Abstract
Prison abolitionist scholarship provides useful frameworks with which to assess and critique prison-focused activism and advocacy, penal reform and carceral expansion. The struggle to achieve prison abolition is one for ‘broad-based social change’, which ‘challenges multiple and overlapping sites of inequality and the discourses that ensure their institutionalization and exacerbation’ (Russell and Carlton 2013, 476). Our contribution is primarily concerned to document and explore historical lineages of feminist and abolitionist resistance to carceral violence. This focus—and the strategic practices of the anti-carceral feminist movement we examine—necessitates consideration of the broader structural conditions of inequality that reproduce the violence, oppression and injustice of incarceration. Abolition is a challenging social change project that begins with locating the historical and ongoing linkages between imprisonment and other forms of social control and harm.
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- 1.
Under the 1958 Act a Coroner had the power to make these findings of homicide without the same stringent rules of evidence and burden of proof applied in regular courts of law. In 1985, the Act was reformed so that this finding was no longer available to Coroners.
- 2.
In 1982 the Victorian Equal Opportunity Board was relatively newly established. Subsequently, after the Equal Opportunity Act was reformed in 1984 and then again in 1987, it became the Equal Opportunity Commission of Victoria and a Commissioner was appointed and allocated powers to investigate discrimination claims.
- 3.
3CR Community Radio station was founded and commenced broadcasting in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1976. It was Australia’s first community-run and -owned grassroots radio station. 3CR has an established reputation as outspoken and independent. It prioritises issues neglected by mainstream media and provides a platform for political and social justice.
- 4.
Flat Out Inc. is a statewide advocacy service founded in 1988 for women who have contact with the criminal justice system or prisons in Victoria. It is an independent, not-for-profit community organisation run by and for women. Flat Out Inc. has a history of leading and participating in research and community education seeking to inform the wider community about the harms that occur for women in the criminal justice system.
- 5.
A series of notebooks that we refer to as the ‘Fairlea Vigil Diaries’, which contain five months’ worth of dated anonymous handwritten diary entries from 1993. These notebooks are now held in the personal archives of one of our participants, Catherine Gow , and not currently publicly available.
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Carlton, B., Russell, E.K. (2018). Introduction. In: Resisting Carceral Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01695-1_1
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