It is illusory to rely on the violent patriarchal state to impose violence on patriarchal individuals and, somehow, expect to bring about feminist justice.

Abolition feminism argues that abolitionist and feminist goals are inherently linked, as both seek to dismantle systems of power that perpetuate inequality. They also target systemic issues in the carceral state (prisons, policing, surveillance) that marginalize and harm vulnerable communities more than they protect them.

Key thinkers in abolition feminism, such as Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, Beth Richie, and Francoise Verges, argue that traditional responses to violence — like prisons and policing — often fail to protect survivors and perpetuate harm, especially for people experiencing gender violence. Abolition feminism proposes a vision that seeks transformative justice, challenging both interpersonal and state violence while envisioning a society with structures that support freedom, safety, and equality without reliance on carceral systems.

Critiques against Carceral Feminism

The term “carceral feminism,” coined by scholar Elizabeth Bernstein, describes an often mainstream feminist approach that tackles gender-based violence by advocating punitive measures within the criminal justice system, inadvertently reinforcing mass incarceration without addressing systemic inequalities. Rising in the 1970s and 1980s, carceral feminism gained prominence within feminist activism where progress was often defined by how many years perpetrators of sexual and domestic violence would serve in prison, a metric that, while serving the idea of punitive justice, still neglected the root causes of violence and thus failed to protect those vulnerable to abuse.

As carceral feminism focuses on punishing perpetrators, it often neglects to address the broader socio-economic and structural context that enables this violence. Abolition feminism critiques this approach, arguing that mainstream feminism empowers the state (which is often a key perpetrator of violence itself) by reinforcing systems of policing and incarceration. The carceral strategy, while offering short-term safety, neglects comprehensive solutions to gender-based harm and disproportionately affects marginalized groups. Critics also point out that prioritizing punitive measures, such as increased policing and longer prison sentences, frequently worsens the situation for socio-economically vulnerable women.

Consider the case of abuse in a low-income household: the victim often faces a brutal choice — imprison her abusive partner and lose their household income, risking homelessness and the potential removal of her children by social services, or endure the abuse to keep a roof over her family’s head. In some likely cases, the victim ends up being subject to incarceration as well for “crimes” that stem from the sudden need to put bread on her table, alone. Lacking adequate social protections, these women are trapped in a lose-lose situation, where the carceral system ultimately fails to deliver justice.

Another critique from an abolition feminist perspective is on how feminist movements have at times overlooked state violence, focusing instead on individual instances of harm. This “siloing” diminishes the capacity for holistic, intersectional approaches. The societal belief in retribution as the sole form of justice also aligns with capitalist values that prioritize individual responsibility over collective well-being and community-based support systems.

By aligning with the criminal justice system, carceral feminism inadvertently contributes to mass incarceration, perpetuates systemic violence, and fails to align with broader social and economic justice movements. Hence, abolition feminism advocates for a perspective focused on restorative solutions that reject punitive measures. Instead, it aims to dismantle the structures that uphold oppression and enable violence, while emphasizing the necessity of resources like education, healthcare, and economic opportunities as preventive measures against violence.

‘Both-And’ Approach to Solutions

Abolition feminism emphasizes a “both-and” approach, advocating for both the decarceration of prisons (such as eliminating cash bail and reducing surveillance) and the establishment of community-based support systems to address violence at its roots. This involves developing resources that create genuine safety and prevent harm by investing in community health, housing, and education. Rather than merely closing prisons and jails, the abolition feminist approach seeks to establish social systems that provide equitable opportunities, thus reducing reliance on punitive systems altogether.

Abolitionist feminists stress the importance of envisioning a world that addresses violence in interpersonal and structural forms without carceral responses. For this, abolition feminism advocates for two key objectives: the abolition of prisons and the establishment of community-based support systems.

First, focusing solely on individual cases of harm and relying on punitive justice distracts us from the systemic hierarchies that perpetuate violence, of which the state is an integral part.Incarceration then empowers the state to enact violence, which, to this day, fails to significantly prevent future crimes; if anything, it just creates the perfect environment for reoffence to occur. Even if we lock up all rapists, rape will continue to occur because the underlying systems of violence remain intact.

Second, the approach of community empowerment helps restore justice by rebalancing the power between marginalized communities and traditionally dominant communities. Power imbalances are fundamental to the perpetration of sexual and gender-based violence. Hence, it is logical to think that dismantling the systems that allow violence to thrive requires creating a liberated society where marginalized individuals hold equal power to those traditionally in authority. For example, approaches such as safeguarding marginalized groups by ensuring housing and social security can reduce the precarity of these groups’ positions and remove their reliance on potential abusers.

The hypothesis for taking this approach is that fulfilling these conditions would diminish the likelihood of violence, particularly those fuelled by power disparities. However, we must also acknowledge that realities may still be approximations of an ideal state of equality, implying that some degree of power imbalance will persist, albeit less severe. This leads to the acknowledgment that anomalies will always exist; some individuals will still be batshit evil even after we engineer the environment in such a way that violence is less likely to occur.

The dilemma of complete abolition

This brings us to an aspect of the abolitionist goal that is challenging: the complete abolition of prisons. From my perspective, the way to see the abolition of prisons is similar to the way to see the abolition of prostitution. While our end goal is to eliminate prostitution, the approach is that we focus on creating a world where it is no longer necessary, rather than directly attempting to abolish it and making sex workers move to an even more vulnerable position. Similarly, the abolition of prisons, ideally, should involve working toward a society where justice can be served without relying on incarceration, rather than force-shutting prisons and then making people go back to the vulnerable areas that made them go to prison to begin with.

The problem is, while it is not hard to see that prostitution can be abolished with measures that liberate sex workers from conditions that make them rely on the commodification of their bodies, it is not as easy to see how certain crimes that are subject to incarceration, such as rape, can be eradicated with any measure.

This raises a critical question that I struggle with:

In the case of the complete abolition of prisons, how do we ensure community safety from the criminal anomalies (e.g., rapists) without granting the state (or other party) some power to incarcerate and surveil?

How do we do this in a way that serves justice and aligns with the feminist ideal of ending the cycle of violence and power imbalance?

Further Reading

• Davis, A. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? New York, NY: Seven Stories Press.
• Davis, A., Dent, G., Meiners, E. R., & Richie, B. E. (2022). Abolition. Feminism. Now. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
• Vergès, F. (2020). A Feminist Theory of Violence. London, UK: Pluto Press.