ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses carceral feminism, which refers to the attempt to secure women’s protection through intensified criminal justice interventions including greater reliance on policing, criminalization, and incarceration. Carceral feminism does not denote a discrete group of feminists but the fact that criminalization is a stubbornly persistent feature of feminist agendas. I argue that the penal system is a colonial institution born of Indigenous displacement, Black enslavement, and capitalist exploitation. The American carceral state is a colonial institution at its core, and it serves to maintain colonial domination – it cannot be decolonized; it can only be dismantled. The chapter examines how feminists have participated in the American colonial prison project by sanitizing state violence as the protection of vulnerable women and silencing anti-carceral Black and Indigenous people, people of colour, and socialist feminists. Challenging carceral approaches to women’s safety is essential to the project of decolonizing justice and the chapter concludes by suggesting how feminists can purge carceral programmes, practices, and logics from their gender-justice-seeking agendas.
