Disrupting the Abuse-Prison Nexus: The Gendered Violence of Prosecution and Abolitionist Feminist Approaches to Social Care Work

Abstract

The vast majority of people in U.S. women’s prisons are survivors of interpersonal violence, a pattern that organizers and advocates have referred to as the abuse-to-prison pipeline. This article critically examines criminal prosecution from the perspectives of survivors of interpersonal violence who faced long prison sentences in California. In-depth interviews and group discussions were generated through a participatory process at a gathering to launch the University of California Sentencing Project, a partnership with the community-based organization California Coalition for Women Prisoners. The twenty-two formerly incarcerated participants had collectively spent more than 300 years imprisoned. Drawing on their lived experiences spanning several decades and multiple jurisdictions, this article offers an unyielding account of tactics of isolation, intimidation, narrative manipulation, and confinement as definitional to prosecutorial practice and culture. This criminalized survivor-centered analysis of prosecution shows how one of the most robustly funded public interventions for interpersonal violence is not merely failing to protect victims but is protracting patterns of abuse and coercive control. Implications are discussed in terms of social care work and collective defense rooted in abolition feminism.

1. Introduction

Over the last decade, the relative invisibility of women’s prisons on the terrain of the U.S. mass incarceration crisis has been unprecedentedly disrupted as feminist anti-carceral organizing and advocacy has gained more traction. Among the many gendered harms of today’s carceral state is a phenomenon organizers, advocates, and scholars have dubbed the abuse-to-prison pipeline. An estimated 191,000 women and girls are confined in U.S. prisons, jails, and other detention settings on a given day (Sawyer and Wagner 2024), and the vast majority of people serving long sentences in women’s prisons (which includes transgender men and other gender-marginalized people) have been criminalized in the context of navigating or resisting domestic and/or sexual violence (Richie 1996; Richie 2012; Dichter and Osthoff 2015; Mukamal et al. 2024). Criminalized survivors, a term popularized by the national organizing project Survived & Punished, have been at the heart of a decades-long lineage of activism behind and across the walls of women’s prisons that has illuminated gendered racialized criminalization and abusive conditions (Thuma 2019). Organizing and advocacy to directly support criminalized survivors and intervene in the abuse-to-prison pipeline—from participatory defense campaigns to domestic violence survivors’ justice legislation—has fueled growing calls for prison and police abolition (Law 2019; Kaba 2021; Davis et al. 2022; Simonson 2023).

Efforts to bring attention to the staggering prevalence of abuse histories among people in women’s prisons have contributed to a broader reckoning with the contradictions of criminalization as the principal public response to domestic and sexual violence. More than two decades of critical race and feminist scholarship have demonstrated how criminal legal policies purporting to intervene in, deter, and prevent gender-based violence have actually compounded and exacerbated harms for survivors in marginalized communities (INCITE! 2006; Bumiller 2008; Crenshaw 2012; Richie 2012; Kim 2018; Gruber 2021). Especially salient examples include mandatory arrest laws, requiring law enforcement to make arrests if they believe domestic violence has occurred, and no-drop prosecution policies, requiring prosecution even if the identified victim withdraws their complaint. Both policies have hastened patterns of dual arrest and the prosecution of survivors, particularly of women of color and queer and transgender people (Coker 2001; Goodmark 2011; Gruber 2021). Black feminist and feminist of color scholars and activists have challenged the legitimacy of the state’s claims of victim protection by, for example, documenting police violence against marginalized survivors and the pernicious consequences of policing in communities of color (INCITE! 2006; Richie 2012; Ritchie 2017). Moreover, this work has shown how conditions of confinement replicate the very dynamics of power and control that survivor advocates work to expose and undo (Davis 2003; Cosby 2020). Yet, many domestic and sexual violence service organizations continue to be beholden to criminal legal approaches and partnerships even as increasing numbers of direct service providers and advocates recognize the failures of criminal legal interventions (Weiss 2020).

Prosecution is a crucial, if underappreciated, process in the abuse-to-prison pipeline. Feminist critiques of the disempowering and retraumatizing effects of criminal proceedings on survivors who are formally recognized as victims are longstanding. Beginning in the 1980s, these critiques helped propel significant reforms aimed at improving prosecutorial responsiveness in the context of a larger expansion of carceral approaches to gendered violence (Bumiller 2008; Kim 2015). A growing body of legal and community-based scholarship makes clear that dynamics of navigating and resisting domestic and sexual violence remain largely illegible to the court, contributing to a widespread, racialized, and unrelenting pattern of prosecuting survivors (Bierria and Lenz 2022; Goodmark 2023; Zamouri 2023). In a structural critique of failure-to-protect cases brought against domestic violence survivors, scholar-activists Bierria and Lenz (2019) interrogate “the judiciary’s role in legitimizing and exacerbating domestic violence” (p. 107), arguing that the court effectively becomes another batterer, and they urge more research in this area.

This article examines the lived experiences of criminal prosecution among twenty-two people who faced long prison sentences in California’s women’s prisons. It is based in a participatory action research collaboration initiated by members of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), a statewide grassroots organization. CCWP monitors and challenges abusive conditions inside California women’s prisons as well as advocates for the release of incarcerated people through legal advocacy, campaign organizing, policy advocacy, grassroots media production, and mutual aid efforts. The research collaboration aims to generate empirical research and creative work rooted in the experiences of people formerly and currently incarcerated in California’s women’s prisons, disrupt narratives that legitimize long-term incarceration, strengthen networks of care among those who have faced long-term imprisonment, and inform transformative policy change.

