfinished are one and the same. The 
moment of freedom is that of entering unbuilt ground” (25).  

Through their commitment to the unfinished, CA theorists and activists 
remain open to the ongoing need for accountability. A group such as CARA can, 
therefore, produce 10 principles for community accountability, but it presents those 
principles as the bones of a process that must be fleshed out by the people involved 
in the process, rather than as a user’s manual (CARA 2006, 250). We can see this 
commitment to the unfinished vividly in the reflections of Mimi Kim on her work as 
part of Creative Interventions (CI): “Within CI intervention teams, tensions arose 
regarding the centrality and expression of gender analysis during an intervention. I 
normally assumed a gender binary and embraced the doctrine of ‘believing the 
victim,’ particularly when that person was a woman within a heterosexual dynamic 
of violence. My inability to suspend these assumptions revealed my own internal 
challenges, as well as those within the intervention team” (Kim 2012, 27). While Kim 
calls this inability a symptom of her own “internal challenges” and those of her 
fellow CA practitioners, it is also possible to read these challenges as indicative of a 
wider epistemic challenge in which Kim participates. Yet, Kim marks her inability to 

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understand a situation outside the gender frame she has available for considering 
violence within a heterosexual relation.  

What is remarkable about Kim’s account, and what we are identifying as a 
hallmark of CA’s commitment to the unfinished, is her ability to at once identify the 
gender binarism of her existing epistemic resources and to mark both the challenge 
that a particular CA process poses to those epistemic resources and the internal 
resistance she encounters when that challenge incites her to radically alter her 
epistemological system. Even though Kim does not in that moment succeed in 
making such a change, she identifies and stays open to the need for a radical shift in 
her epistemic resources, rather than simply dismissing challenges to a gender binary 
frame. In other words, Kim resists the resilience of the dominant epistemic 
framework within which her theoretical and practical activity is situated.  

Such openness to the unfinished involves a kind of vulnerability and 
attunement that is at once epistemic and existential. Durazo describes the lived 
experience of CA work as a decolonization process that opens onto the unfinished—
a process that involves what in the concluding section we refer to, following Dotson, 
as a triple-loop epistemic process, which gives rise to third-order social change. 
What her account reveals is that inhabiting the unbuilt ground of the unfinished 
inevitably involves complex affect; while a moment of freedom and lightness of 
being, it is also simultaneously an event infused with fear and anxiety in the face of 
the unknown. Reflecting on a CA process within a university class that she co-taught, 
Durazo points to this affective dimension and the epistemic role that it plays in CA 
processes:  

 
The process is frightening because one enters it without an exact 
destination; there might be a semblance of a path, method, or guide, but 
unknowns characterize the endpoint and places along the way. Fear has 
multiple triggers: past experiences with trauma and the possibility of new 
traumas. The process undeniably depends on courage in the face of an 
exhausting procession of sweaty palms, nausea, pressing silences, and 
tumultuous words and gestures. Yet it was as if a ribbon of faith floated 
above our class, somehow getting us through the difficult moments. There 
was light and laughter too. The feeling that we were going somewhere and 
that change was imminent lifted us and inspired the courage that let the fear 
fall away. When driving home across the Bay Bridge after class, I felt a 
heaviness that sank the pit of my stomach to the car floor and a lightness in 
my heart that felt like a cloud of neblina lifting me out of the car. In collective 
formations and praxis, the weight of suffering coexists alongside the 
lightness of the possibility of healing and transformation. (Durazo 2012, 86–
87; emphasis added)  

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The affective experience of CA processes as a decolonial praxis can be so profound, 
Durazo maintains, that it can approach a kind of existential death, risking death of 
parts of the self/selves that are the product of oppressive systems, but to which an 
individual or community has become attached. “As those unequally divided through 
colonial violence and injustice attempt to take account and reconcile through 
collective and self-reflection, a form of death is beckoned in which the previous 
version of you/community might be deemed no longer viable” (86). In our 
concluding argument, we analyze and elaborate on the importance of the sort of 
epistemic and affective openness that Kim and Durazo exemplify for its role in 
enabling CA activists to not only question the epistemic resources available to them, 
but also to develop new resources and, in the process, new, decolonizing forms of 
subjectivity and community. 
 
