Ending Our Expertise: Feminists, Scholarship, and Prison Abolition

The article has four goals. First, we point to the field of “women and incarceration” and this current carceral moment to identify the current context within US prisons and the nation, and to outline the strong interdisciplinary research that identifies why women, including those who identify as transwomen, are locked up. Second, building from this survey of what we know about women who are locked up, we argue that one central and problematic way that “women and prison” scholarship has informed public policy is through frameworks related to gender responsive programming. Third, we draw on abolition as a framing tool for feminist scholarship and organizing surrounding women in prison. Last, cognizant that the practices of teaching and research are contested and potentially valuable sites for abolition struggles, we explore our “home” site of the university to imagine what shifts at our sites could contribute to building abolition futures. We consider how we may continue to deepen this teaching and learning work within our classrooms.