Here, we respond to the journal’s Special Issue call for research on gender, criminalization, care, and “reimagining” the academic and professionalized field of social work. In a critical review of the social work literature related to criminalized women, Leotti (2020) shows how the field’s dominant focus on individual risk assessment and vulnerabilities eclipses the structural factors that explain criminalization patterns, such as crime policies and racist enforcement practices. A growing number of social work scholars are eschewing behavioral accounts and interrogating the field’s carceral roots and ongoing role in punitive state systems in tension with its professed social justice commitments. In particular, Kim’s (2015, 2018) research on the alignment of the anti-domestic and sexual violence advocacy service sector and the carceral state has invigorated broader interest in charting feminist anti-carceral and abolitionist approaches (O’Brien et al. 2020). Building on this work, this article presents the lived experiences and analyses of criminalized survivors as a vital resource in understanding the nexus of interpersonal violence and incarceration, with implications for how social care workers, broadly defined, can contribute to breaking the abuse-to-prison pipeline.

Carceral California

California’s notorious prison-building boom of the late twentieth century—adding twenty-two new prisons in less than twenty years—cinched the state’s identity as an epicenter of incarceration both nationally and globally. Between 1977 and 2006, the imprisoned population quintupled (Harris and Cremin 2024). As Gilmore (2007) has influentially illuminated, this unprecedented expansion of human caging can be traced to a convergence of political economic crises and a racialized law-and-order politics. Filling the state’s new prison beds required, as she puts it, a “criminal-law production frenzy.” Year after year, legislators passed anywhere from 100 to 200 new laws, radically transforming California’s capacity to surveil, police, prosecute, and punish—from the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act of 1988 that created sentencing enhancements for those police identified as street gang members, to new drug laws, to new mandatory sentences for existing offenses (Gilmore 2007, p. 110). Additionally, throughout the 1990s. voters went to the polls to issue their support in overwhelming numbers for ballot initiatives that decidedly increased the state’s power to incarcerate its residents for life. Most famously, on the heels of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising against policing and racism, Californians approved the country’s first “three-strikes” law, which made any kind of prior felony conviction, committed at any age, strike eligible. Black and Latine working-class and poor communities in the Greater Los Angeles metropolitan area bore the brunt of this ramped up criminalization (Gilmore 2007), and recent research (Prison Policy Initiative 2024) indicates that racial criminalization remains deeply entrenched: Black and white per capita inequities in incarceration rates continue to be most stark (1349 and 143 per 100,000 respectively), followed by American Indian or Alaska Native (934 per 100,000), Latine (295 per 100,000), and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (238 per 100,000).

Although California’s imprisoned population has continued to decline unevenly since its peak in 2006, recent data from the Prison Policy Initiative (2024) show that the Golden State still “locks up a higher percentage of its people than almost any democratic country on earth” in prisons, jails, immigration detention centers, and other carceral institutions. Moreover, California maintains the dubious distinction of being a leader in extreme sentencing. Whereas nationwide, one in seven imprisoned people is serving a life term, in California, this balloons to one in three people serving either life with the possibility of parole, life without the possibility of parole (LWOP), or virtual life (Nellis 2021).

Across the two major state prisons designated for women (California Institution for Women in the Southland and Central California Women’s Facility in the Central Valley), currently 849 people are serving life terms and 175 are serving LWOP, which together comprise nearly thirty percent of the women’s imprisoned population (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation 2024). In a 2023 survey of more than half of all those currently incarcerated in the state women’s prisons for murder or manslaughter convictions (649 people), nearly three in four respondents were experiencing intimate partner violence in the year leading up to their arrest, and two in three indicated risks of lethal violence (Mukamal et al. 2024).

Among the legal levers that continue to drive the culture of extreme punishment in California are more than one hundred different kinds of sentencing enhancements (Bird et al. 2023). Accomplice liability, and particularly felony murder law, is an especially pernicious dragnet (Ghandnoosh et al. 2022; Special Circumstances Conviction Project 2023), with dire impacts on survivors of intimate partner violence (Lembert 2016; Bierria and Lenz 2019; Goodmark 2023). After conviction, sentences are often made more extreme by California’s Board of Parole Hearings, a process overseen by Governor-appointed commissioners, a body that includes former prosecutors, judges, prison wardens, and corrections officers, among others. Parole denials, which can range from three to fifteen years, are ubiquitous; in 2022, only fourteen percent of parole suitability hearings resulted in release (Sanders 2023). Especially pertinent to this study, researchers have found that prosecutors regularly attend suitability hearings, and a greater portion of cases where a prosecutor is present result in denial (Sanders 2023).

