ABSTRACT
As the women's prison populations of North America, Australia, and Europe continue to increase, the justifications for locking up so many women convicted of relatively minor crimes become ever more opaque, convoluted and difficult to contest. It is therefore imperative that the campaign for the abolition of imprisonment of the majority of female offenders be accompanied by an ongoing identification of both the enemies of abolition and their changing strategies of legitimization. Transcarceralism is the attempt to make non-custodial penalties as painful as imprisonment in the belief that sentencers will then have more faith in community sentences. The argument which makes a case for the abolition of women's imprisonment on the grounds of women's special caring responsibilities is also inimical to the prison abolitionist project because it violates too many jurisprudential principles in relation to equity in sentencing.
