Contextualizing this project

Building a timeline of anti-carceral feminist organizing starting in the late 20th century has several purposes and limitations. Timelines suggest a sort of linear, redemptive narrative of history; the story of anti-carceral feminist organizing is far more cyclical and perambulatory than this project might suggest. Still, this timeline is an attempt to demonstrate how Black anti-carceral feminist organizers have resisted the dangerous reach of the carceral state, assembling their principles and practices within a strong national movement to end gender and racial violence. In focusing on this facet of anti-violence organizing, this timeline also suggests a counter-narrative to dominant histories of the carceral state and the mainstream feminist movement.

Modern critiques of the American prison state identify the historical threads that have catalyzed the violence of our current system: an advance of neoliberal logics in the late 20th century, the criminalization of social blight, and a re-organization of white supremacist systems of control. By design, the prison state has also molded what might have been collective, resistant forms of liberation into technologies of case management and crime control: public housing systems, services for survivors of domestic violence, and many state funded social programs are tightly intertwined with the prison system and carceral logic. As this carceral logic is replicated beyond the prison system to pervade the “prison state,” it acutely targets Black women and other gender minorities. Beth Richie argues that one of the fundamental functions of the “prison state” is to suppress, through violence and punishment, those who deviate from white hegemonic cultural norms: people who are not white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, or wealthy. With this frame, it becomes clear that the prison system does not heal and it does not protect -- rather, it promulgates hate and violence by maintaining power for the powerful.

This critique of the prison system owes much to the experiences and labor of Black women across the anti-prison movement’s history. Resistance to the abuses of the carceral state far precede our present moment, as well as the events highlighted on this timeline. This project is intended to remind us that contemporary anti-violence activism is, as Angela Davis argues, “built upon an important legacy of work that traversed movements and prison walls.” Engaging with this history helps us to remember that the violent structure that is the carceral state ought not to be taken for granted. In developing and practicing a critical pedagogy of sexual and carceral violence, the organizers featured on this timeline imagine(d) a more just future, and an urgent call to realize it. 3