2. Materials and Methods

The original materials of this study were derived from an action research collaboration initiated by CCWP. In the mid-1990s, CCWP emerged from struggles being waged within and against the state’s women’s prisons surrounding medical neglect. Rooted in imprisoned women and trans people’s collective self-advocacy, the coalition continues to be led by imprisoned and formerly imprisoned people today (Thuma et al. 2022). In 2019, CCWP organizer Jane Dorotik, then incarcerated at the California Institution for Women, proposed that the organization explore avenues to develop a research agenda on long prison sentencing, rooted in the lived expertise and research interests of long-term imprisoned people. At the time, among the volunteers and members of the Los Angeles chapter of CCWP were several University of California graduate and undergraduate students and faculty. The University of California Sentencing Project (UC Sentencing Project) was launched with an inaugural research study that brought together close to two dozen CCWP members who had received long-term prison sentences and had since been paroled, granted clemency, or exonerated. Rooted in participatory action research and feminist solidarity approaches to research on incarceration (e.g., Fine et al. 2003), a group of community-based and university-based researchers affiliated with CCWP (“the research team”) designed this study in alignment with the social movement organization’s culture and a commitment to amplifying lived expertise and disrupting dominant forms of scientific knowledge that legitimate harm through incarceration.

2.1. Research Gatherings

Two initial research gatherings were held in December 2019 at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) campus. The research team invited people involved with CCWP based on pre-existing relationships, with a focus on those who had been sentenced to long prison terms. The research team coordinated transportation to campus and overnight accommodation for those traveling from outside the Los Angeles metropolitan area; all travel expenses were reimbursed. Participants also received a USD 250 incentive. Each gathering included a meal and began informally, followed by a discussion about the CCWP research initiative. Informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to the gathering and re-reviewed during the gathering following protocols approved by the Institutional Review Board at UCLA (IRB#19-001911). Those who wished to remain anonymous provided verbal consent, and those who wished to have their names attached to their information provided written consent. Funding support for the research gatherings was acquired through intramural sources at UCLA.

2.2. Participants

The twenty-two study participants ranged in age from 29 to 64. Their prison admission dates spanned more than three decades, and collectively, they had spent more than 300 years behind California prison bars. The majority had been sentenced as adolescents or young adults, and most had been sentenced in Los Angeles County. Ten of the twenty-two participants had been sentenced to life terms, including four people who had served LWOP sentences and were later granted clemency or exonerated. Ten had been convicted in a jury trial. More than half of participants had experience with a prearranged plea agreement, and some participants had been prosecuted multiple times and had experienced both jury trials and negotiated plea deals. Some participants had been previously incarcerated as children or adolescents, in some cases as early as age ten or eleven. While a few participants had hired private defense attorneys, the majority were represented by court-appointed public defenders.

In terms of racial and ethnic diversity, participants identified as Indigenous (1); Indigenous and Black (2); biracial (1); Black (7); Latina (5); mixed Japanese, Indigenous, and white (1); Pacific Islander (1); and white (4). Most participants identified as women (19), with two identifying as gender nonconforming and one person not identifying their gender. Most identified their sexuality as bisexual, fluid, lesbian, or queer (11); one identified as asexual; less than half identified as straight (8); and two did not provide a sexual orientation or identity.

2.3. Interviews

The study protocols were designed for participants to work in pairs and engage as both interviewers and interviewees using a semi-structured guide developed by the research team. At each gathering, the research team provided an interactive workshop on interviewing techniques and ethics as well as reviewed the questions and consent protocols. Each pair was provided a private room to conduct and record interviews with a member of the research team nearby for support as needed. The semi-structured interview guide was organized around the following core themes: (1) lived experiences of criminal prosecution, including arrest, charges faced, courtroom experiences, interactions with attorneys, and decision-making related to defense and plea bargaining; (2) the physical, emotional, and relational impacts of receiving a long-term prison sentence; and (3) ideas and priorities for future research.

2.4. Analysis

On both days of the gathering, interviews were followed by a large group discussion lasting approximately 75 min. Participants were invited to share their interviewing experiences and discuss what stood out to them as cross-cutting and salient themes. This was the first stage of a participatory thematic analysis. In the months following the gatherings, audio recordings of the interviews and group discussions were transcribed verbatim and read by eight members of the research team. We used an inductive approach to open coding and analyzing transcripts, along with analytic memoing, broadly influenced by the practical tools of constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2006). Our aim was to identify key themes and theoretical processes underpinning the experiences of prosecution and long-term sentencing. The team used a process of constant comparison and selective coding, which led to the identification of categories and properties. Analytic software Dedoose, version 9.0 (2020) was used to organize the data based on the preliminary analytic structure by applying and adapting categories to fit the remaining data.

In the second stage of a participatory analysis, two virtual gatherings were held in October and November of 2022, where the research team’s preliminary findings were reviewed with twenty-one participants who were invited to affirm, correct, and/or expand on existing interpretations.1 Following the incorporation of these contributions, a draft report was prepared by the research team and circulated to participants for a third stage of participation; sixteen participants provided commentary that was incorporated into the final report (Hankins et al. 2023).

This article builds on this analysis to elaborate the theoretical processes of prosecution that emerged in the study. Three members of the inaugural study research team (Jordan, Hankins, and Thuma) and a current member of the UC Sentencing Project leadership team (Birru) re-reviewed the original transcripts and analysis and drafted a provisional set of results. Three study participants and collaborators (Cumpian, Ralston, and Wilson) critically reviewed the analysis and co-developed the implications.

Our team of authors includes both criminal legal system-impacted and non-system-impacted people, and people who were and were not participants in the study. Hence, while we refer to participants collectively and individually in the third-person, it is important to note that “they” are also “we” in the case of three members of the author team.