The Decolonial Epistemology of Community Accountability 

The carceral humanism of GRJ’s coordinated continuum of care and the 
abolitionism of CA’s continuum of decarcerating alternatives not only differ from 
one another politically or in the quality and scope of the institutional and/or 
sociopolitical change that they respectively entail. Their differences are also of an 
irreducibly epistemological order. To conceptualize these differences and to set the 
stage for discerning the specifically epistemological dimensions of CA’s radical 
ingenuity, we will draw from the work of Black feminist epistemologist Kristie 
Dotson (2014). Working within the fields of social epistemology and epistemologies 
of ignorance (e.g., Alcoff and Potter 1992, Anzaldúa 1999, Code 1995, 2004, 2008; 
Collins 2000; Fricker 2007; Medina 2012; Mignolo 2007, 2009; Mills 1999; Pohlhaus 
2011; Sullivan and Tuana 2007), Dotson sets out to conceptualize epistemic 
oppression, which she defines as persistent and unwarranted epistemic exclusions 
that hinder subjects’ ability to contribute to knowledge production (2014, 115). In 
the course of her analysis, she creatively appropriates an “orders of change” model 
of organizational change from the cognitive behavioral science of organizational 
development (Bartunek and Moch 1987; Walsh 2004) in order to theorize the 
magnitude of the epistemic shifts required to motivate different kinds of social 
change—from organizational and institutional change to structural sociopolitical 
change. Dotson analyzes the specifically epistemic exclusions that hinder subjects’ 
ability to engage in social change by infringing on their capacity to participate in the 
requisite processes of imagining uncharted possibilities, producing new knowledge, 
revising existing shared epistemic resources, and (in some cases) detecting and 
transforming the limits of the very epistemological systems or instituted social 
imaginaries within which their shared epistemic resources are situated. 

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Bartunek and Moch outline three different levels of organizational change, 
each of which entails progressively more radical alterations to prevailing schemas—
i.e., “templates that, when pressed against experience, give it form and meaning” 
(Bartunek and Moch 1987, 484). First-order change transpires as part of a problem-
solving strategy that seeks to overcome obstacles to fulfilling goals of already 
established schemas. First-order change thus leaves established epistemic resources 
intact, not discerning them as problematic, but focusing on solving problems and 
reducing inefficiencies “so that established patterns can function more effectively” 
(Bartunek and Moch 1987, 487). A first-order change, Dotson explains, “does not call 
for revisions in beliefs and values specifically. Rather, it attempts to make one’s 
behaviour reflect one’s [already established] beliefs and values” (2014, 118). As 
such, first-order change primarily involves what Dotson calls single-loop processes. 
Individuals engage in single-loop processes when “they alter their strategies or 
approaches to solving a problem, without examining or changing their underlying 
governing values” (118; citing Walsh 2004, 306).  

Second-order change alters the schemas themselves, “phasing out” one or a 
set of interpretive schemas in favor of others. It is typically a response to discovering 
that the shared epistemic resources of an organization are themselves insufficient in 
some way given the overarching goals of the organization. Second-order change 
involves both single- and double-loop processes in which individuals “hold their 
governing and often unconscious values open for examination” and shift the 
conceptual, habitual, and normative constructs and processes upon which they rely 
in directing, evaluating, and making sense of their actions (Walsh 2004). Second-
order change results when individuals shift their behaviors to reflect these altered 
schemas. 

Both single- and double-loop processes aim at increasing individual and 
organizational effectiveness either by bringing the actions of individuals into 
alignment with currently prevailing organizational schemas (single-loop processes) 
or by shifting organizational schemas themselves (double-loop processes). But, in 
addition to altering individuals’ values and behaviors in the service of greater 
organizational efficiency, second-order change can also enable individuals to 
consider new possibilities, such as third-order change. Rather than just filling in gaps 
within one’s epistemic resources or making those resources more efficient, third-
order change entails recognizing and, possibly, enabling individuals to alter the 
operative, instituted social imaginaries or epistemological systems within which 
cognitive and organizational schemas are situated and through which such schemas 
are preserved and legitimated (Dotson 2014, 119). An instituted imaginary is a 
cultural system that “carries normative social meanings, customs, expectations, 
assumptions, values, prohibitions, and permissions—the habitus and ethos—into 
which people are nurtured from childhood” (Code 2008, 34; cited in Dotson 2014, 

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119). While “in single- and double-loop processes, instituted social imaginaries may 
not be challenged or even recognized,” triple-loop processes “can aid in producing 
an instituting social imaginary capable of altering one’s entire epistemological 
system” (Dotson 2014, 119). The epistemic resources of the dominant order are 
disclosed as inadequate and thrown into question. 

When CA activists engage in deep questioning and critique of the 
criminological framing of violence—when they create non-carceral, life-affirming, 
decolonial responses to violence—they are creating third-order change, which 
throws dominant epistemological and political systems into question, opens onto 
the unbuilt ground of the unfinished, and produces new instituting social 
imaginaries. Radical community accountability processes frequently engender triple-
loop processes that enable us (as participants and world-traveling readers) to 
epistemically de-link from the dominant epistemic resources according to which an 
array of social problems—related to racialized and gendered violence, colonialism, 
unemployment, education, drug addiction, and public health—are framed through 
the schemas of criminality and penality.  

