Beyond Prison Bars

It’s hard to discuss the topic of punishment without imagining my own childhood – the times I was reprimanded by my parents for doing something wrong or failing to meet their expectations.

Our earliest experiences of punishment are within the family, the institution that introduces us to discipline, authority, and social norms. Scholars such as Adrian Howe have explored the gendered nature of punishment, emphasizing how the family – the most proximal part of the social structure into which we are born – teaches us how to behave as women, how to exist within the roles established for us, and how to conform to the values and norms set by our societies.

We often think of such gendered discipline as an intimate matter that takes place between children and their parents. In this sense, punishment is thought of as a kind of nurture, rather than a tool of terror, discipline, and the fruit of a rotten system.

But the punishment that takes place within families is also a manifestation of state punishment. It is an extension of a larger patriarchal system, scaled down and delivered within the context of the nuclear family. It is only through the deconstruction of these punitive micro-structures and logics that we can reflect upon the many ways in which punishment has surpassed incarceration.

Punishment is often justified as a means to attaining four ends: retribution (punishing offenders for the harm they've caused), deterrence (discouraging future crimes by showing the consequences), rehabilitation (reforming offenders to prevent future offenses), and incapacitation (removing offenders from society to prevent further harm). The most (in)famous piece of critical literature on punishment is probably Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. While influential in its own right, Foucault’s work has also been reconfigured through gender-sensitive and intersectional lenses, rendering it more amenable to feminist analysis.

Criminalization and Incarceration of Transness

Punishment is no longer just a four walled overcrowded prison cell. Punishment has become a part of our daily life and struggles. We have no access to our basic needs and rights, including healthcare, education, etc. With no state or systemic support, we are left to fend for our own, thus constantly living in a state of fight or flight. This is especially the case for trans folks, who are largely denied access to adequate housing, education, healthcare, economic opportunities, social support, and legal protection. This leaves them with an extremely limited pool of options, in which sex work is a survival mechanism for some, and a societal expectation of all. When you are preoccupied with figuring out how to keep a roof over your head, you have no space to hope and to dream, to think of the future. Not when you exist under a system that thrives on your struggle and blames you for your own misfortune.

Those who do end up getting into sex work still face struggles, challenging the notion that sex work gives you access to power, especially in light of the historical stigmatization of trans identities and its intersection with the sex industry. Even within the sex workers community, trans workers are shunned and isolated from any supportive social network, rendering them even more vulnerable to violence.

Transness is treated as both a crime and a punishment in our rigid binary societies. One cannot comprehend the full extent of such a reality, let alone grasp how much worse things can be when you belong to a community that has been historically and systematically marginalized. True punishment is to have your privileges taken away, along with your freedom and your right to exist openly and publicly. It is a form of punishment that extends beyond the confines of the prison into the public life of the everyday world.

Trans folks can tell you how the “outside” and the “inside” world are not so different anymore. In both worlds you are under constant surveillance and violent attacks aiming to discipline your being and force you to conform to the gender “assigned” to you at birth. It is through this systemic logic that incarceration has become legitimized as part of the social punishment executed by the family and society.

To What End?

In the spirit of second wave feminism, some activists have taken the fight for equality and inclusion to heart, but have allowed the punitive morals from their childhood to restrict the scope of their advocacy. Asking for the respect of a person’s gender when placing them in a prison cell is certainly affirming, but should we not also ask why they are being incarcerated in the first place?

As an example, we can imagine a trans sex worker who has been incarcerated for solicitation. Global North advocates would lobby to have the worker incarcerated in a prison that reflects their gender identity and would pat themselves on the back if they succeeded. These “gestures” are both shallow and flawed, as they fall short of asking the crucial question: why should anyone be incarcerated for utilizing their own bodies and sexual abilities to meet their economic needs?

There can be no respect for gender identity when the entire system does not respect your being. Criminal justice systems are designed to only serve the elite and disproportionately target marginalized groups like trans sex workers, who are punished simply for trying to survive. You cannot fix a problem by making it more inclusive of marginalized communities, you can only start to acknowledge its failings by understanding how it is the essence of said marginalization. We need to reconsider the way in which we approach social justice causes. Then, we might realize that sticking the “inclusive” and “intersectional” labels on rotten systems is not “progress”.

Feminist Values on Sale

As governments cut funding and push back against progressive values like inclusion and gender justice, it is striking how many feminist organizations in the Global North have adapted by aligning with rising conservative agendas. By prioritizing financial survival, these organizations are not just compromising their values but also betraying the very cause they claim to defend, thus deepening the divide between the Global North and South more than ever before.

While abolitionist discourse has been gaining traction globally, is still often overpowered by voices from the neoliberal sphere of the Global North, where change is more often than not treated as an individual’s responsibility.

But the fight for an abolitionist future cannot be waged in isolation, as power lies in community, and nothing threatens oppressive systems more than unity. Social justice efforts have sometimes diverged along the lines of competing agendas and visions, but reclaiming a feminism rooted in solidarity, resistance, and collective liberation is more urgent than ever. The systems we fight depend on our fragmentation—our power lies in refusing to be divided.

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.