2.5. On Writing and Reading About Violence

Throughout the research gatherings, participants emphasized a desire for people who have not experienced prosecution or incarceration to learn about processes of criminalization from their perspectives. As Roshawn put it, “We’ve got to educate more people about the system, because the system is made to beat us down”. The violence experienced by participants can be difficult to write and read about, and yet, as Tamara emphasized, “what is not exposed cannot be changed”. Readers are invited into these narratives as part of a deliberate process to surface these stories in ways that do not reduce participants’ lives to the violence that they have experienced or to the ongoing impacts of interpersonal and state violence. Crucially, this project is directly tied to CCCWP’s efforts to build relationships among survivors inside and outside of prison and pursue changes in policy and practice to end the institutional violence of incarceration and the criminalization of survival.

3. Results

Nearly all study participants spoke about having survived interpersonal violence in their lifetimes. Although pre-incarceration histories of abuse were not the focus of the initial study, these experiences emerged as central to how most participants narrated their trajectories into the criminal legal system and, crucially, how they interpreted their experiences of being criminally prosecuted. We draw on these accounts to elucidate criminal prosecution as gendered violence, describing three dimensions of abuse and coercive control: conditioning pleas and convictions through isolation and intimidation; denying and manipulating narratives of survival to secure a “win”; and escalating control through maximizing confinement.

3.1. Conditioning Pleas and Convictions Through Isolation and Intimidation

You’re in shock… and scared, and you just say yes, but you don’t understand the enormity of it.… You’re supposed to be kept in the dark.

—Anvi

Participants were jailed upon arrest, and many were held for long periods of pre-trial detention. Some recalled being “totally in shock” and “numb”. Many were dealing with the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event, including loss of a loved one in some cases, while removed from their everyday support systems. Some participants recalled a feeling of expectation in the first days or weeks following their arrest that authorities would soon recognize that they had been victimized. As Kelly put it, “I thought our system was about … figuring out what went wrong here …. I was waiting for that moment. And it never happened”. Some did not immediately disclose information about their abuse out of concern of escalated risk of retaliatory violence. Monica explained how interrogators leveraged her fear of retaliation by her abusive partner to elicit incriminating statements without her lawyer present that were then held against her in court.

Participants analyzed how past and recent traumas are, in Wendy’s words, “multiplied by the traumas that are happening in custody, in transport, and above all, in the court setting”. Pre-trial conditions were sources of physical and psychological harm that functioned to undercut their ability to successfully fight their case and, for some, influenced their decision to agree to a plea bargain. Already experiencing acute care needs and emotional stress, participants described pre-trial conditions as tantamount to “torture”. They were isolated; roughly handled by guards; and denied access to adequate food, water, the outdoors, medical care, and other basic needs. What especially stuck out, as participants discussed their experiences together many years later, were how these practices seemed intended to denigrate and dehumanize, and, in turn, condition them into accepting plea deals. For instance, several people recalled what they referred to as “dry runs”, where they were transported from jail to court on days when they did not have a scheduled hearing. Wendy saw these practices of unnecessarily shuttling people between points of confinement, which required a strip search and the shackling of the wrists and ankles, as “designed to degrade”. As Domonique reflected on interactions with prison guards during strip searches, “You just feel disgusted, you know, they’re looking at you, laughing at you”. Eliana drew a direct connection between the conditions in the courthouse holding cells and the wearing down of her resilience to keep fighting her case:

I would stay at the courthouse, the old dirty courthouse where I’m in a belly chain and shackles. And for hours, I would be in there from 7:00 in the morning to 7:00 at night in a room with no mattress on the bunk. It’s just a metal bunk. I would use a tissue paper for a pillow to try to sleep but I’m shackled and handcuffed, I only got one hand free. The whole process of court is just—you just want to hurry up and sign. That’s how I felt, too. I want to hurry up and sign so I don’t have to come to this courthouse anymore.

Participants experienced such tactics of domination as gendered assaults on their bodily autonomy. In a particularly explicit example, Tamara, who was pregnant in jail and forced into an induced labor despite her objections, recalled a male prison guard’s pronouncement that “your body’s the property of the state when you’re in here. You don’t have a say”. Participants’ memories of direct and veiled forms of intimidation during the pre-trial period exacerbated stress and taxed the physical and mental endurance needed to sustain a successful legal defense, ultimately leading several to submit to a plea deal rather than take their case to trial.

The complexities of legal procedure were experienced as their own distinct forms of isolation and intimidation. Participants had felt “kept in the dark” about the details of their own legal cases and believed that the criminal court system was designed to be “completely incomprehensible”. This interpretation was resounding and became a focus of group discussions:

Cruz:

I literally couldn’t understand what they were saying, like what any of it meant. Like, they’re using the biggest words for me, you know?

Wendy:

For everybody.

Cruz:

Yeah. And it was going, they’re using these big words, it’s going so fast .... And they’re like, do you need a Spanish translator? I’m like, no, I need an English translator!

Group:

Laughter.

Jayda:

But that’s real!

This sense of deliberately withheld information confirmed a view that the system was organized to hasten participants’ desperation and uncertainty and to manufacture conditions for succumbing to plea bargaining. Many participants recalled the experience of relying on their attorneys to understand their legal options as frustrating and disempowering. It was difficult to grasp the “enormity” of their case and its potential lifelong implications. As Margo remembers her sentencing hearing, “I was in shock, traumatized by the courts, and didn’t know or understand what was going on .... I didn’t understand what they were saying to me. And no one bothered to break it down .... They sentenced me to life in prison with the possibility of parole, and I didn’t even understand what that meant”.

