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Pros And Cons Of Anti Carceral Feminism

3415 Words14 Pages

Ella Dotzler
WGS 1225
Final Paper
May 1, 2023
The Harvard University Rejection of Anti-Carceral Feminism Ideals
Introduction & Carceral vs. Anti-Carceral Feminism
Modern feminists who align themselves with the prison abolitionist viewpoints, myself included, are facing an internal moral dilemma: How do we, as both feminists and abolitionists, advocate for punishment of gender-based violent crimes while still maintaining an abolitionist identity? The urge to hold people accountable for gender-based institutional and sexual violence makes it difficult to separate feminist accountability ideals from the imaginative—and not yet established—ideals of prison and police abolition. This tension is particularly acute in cases where survivors of gender-based …show more content…

This approach, which has been adopted by the United States, places the criminal justice system at the forefront of addressing these issues. Proponents of carceral feminism argue that the criminal justice system should be used to punish perpetrators of sexual violence and also to deter others from engaging. However, this system has several notable drawbacks including the overarching idea that the criminal justice system is systematically flawed and fails to provide justice to victims in a lot of cases. This is especially true for victims that identify with marginalized groups, including women of color and low-income women. This is further explored through the in class reading of Emily Thuma’s piece titled, “Lessons in Self-Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anti Carceral Feminism.” Furthermore, the criminalization of sexual violence and assault puts more and more power in the hands of the government and its institutions, which only further advances the existing inequalities. The most important flaw of carceral feminism, though, is that the theory fails to address root causes of gender-based violence and therefore cannot deter future occurrences in a meaningful way. The carceral feminist theory fails because it is reactive without any element of proactivity that could significantly benefit

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