Once There Was No Prison Rape: Ending Sexual Violence as Strategy for Prison Abolition

“The truth is, the Administration believes rape and sexual assault is just a part of prison. It is a type of punishment. Not to punish you for your crime, but for being different—for being Gay or Trans or Deaf or just for being passive.”

—a prisoner in Texas writing for Black and Pink newspaper

“People are sentenced to prison as punishment, not for punishment . . . Corrections staff should be the very best people prisoners encounter.”

—Kathleen Dennehy, former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections

This article focuses on the particular tension between prison reformist campaigns and abolitionist vision in efforts to address the needs of survivors of sexual violence in prison. Prison reform advocates, from conservative and progressive sides, have relied on punishment-expanding efforts to bring an end to sexual assault in prison. They rely on state actors and disciplinary actions to control individual acts of sexual violence. Abolitionist organizers, however, have offered very little to meet the immediate needs of incarcerated survivors. In an attempt to not extend the reach of state power, many abolitionists have failed to provide immediate support or relief to individual survivors of sexual violence in incarceration settings. I will discuss this dynamic and offer some potential ways for abolitionists to more authentically meet the immediate needs of incarcerated survivors.

A little over a year after being released from prison, I founded Black and Pink, a nationally networked grassroots organization focused on meeting the immediate needs of LGBTQ prisoners while simultaneously working to abolish the prison industrial complex. In our statement of purpose we describe ourselves as “an open family of LGBTQ prisoners and ‘free world’ allies who support each other.” Our organizing efforts include: a pen pal program, community power-building among currently incarcerated and court-involved people, and a free newspaper for prisoners filled with prisoner-generated content. Black and Pink is an explicitly abolitionist organization. Abolition, for us, means that we believe the U.S. prison system¹ is not broken but rather that it works exactly as it is intended to.

The assertion that the U.S. prison system is not broken forces us to question what its function is. While abolitionists are not a monolith, there are key underpinnings to abolitionist understandings of the prison system. Abolitionists assert that the U.S. prison system has been built up with the purpose of, among other things, maintaining systems of “anti-Blackness” (Alexander 2012), regulating and disciplining non-normative gender/sexuality (Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock 2012), controlling im/migration (Walia 2013), suppressing resistance (Churchill 2001), and establishing a capitalist response to surplus labor (Gilmore 2007). This understanding of the prison system has been developed from the lived experience of prisoners (James 2005, Jackson 1970, James 2013) as well as research by academics and grassroots community organizers. Abolition can be thought of as both the end goal, a world with no prisons, and also as the method of getting us to the goal.

As an abolitionist organizing effort, composed primarily of prisoners, Black and Pink recognizes that we must work to eliminate the immediate suffering experienced by prisoners without expanding the power of the punishment system. Abolitionist scholar Ruthie Wilson Gilmore refers to such efforts with these principles as non-reformist reforms. Gilmore likens this to removing bricks from the system while struggling to tear the walls down. Angela Y. Davis similarly explores this dynamic. In an interview with Dylan Rodriguez, Davis states,

The seemingly unbreakable link between prison reform and prison development—referred to by Foucault in his analysis of prison history—has created a situation in which progress in prison reform has tended to render the prison more impermeable to change and has resulted in bigger, and what are considered ‘better,’ prisons. The most difficult question for advocates of prison abolition is how to establish a balance between reforms that are clearly necessary to safeguard the lives of prisoners and those strategies designed to promote the eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of punishment.

(2004)

It is very difficult for abolitionists...