Navigating this opaque criminal court system was particularly challenging in the context of managing post-traumatic stress from interpersonal violence. Participants broadly agreed that such stress contributed to their confusion about the prosecutorial process. Moreover, they explained how appearing fragile, afraid, or confused about their situation could be weaponized against them, even by their own legal counsel. Anvi, for instance, noted that she did not know what was “up or down” and was unable to clearly “express what happened” to her attorneys; the possible long prison term she was facing was unfathomable. She believed that her lawyers preyed on these vulnerabilities to pressure her into taking a plea deal. “I had no concept of what I was accepting”, she explained. For some, the layers of state-facilitated disorientation included jail authorities forcibly placing them on heavy psychotropic drugs.

3.2. Denying and Manipulating Survival Narratives to Secure “Wins”

I never read my trial transcript because I would get too sick and because I knew it was all lies. It was just too hard for me.

—Suzy

Labeled as defendants, participants observed how the adversarial criminal legal system’s victim–defendant dyad rendered them illegible as people who had survived victimization. Those who had little or no prior exposure to the criminal legal system shared that they were bewildered to realize how their own voice and understanding of the facts would be deemed “irrelevant” or “inadmissible” or ignored by investigators, prosecutors, judges, and, in some cases, even their own defense attorneys. As Kelly described it, “I thought somebody would advocate for me, and I thought that the prosecution knew that I was also a victim of my husband’s abuse. But it was their job to just dirty me up as much as they could, whatever they could to just get a conviction”.

Participants observed how legal actors, legal frameworks, and institutional barriers functioned to suppress and minimize evidence of abuse, even when it was centrally relevant to their case. For example, it took months for Roshawn to obtain medical imagery to confirm several internal injuries from acute violence she had experienced before her arrest. While her attorney introduced the images as evidence of severe domestic violence, the delayed imaging allowed prosecutors to challenge the veracity of her testimony about when the injuries were sustained. In one of many examples of prosecutors denying self-defense claims, when Anna’s attorneys introduced evidence of domestic abuse to support a reduction in charges, she recalled a prosecutor who reasoned: “This is not a manslaughter case. A manslaughter case is for a man who kills another man in a bar fight. This is not for her”.

Group discussions among participants revealed a collective common sense that the prosecution’s purpose was to secure as many convictions as possible, and to incriminate however possible. As Tamara said of her experience of plea bargaining, “what stands out to me then and now is the total absence of truth and healing or caring for members of a family—especially the children, who they claim to be protecting by throwing us as far under the jail as possible”. Many recounted how their lives became unrecognizable as prosecutors spun narratives about their character, life histories, relationships, and actions. People recalled being “tricked”, lied to, and lied about. These forms of abstraction, often within the normative rules of evidence, were experienced as proactive forms of distortion and deceit akin to gaslighting, echoing abusive relationship dynamics and vulnerabilities. Margo homed in on narrative manipulation as the most “traumatizing thing because I sat there and I listened to these people say all these terrible things about me, and I knew that wasn’t true. And the prosecutor even lied and held back information”.

It was a widely held view, particularly among participants of color, that, as Eliana put it, “you’re really guilty until proven innocent”. Sydney went on to describe how multiple state systems had colluded in constructing her as always-already guilty: “From foster care to incarceration, it was as if everybody knew who I was, and I never got one chance to tell my story .... I was jailed my whole life simply because of my size and race. People can’t tell you the violent crimes I committed because I didn’t, and that’s just the reality of it”. Some participants drew a direct link between law-and-order electoral politics and ballot initiative campaigns and the kinds of racialized and gendered narrative manipulation they experienced as part of their prosecution. For instance, Linda explained how she and her co-defendants became “poster children” during the campaign for California Proposition 21, which increased punitive sentencing for youth with alleged gang affiliations:

Going in there, you already know what they’re going to do with you, and especially if you’re a woman, a woman of color, from the projects, and you don’t have money to get an attorney and you don’t have money to get a private investigator or get these things, they can and do pretty much whatever the hell they want to do with you. And they do .... We were all Latina .... We were all under age, and this was during Proposition 21, where it’s trying minors as adults .... I had fourteen years in gang enhancements .... I do believe that race and politics had a big part in that.

Here, Linda underscores that she was unsurprised by the state’s framing of her case; as a multiply marginalized young person, her fate seemed inevitable in the context of a moral panic about Black and Brown youth crime. She went on to add: “a lot of the time it’s not even against you, it’s who can move up in the game as far as like judges and DAs and what can benefit them from us being sentenced to this crime”. Relatedly, participants were generally united in a perception of the prosecutorial process as “rigged” and run by an “old boys’ network” that served racist and sexist ends. Romarilyn recounted how the judge and district attorney “were in collusion together”, working to facilitate a murder conviction of a Black woman from an all-white jury. Among several other examples, Kelly had learned that the district attorney and judge in her trial had been college roommates.

3.3. Escalating Control Through Through Maximizing Confinement

They just trying to prevent you from going home.

—Domonique

The criminalizing power of prosecution extends beyond the courts and into prison, where conditions of control escalate to maximize the severity and duration of confinement. Participants spoke of a long reach of prosecution enforced through the disciplinary power of prison guards and parole board commissioners. Arbitrary and targeted enforcement and scrutiny are considered here as forms of de facto prosecutorial power.

