Against Carceral Feminism OK invites you to join us.

For decades, Oklahoma has led the nation in the rate at which it sends people into women prisons, roughly 281 of every 100,000 Oklahoma women are behind bars — twice the national average. As abolitionist scholar Angela Y. Davis has stated, “Since the population of women in prison now consists of a majority of women of color, the historical resonances of slavery, colonization, and genocide should not be missed in these images of women in chains and shackles.”

This increase in the incarceration of women and gender non-conforming people nationwide is paralleled by the rise of carceral feminism within anti-violence movements that have tied the response to gender-based violence to the expansion of punitive power, increased sentencing, and law enforcement collaboration.

As prison abolitionist Thomas Mathiesen warned in 1986, “rather than helping in constructing ‘alternatives’ which actually become add-ons to the prison solution, we should see it as our task to strive towards ‘shrinking’ the system.” We see the add-on phenomenon frequently in the gender violence context, as activists’ transformative ideas and programs are taken over by prosecutors and court administrators and become yet another reason to maintain penal intervention.”

What we have learned over the years is that prisons, jails, and all forms of confinement are inherently violent; they thrive off gendered and racialized violence including sexual harassment, rape, and retaliation.

Prisons entrench gender conformity and binaries by institutionalizing gender segregation.

Through the testimony and advocacy of survivors of gender-based violence we have learned that police cannot and will not protect us, that policing is in fact the reason why many don’t report the violence they’ve experienced for fear of being retraumatized, not believed, and belittled, or criminalized themselves.

It is imperative that now more than ever we commit to move away from punitive state power as a solution to interpersonal violence. The system that perpetuates the very same violence cannot be the solution.

Instead, our coalition of organizers, survivors, and partners intentionally aim to move us together to learn and build the solutions that are rooted in community care and invested in life-affirming resources.

We believe in investing in care that is accessible to Black, Indigenous, Trans, Disabled, and other survivors who face systemic discrimination when seeking support.

We must invest in transformative community-based strategies that provide reparation and healing as well as resources that address the root of systemic and interpersonal violence.

We must advocate for the release of criminalized survivors and support their access to essential needs that Oklahoma prisons fail to provide for them.  

If you are interested in learning and taking action with a community of survivors, advocates, and organizers engaging with this work to end gendered violence and a reliance on policing and prisons, then sign your name!