As abolitionists and CA theorists/practitioners such as Bierria, Davis, Durazo, 
Kim, and Mathiesen testify, this is not a simple or easy undertaking. In Dotson’s 
words, “First-, second- and third-order changes are progressively more demanding”; 
the resilience of dominant epistemological systems is of such magnitude that they 
can absorb extraordinarily large disturbances without redefining their structures 
(Dotson 2014, 119). Indeed, in language that parallels that of abolitionists and CA 
theorists conceptualizing the unfinished (Durazo 2012, 86–87; Mathiesen 1974, 13–
27), Bartunek and Moch, when writing about third-order change, compare the 
experience of encountering the limits of one’s epistemological system to an 
encounter with “the mystical” (1994). The possibilities opened up by triple-loop 
processes appear through the grid of intelligibility constructed by prevailing 
epistemic resources—if they appear at all—as empirically impossible, monstrous, 
unthinkable, or, to borrow Kim’s description, internally challenging. From within the 
dominant epistemological systems of the U.S. carceral state, the possibility of prison 
abolition emerges as just such a monstrosity. 

Like the grassroots feminist antiviolence movement that preceded it, GRJ 
theory, too, constructed a brief epistemic aperture, if not a material doorway, onto 
third-order change. When, in 1991, at the inception of feminist criminological 
critique of the “vengeful equity” of carceral feminism and its complicity in mass 
incarceration, Chesney-Lind called for the abolition of women’s prisons in the United 
States—when she advocated that feminist criminology move beyond an 
individualistic analytical focus on “offender profiles” to an analysis of the prison 
industrial complex and the ways that patriarchy and the intersections of race, class, 
and gender govern the lives of criminalized women—when she proposed that 

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feminist criminologists not only look to the grassroots for successful decarceral 
alternatives that sever rather than widen the net of patriarchal social control but 
enter the political fray by joining such social movements (even at the expense of 
“jeopardiz[ing] their [own] ‘objectivity’, their access to funding, and ultimately even 
their careers”(Chesney-Lind 1991, 63–65)—Chesney-Lind effectively called upon 
herself and other feminist criminologists to, in Dotson’s words, “take a step back 
and become aware of their overall epistemological systems that are preserving and 
legitimating inadequate epistemic resources” for detecting and redressing the 
oppressive structural positions of criminalized women (Dotson 2014, 131). Rather 
than just making existing epistemic resources more efficient or filling in gaps within 
those epistemic resources, as would be possible with first- or second-order changes, 
Chesney-Lind urged feminist criminologists to engage in triple-loop processes in 
order to create and disseminate new epistemic resources that might enable people 
to de-link from the epistemological systems undergirding mass incarceration—“to 
make decarceration thinkable” (64, emphasis added). 

As the foregoing account makes clear, this did not happen (at least en 
masse). GRJ did not turn toward and enter the political fray with grassroots women-
of-color activists who are engaged in the ambitious, politically marginalized (if not 
vilified), infinitesimally funded, conceptually and emotionally disorienting, yet 
revolutionary and epistemological frame-breaking work of third-order social 
transformation. Instead, GRJ turned toward the National Institute of Corrections and 
California Department of Corrections. It entered into major research, 
implementation, and consultancy contracts with the U.S. carceral state, adopted the 
dominant epistemic resources of neoliberal carceral logic and the systems-of-care 
“wraparound” social services model, and made mere first- and second-order 
“gendered tweaks to carceral business as usual” (Buchanan 2012, 1685). GRJ 
adapted to funder-driven appeals to commodify concepts and practices, created 
“trademarked” approaches and best practices, and followed the mainstream 
antiviolence movement in incorporating its efforts into the continually expanding 
institutions of the U.S. carceral state. The adaptation of GRJ from abolitionism to 
carceral humanism, its abandonment of what Dotson refers to as triple-loop 
processes and the third-order social and epistemological transformation to which 
those processes give rise, is a symptom not only of the cooptative political power of 
the U.S. carceral state, but also of the epistemological resilience of the carceral logic 
that undergirds it. The epistemological resilience of carceral logic is such that it can 
absorb extraordinarily large disturbances without redefining its essential structures.  

GRJ, like the mainstream antiviolence movement before it, has been 
absorbed by the expansive epistemological and political resilience of U.S. carcerality. 
Like the mainstream antiviolence movement, GRJ distances itself from and 
objectifies survivors/criminalized women as the passive “clients” of wraparound 

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social services, and it constructs the gender-responsive prison as the “one-stop shop 
[!]” at which criminalized (and disproportionately poor and racialized) women 
survivors could receive access to this network of integrated social services (Bloom et 
al. 2002, xxv). Far from interrupting society’s reliance upon incarceration and its 
epistemological confinement within carceral logic, GRJ further entrenches the social 
centrality of the prison industrial complex by fashioning it as the neoliberal 
gatekeeper of a continuum of coordinated social services, strengthening and 
extending the reach of the prison industrial complex by intertwining it with the non-
profit and social service industrial complexes.  