In terms of their experiences of incarceration, participants emphasized how difficult it was to protect themselves or others from violence inflicted by correctional officers (COs) and other prison authorities without risking punitive action. As one participant put it, “You’ve always been a victim of the courts and the prosecutors. When you get [to prison], you’re a victim of the COs”. Lizz likened the process of navigating the disciplinary power of prison staff to a “tightrope” one must walk, as prison conditions force an impossible choice between either submitting to abuse or risking more prison time in retaliation for resisting this abuse. In Amelia’s case, after being routinely taunted by prison staff about whether she “wanted to be a man”, she received a disciplinary infraction for challenging a guard who accused her of hiding contraband in her boxers—a pretense for an invasive physical search. Homophobia, transphobia, and racism commonly surfaced in stories of prison authorities’ acts of retaliation. “They got away with it because you don’t have anybody fighting for you”, Domonique shared. “You have to fight for yourself. And when you do try to fight, you know, they trying to make excuses to go through your mail, tear up your mail, not give you your mail, give you your mail when it’s late, so time limitations ran through it .... They just trying to prevent you from going home”.

In further describing the de facto power of prison staff to “re-sentence” them to more time, participants revealed how the disciplinary culture of prison enabled new criminal charges. Only seventeen years old when she received a life sentence, Linda described the “authoritativeness” of prison culture, and particularly male prison staff “pressing up their authority, going through room searches, through threats … and just being, like, taunted or just harassed”. Linda accumulated several disciplinary violations in her first years in prison and ultimately wound up “picking up a case”—being charged and convicted of another crime while incarcerated—for an assault against a staff member, which added an additional four years to her original twenty-year life sentence. These kinds of new convictions and disciplinary violations cost participants “good conduct credits”, which can shave time off of one’s sentence. They can also block or limit people’s access to participating in vocational, academic, or social programming, through which imprisoned people can earn “program credits” toward an earlier release date for those with determinate sentences, or an earlier parole eligibility date for those with indeterminate sentences.

For participants with indeterminate sentences, parole board commissioners also served a de facto prosecution and sentencing role as the ultimate authority of whether to grant or deny parole and, if denied, how long one must wait for a next eligibility hearing. Many participants received multiple parole denials ranging upward to ten years. Participants charted a direct path between disciplinary violations and parole denials. As Ilka recounted, “The first time I went to the board, I got denied ten years …. On paper, when it came to my education, the certificates and the groups, [the commissioner] said, I’m perfect on paper. It’s just when they turn that paper over and go through my violations ... he said that’s where it goes bad”.

Participants underscored how ambiguity enabled the Board of Parole Hearings (BPH) to deny parole. Romarilyn shared that despite having no prior convictions, no disciplinary record, and numerous programming accomplishments, she received two three-year denials. Anna, too, had no disciplinary record over her seventeen years of incarceration, and yet like Romarilyn, she too experienced the BPH’s power to “re-sentence a person over and over”, without “consideration [of] your behavior in prison”. The opaque and moving goalpost of demonstrating “insight” into one’s crime of conviction could lead to people “doing like double, triple their time”.

Narrating experiences of surviving domestic or sexual violence during a parole hearing was a risk. Many recalled BPH commissioners telling them they were evading responsibility or lacking “insight” into the cause of their convictions. As Margo explained, demonstrating insight meant contorting oneself to fit the narrative constructed by the prosecution, not telling one’s own truth:

[T]hey kept saying, well, where’s your insight? Where’s your insight? And I was like, I’m telling you what happened …. Growing up, my mother, my grandparents and the elders in our family said “always tell the truth,” and so that’s what I did. I told the truth. But they have a twisted thing in the system …. You’re telling the truth, but they have a different perception of what the truth is. And so that gives them a reason to deny you …. Now, like my sixth or seventh time, I realized what they were doing …. You have to become more like them and understand them, you know?

Demonstrating “insight” is then another tightrope, as parole-eligible participants had to choose whether to speak their own truth or reproduce a criminal legal narrative constructed through isolation, intimidation, manipulation, and collusion. Participants’ engagements with the parole board demonstrate how the abusive and coercive conditions of plea bargaining and the manipulation of narratives are leveraged to maximize control. Sometimes decades after the original prosecutor “secured a win”, participants were forced to reproduce a narrative that cast them as a one-dimensional “offender”. They were still contending with an abusive authority that allowed little to no space for the ways that victimization shaped their initial encounters with the criminal legal system. As some participants relayed, navigating these requirements can have lasting effects on the psyche and one’s sense of belonging and safety long after parole is granted.

4. Discussion

In contribution to this Special Issue on criminalization and care, the results of our study show criminal prosecution as—to quote Tamara—a “total absence of truth and healing or caring”. The zero-sum game of the adversarial system disavows survivors who are charged with crimes from the state’s purported role to protect victims, and the withholding of care underpins the securing of convictions and prolonging of prison sentences. From the critical vantage of criminalized survivors who participated in and co-authored this study, prosecution relies on practices that silence, isolate, intimidate, manipulate, trap, degrade, humiliate, and diminish the agency and self-determination of defendants. Weaponized with impunity, this repertoire of tactics is shown to be instrumental in the production of guilt and criminality and the manufacturing of consent in plea bargaining and parole contexts. The collaborative analysis of participants, with convictions spanning multiple jurisdictions and several decades, corroborates that these dynamics are institutional, not aberrational. Understanding how prosecution systematically erodes survivors’ capacities to voice their truths and fight the cases against them is essential to disrupting criminalization patterns. Such findings also confront the state’s claims to fairness, justice, due process, and public safety, particularly the assertion of protecting victims of domestic and sexual violence.

