Caging Violence: Feminisms, Harm, and the US Carceral State

In recent years, the #MeToo movement, the Jeffrey Epstein saga, and other developments have heightened public awareness of harm—particularly sexual harm—and its systemic nature. At the same time, mounting opposition to mass incarceration in the United States—attributable in large part to the activism undertaken through the #BlackLivesMatter movement—has encouraged observers to question and challenge prevailing criminal justice approaches to violence. For many activists, punitive, carceral responses to violence and sexual violence do little to mitigate such harm. On the contrary, policing and incarceration actually enact their own violence, dominating and dehumanizing suspect and criminalized populations. They also completely fail to address any of the conditions (racism, sexism, economic inequality, homophobia, transphobia) that engender sexual and other kinds of violence in the first place.

Four recent books—by legal scholar Aya Gruber, literary theorist Gillian Harkins, scholar-activists Judith Levine and Erica Meiners, and gender studies scholar Emily Thuma—work through these tangles and tensions. At a moment in which a growing number of Americans support defunding or abolishing police and prisons, these authors supply urgent histories of the US carceral state, the sex offender registry, and competing feminist activisms.¹ Taken together, these texts illuminate paths toward restorative and transformative justice, which acknowledge the systems and processes that enable harm, and away from the regnant model of hyperpolicing and caging, which individualizes and medicalizes the commission of violence—all while inflicting its own.

The first section of this review concentrates on “carceral feminist” and “anticarceral feminist” responses to gender-based violence and considers why the former model won out over the latter in the late twentieth century, thereby helping to construct the sprawling US carceral state. The next section focuses specifically on the “sex offense legal regime,” as Levine and Meiners call it, and the dilemmas it presents for feminists in the twenty-first century (4). Finally, the review closes by using an “abolition feminist” lens to examine proposed alternatives to the punitive, retributive models of justice propagated by many carceral feminists.

Building the Perfect Beast

An elaborate legal regime designed to punish abusers and protect innocents expanded and solidified in the late twentieth-century United States. The conflation in media dispatches and political discourse of “concentrated urban poverty, rising crime rates, civil rights activism, and explosive urban uprisings” in the 1960s and 1970s fueled efforts to “get tough” on crime, drugs, particular sex offenses, and disorder, broadly conceived.² As feminists pursued “consciousness-raising” around matters of gender-based violence, some attached themselves to the growing carceral machinery. The state—with its increasing capacity to police, brutalize, and cage—would safeguard women and children by targeting and punishing their abusers, these activists reckoned. This brand of “carceral feminism,” as sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein has termed it, thereby facilitated the rise of mass incarceration in the US.³

Building on Bernstein’s research, Gruber’s The Feminist War on Crime historicizes and critiques the “legal feminist position that stronger criminal punishment is the remedy for harmful behaviors categorized as ‘crimes’” (45, emphasis in original). Gruber traces the long genealogy of feminist efforts to address domestic violence and sexual harm. Such campaigns, Gruber persuasively contends, have often aligned with and bolstered reactionary causes—from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “yellow slavery” and “white slavery” panics, which helped justify racist immigration and anti-miscegenation measures, to the “significant indirect role” played by feminist antirape crusaders “in...