Thinking radically about antiviolence requires that we shift our attention 
from the prison, conceived as an isolated institution, to the web of relationships that 
comprise the prison industrial complex—symbiotic relationships among correctional 
bureaucracies, corporations, media conglomerates, and governmental agencies, and 
retributive relationships that are fostered by this web among persons variously 
caught up in and constituted by it (Davis 2003, 106–108). Positing decarceration as 
our overarching strategy, we must “let go of the desire to discover one single 
alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the 
prison system,” Angela Y. Davis argues, and instead “envision a continuum of 
alternatives to imprisonment” (106–108). The CA and transformative justice 
movements take just such an abolitionist approach to antiviolence work by 
theoretically and practically constructing a continuum of alternatives to 
incarceration that differs decidedly from the carceral feminist “coordinated 
continuum of care” developed by GRJ. By proposing a “caring” carceral solution that 
“occup[ies] the same footprint as the prison system,” GRJ reiterates and reinforces 
the dominant trend of constructing and conceiving of prisons “as the default 
solution for a vast range of social problems that need to be addressed by other 
institutions” (Davis and Shaylor 2001, 21).  

Gender-responsive prisons are still prisons. Kinder, gentler cages are still 
cages. The institutions of the punishment industry (however recast) and the 
professionals that occupy them (however retrained) will never properly and 
effectively address the needs and issues of colonized and marginalized peoples. 
Prisons cannot, and should not, be expected to function as vehicles for social change 
or human development (Braz 2006, 87; Carlen and Tombs 2006; Hannah-Moffat 
2004a; Nixon et al. 2008, 33; Rojo 2014). CA activists may not possess a roadmap to 
an abolitionist future, but they are not only creating spaces in which we can begin to 
think, imagine, and feel what those future political and epistemological systems 
might be like; they are producing the kinds of communities capable of inhabiting 
those systems.  

 
 

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Acknowledgments 
The research for this essay was in part supported by a faculty research grant 

from the College of Humanities & Social Science at California State University, 
Fullerton. The authors would also like to acknowledge the participants of the 
Philosophy Department Colloquium Series at CSU Fullerton and the Feminist Theory 
Writing Group at the University of Colorado Denver for their critical attention to 
earlier iterations of this essay. A version of this work was also presented and 
received thoughtful commentary from interlocutors at the American Philosophical 
Association. The authors owe a special debt of thanks to Alisa Bierria, Michelle 
Comstock, Andrew Dilts, Kristie Dotson, Sarah Fields, Amy Hasinoff, Mimi Kim, Lucy 
McGuffey, Xhercis Mendez, Andrea Pitts, Gillian Silverman, Toni Tyson, Margaret 
Woodhull, and Feminist Philosophy Quarterly’s anonymous reviewers for critical 
feedback and support in helping foster these ideas to print. 
 
 
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BRADY HEINER is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Faculty of African 
American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. He has published essays in 
Philosophy & Social Criticism, Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of 
Mass Incarceration (Fordham University Press, 2015), differences: A Journal of 
Feminist Cultural Studies, Continental Philosophy Review, Social Justice, and City: 
Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action. He is a founding member of 
the steering committee of the CSU Project Rebound Consortium and the Founder 
and Director of Project Rebound at Cal State Fullerton, a program that supports the 
higher education and successful reintegration of the formerly incarcerated. 
 
SARAH TYSON is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Faculty of Women 
and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Denver. She has published essays 
in Hypatia, Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration 
(Fordham University Press, 2015), Radical Philosophy Review, and Metaphilosophy. 

35

Heiner and Tyson: Feminism and the Carceral State

Published by Scholarship@Western, 2017

http://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/world_female_imprisonment_list_third_edition_0.pdf
http://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/world_female_imprisonment_list_third_edition_0.pdf


 
 

She is currently a member of WEBS, a program in Denver Women’s Correctional 
Facility and La Vista Correctional Facility for healing, organizing, and learning about 
issues of violence. 
 

36

Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 3 [2017], Iss. 1, Art. 3

http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3
DOI: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3


	Feminist Philosophy Quarterly
	2017

	Feminism and the Carceral State: Gender-Responsive Justice, Community Accountability, and the Epistemology of Antiviolence
	Brady T. Heiner
	Sarah K. Tyson
	Recommended Citation


	Feminism and the Carceral State: Gender-Responsive Justice, Community Accountability, and the Epistemology of Antiviolence