Our focus on prosecution provides a criminalized survivor-centered analysis of how tactics of abuse and coercive control serve to maximize convictions and prison time. Twelve participants in this study agreed to a plea deal in conditions they described as coercive. Plea bargains determine the overwhelming majority of case outcomes in the United States, including in California, where it is estimated that only three percent of felony cases are determined by trial (Judicial Council of California 2023). Extending existing research on what Heiner (2016) refers to as a “mass forfeiture of procedural justice”, and specifically on the role of pre-trial detention conditions in facilitating pleas (Peterson 2020; Lerman et al. 2022), this study shows how racialized gendered violence meted out by jail staff and authorities may play an underappreciated role in case outcomes. As researchers with the UC Sentencing Project, we have previously reported on the sentencing powers of prison authorities and parole board commissioners, showing how long-term prison sentences are not reducible to plea bargaining or discrete judicial decisions but are instead the result of actions and decisions made by multiple informal and formal actors and influenced by broader political and social conditions (Hankins et al. 2023). Here, we show prosecution as a dynamic process that follows participants into their incarceration experiences and impacts time served. A focus on prosecution thus reveals survivor criminalization as a cyclical pattern from arrest through reentry.

The literature on gendered pathways to incarceration has generated an array of concerns about the high rates of trauma histories among people in women’s prisons and the need for trauma responsiveness (e.g., Lynch et al. 2012; Brav 2021). An understanding of prosecution as enacting gendered violence bridges these concerns with abolitionist feminist perspectives on the intrinsic violence of criminalization and imprisonment (Kaba 2021; Bierria et al. 2022; Davis et al. 2022). Indeed, abolition feminism reroutes our energies from individual empowerment and gender-responsive programming interventions (Hannah-Moffat 2000; Shaylor 2008; Pollack 2013) toward organizing for the freedom of criminalized survivors and against the abusive state (Love & Protect and Survived & Punished 2017; Kaba 2021; Davis et al. 2022). To put it differently, this article’s indictment of the violence of prosecution should not be misconstrued as a simple clarion call for more procedural justice or judicial training, or an uncritical endorsement of the “progressive prosecutor” movement (Godsoe and Romero 2023). Rather, participants’ accounts point us toward an abolitionist horizon.

In their introduction to a first-of-its-kind collection on abolition and social work, Kim et al. (2024) consider the tensions of developing explicitly abolitionist practices in the field given how “social workers and the profession itself have been deeply entrenched in the very systems that abolitionists are fighting to dismantle” (5). Exposing and resisting the collusion of social workers in systems of social control has rightly been a priority among critical social work scholars advancing anti-racist and abolitionist praxis. Outside professionalized social work lies a long and rebellious history of collective care work by and for criminalized survivors, as part of a broader grassroots tradition of prisoner solidarity behind and across prison walls (Love & Protect and Survived & Punished 2017; Thuma 2019; Kaba 2021; Thuma et al. 2022; Klein 2024). How might this tradition inform and inspire the growing interest in abolition among social work students, scholars, and practitioners? How might these traditions help meaningfully grow the ecosystem of people, groups, and organizations capable of mobilizing against the harms of prosecution?

We focus here on lifting up a set of social care approaches—by no means exhaustive nor intended to be—that are currently practiced in the abolitionist feminist ecosystem that made the present research study possible. While relevant to social workers, we use the term social care work to reflect the social movement roots of these practices, our interdisciplinary team, and our alignment with the deprofessionalization principle advanced by the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (2024). We draw especially on the vital work of Survived & Punished and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, among other formations working to end the criminalization of surviving domestic and sexual violence; end the incarceration of girls, women, transgender men, and all gender-oppressed people; and create transformative responses to gender-based violence. In

Table 1. Social care practices for resisting the abuse-prison nexus.

Area	Example Practices
Accompanying criminalized survivors from arrest through reentry	Proactively reach out to criminalized survivors to offer support and confront state-created barriers to communication and relationship-building with incarcerated people. Develop trauma-of-criminalization-informed practices of accompaniment with criminalized survivors and their loved ones. Recognize, value, and help activate the existing social care networks of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated survivors. Persistently advocate for survivors’ acute and ongoing needs while incarcerated (e.g., medical care and language interpreters). Resist the siloing of individual advocacy by working cooperatively with collective advocacy efforts.
Collectively advocating for and defending criminalized survivors	Research your local and regional landscape to learn what resources are, and are not, available for supporting criminalized survivors and advocating for their freedom, and for supporting people experiencing intimate partner violence without criminal legal system involvement. Demonstrate public support for criminalized and incarcerated survivors through court attendance, petitions, op-eds, phone or email zaps, etcetera. Offer knowledge and resources related to intimate partner and sexual violence to defense counsel in advocating for dismissed charges, reduced bail, and mitigated sentences. Collaborate with attorneys to build a defense strategy that reflects the survivor’s lived experience and the systemic conditions that contributed to the charges; work to introduce narratives about structural inequalities and violence into court proceedings to contextualize the case. Encourage and coordinate the writing of letters of support to incarcerated survivors. Collaborate with community groups to run courtwatch programs to increase judicial accountability. Raise bail or collaborate with community bail fund networks, if relevant, as well as funds to support survivors’ basic needs in the pre-trial period (housing, childcare, transportation, jail commissary, and jail communications). Engage in post-conviction advocacy efforts, from clemency campaigns to parole preparation to any available pathways to re-sentencing in your state.
Transforming conditions that fuel the criminalization of survivors of interpersonal violence	Raise collective consciousness around the abuse-to-prison pipeline, and work to shift narratives that contribute to the criminalization of survivors through political education, art- and culture-making, media production, etcetera; connect this work to broader efforts to expose and dismantle the harms of the prison-industrial complex. Untether domestic and sexual violence and mental health services from law enforcement, including but not limited to crisis intervention services. Invest in the development and sustainability of non-adversarial approaches to repair, healing, and accountability outside the criminal legal system (e.g., restorative justice, community accountability, and transformative justice). Support and/or launch campaigns to end pre-trial detention and cash bail, close jails and prisons, curb plea bargaining, and otherwise shrink the carceral state. Expand and monitor the availability, implementation, and accessibility of survivor sentencing relief laws. Strengthen connections and forge coalitions among organizations and groups working at the intersection of criminalization and domestic and sexual violence.

, we identify three general areas of social care work practice in relation to the results of our study and provide specific examples of each. Taken together, they emphasize centering lived expertise, linking individual and collective forms of advocacy, and building power to prevent criminalization and interpersonal violence.

Accompaniment is used here to refer to relational practices and day-to-day forms of support for an individual survivor facing prosecution. Deep and robust accompaniment—from nonjudgmental listening to resource navigation—can intervene in the violence of prosecution by challenging isolation, abusive pre-trial conditions, and narrative manipulation, and in turn affirming the survivor’s dignity and worth and fortifying their strength to fight their case. Accompaniment often includes persistent advocacy to ensure that survivors, and those for whom they are primary caregivers, have their basic needs met while resisting their criminalization. It also involves advocating for a survivor’s voice to be heard, including by their own defense counsel who may be unknowledgeable about intimate partner violence, unprepared, and/or under-resourced. We emphasize the importance of honoring and activating existing networks of care, as the work of accompaniment can be shared by friends, family, neighbors, organizers and activists, faith community members, and formal advocates and service providers. People with lived or learned expertise in the criminalization of surviving domestic and sexual violence are especially indispensable accompaniers in legal proceedings and communications with defense counsel and can also play a liaising role with loved ones. These kinds of social care work form a foundation upon which other kinds of collective advocacy can be built.

Collective advocacy is used here to refer to community organizing approaches undertaken with a survivor’s consent to fight for their freedom, pre- or post-conviction. Rooted in an understanding of the violence of prosecution, a collective defense strategy confronts the harms of criminalization with an abundance of care and community mobilization. As Love & Protect and Survived & Punished (2017) write in their survivor defense toolkit, “defense committees can serve a much larger range of purposes than a legal team or a domestic violence advocate acting on their own” as they “allow for all of a survivor’s needs to be considered” and “make space for there to be a diversity of strategies that can make huge impacts on the outcome of a case.” Such strategies may include packing a courtroom; fundraising; writing letters of support to survivors; gathering signatures; creating art and media; and organizing a rally, vigil, or press conference. Those of us who have experienced criminalization emphasize how transformative even seemingly small acts of collective care are, as they create space for survivors to process and make sense of their experiences and disrupt the stigmatizing and isolating impacts of criminal charges. Crucially, defense campaigns to free individual survivors can be and often are leveraged to highlight the structural oppressions and systemic failures at play in a given case, situating the survivor’s story within larger abolition feminist struggles.2

Transforming conditions speaks to an array of broader cultural, political, and ideological practices aimed to break the abuse-to-prison pipeline and dismantle the prison-industrial complex. This work involves developing political education tools for cultivating a structural analysis of gendered violence, criminalization, and imprisonment, as well as art and media production that confront carceral logics and invite radical reimaginings of safety, justice, and healing. Efforts to develop, sustain, and expand explicitly anti-carceral approaches to crisis response, interpersonal violence prevention and intervention, and accountability and healing are vital to shrinking the front end of the pipeline. Toward the collective freedom of criminalized survivors and prison abolition, activists and advocates are engaged in a wide range of political organizing efforts, including expanding legal pathways for release (e.g., survivor justice legislation and second-look legislation), decoupling advocacy services and police reporting mechanisms, blocking efforts to grow prison infrastructure, campaigning to close existing jails and prisons, and transforming reentry programs and services.3

Readers in the social work field, and students embarking on a social work education, can recognize the practices described above as broadly compatible with the profession’s stated core values of the importance of human relationships, dignity and worth of the person, and social justice. The skills nurtured in social work education are also directly applicable to many of these practices. Moreover, many people who have already accompanied loved ones or who have directly experienced the harms of criminalization find their way to the field in pursuit of social change. Yet, the knowledge of those with lived experiences and traditions of social care work that have been incubated by anti-prison movements are rarely engaged in social work literature, education, and training, and there remain numerous barriers for formerly incarcerated people to gain entry and licensure. As the abuse-prison nexus arguably touches every arena of social work practice, strategies of social care and resistance rooted in the collective knowledge of criminalized survivors is a potent portal for reimagining social work.