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The Carceral Creep: Gender-Based Violence, Race, and the Expansion of the Punitive State, 1973–1983

May 2020
Social Problems 67(2):251-269

Authors:

California State University, Long Beach

The development of the feminist anti-domestic violence movement in the United States illustrates the trajectory from a social movement field devoid of carceral involvement to one fully occupied by the agents of crime control. Countering a narrative that often begins with the Violence against Women Act of 1994, this study demonstrates how the roots of carceral feminism extend back to the movement’s first decade from 1973 to 1983. This study analyzes data from 60 social movement leaders. The pluralist coalition resulting from a successful lawsuit against the Oakland Police Department, the creation of the victim witness program in San Francisco, and the development of the Community Coordinated Response in Duluth, Minnesota, represent mechanisms of engagement with law enforcement tied to innovative organizational forms. The process called the “carceral creep” describes how early social movement successes against an initially unresponsive criminal justice system evolved into collaborative relationships that altered the autonomy and constitution of initial social movement organizations. The creation of new organizational forms and their replication contributed to today’s carceral feminism. These developments were accompanied by persisting gender, race, and class tropes used to justify pro-criminalization strategies and obfuscate impacts on marginalized communities.

Three Feminist Anti-Domestic Violence Strategies to Engage the Carceral State Feminist Anti-Domestic Violence (DV) Strategy

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The Carceral Creep: Gender-Based

Violence, Race, and the Expansion of the

Punitive State, 1973–1983

Mimi E. Kim

California State University, Long Beach

ABSTRACT

The development of the feminist anti-domestic violence movement in the United States

illustrates the trajectory from a social movement ﬁeld devoid of carceral involvement to one

fully occupied by the agents of crime control. Countering a narrative that often begins with

the Violence against Women Act of 1994, this study demonstrates how the roots of carceral

feminism extend back to the movement’s ﬁrst decade from 1973 to 1983. This study ana-

lyzes data from 60 social movement leaders. The pluralist coalition resulting from a success-

ful lawsuit against the Oakland Police Department, the creation of the victim witness pro-

gram in San Francisco, and the development of the Community Coordinated Response in

Duluth, Minnesota, represent mechanisms of engagement with law enforcement tied to in-

novative organizational forms. The process called the “carceral creep” describes how early

social movement successes against an initially unresponsive criminal justice system evolved

into collaborative relationships that altered the autonomy and constitution of initial social

movement organizations. The creation of new organizational forms and their replication

contributed to today’s carceral feminism. These developments were accompanied by per-

sisting gender, race, and class tropes used to justify pro-criminalization strategies and obfus-

cate impacts on marginalized communities.

KEYWORDS:social movements; domestic violence; intersectionality; carceral state;

carceral feminism.

The unprecedented growth in rates of U.S. incarceration since the early 1970s has prompted wide-

spread reevaluation of public investments in crime control. Beyond the alarming statistics, the scope

of carceral activities has expanded beyond the confines of the criminal justice system, permeating

ever-widening aspects of social, political, and economic life (Garland 2001;Simon 2007;Wacquant

2009). Implicated in carceral expansion has been the contemporary feminist social movement,

The author wishes to thank the many people who offered their inspiration, support, and feedback, including those whose social

movement activism fills these pages. My deepest gratitude extends to Catherine Albiston, Alisa Bierria, Henry Brady, Julian Chow,

Jennifer Jihye Chun, Donna Coker, Veena Dubal, Leigh Goodmark, Leah Jacobs, Roi Livne, Kristin Luker, Doug McAdam, Calvin

Morrill, K-Sue Park, Laurie Schaffner, and Jonathan Simon who reviewed previous drafts. Special thanks go to Deborah Freedman

Lustig, David Minkus, Christine Trost, and all of the inspiring fellows at the Berkeley Center for Research on Social Change, the fel-

lows at the Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice Network’s Summer Research Institute, and to my comrades at Incite! for their en-

during collective vision and insurgent spirit. The author also extends gratitude to the editors and anonymous reviewers of Social

Problems for their insightful comments and suggestions. Please direct correspondence to the author at the School of Social Work,

California State University, Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA 90840; email: mimi.eunmi.kim@gmail.com.

CThe Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

251

Social Problems, 2020, 67, 251–269

doi: 10.1093/socpro/spz013

Advance Access Publication Date: 29 May 2019

Article

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particularly those movement strands that challenge gender-based violence including sexual assault,

domestic violence, and, more recently, stalking and sex trafficking. Successful demands for criminali-

zation of gender-based violence, enhanced penalties, and policies such as mandatory arrest are among

the systemic changes that have earned this movement accolades for its record of social movement

success and critiques by those concerned about its contributions to the expanding punitive state.

Building on theories of the “third governmental sector” and carceral annexation of civil society

(Garland 2001), social scientists have begun to provide empirical evidence of the ways in which crim-

inal justice institutions cooperatively or coercively incorporate sectors of civil society into carceral ac-

tivities. Research largely focused on third party policing, referring to police recruitment of non-state

actors into the functions of crime control, has contributed to a heightened understanding of the coer-

cive mechanisms driving carceral expansion into civil society (Desmond 2016;Lara-Millan 2014;

Mazerolle and Ransley 2005). However, the theoretical underpinnings and empirical examples rest

upon the assumption of recruitment initiated by the state. Less is known about the dynamics of car-

ceral expansion when initial demands are generated from civil society.

The emergence of what is now known as “carceral feminism” (Bernstein 2005), has advanced an-

other set of considerations for carceral expansion associated with a social movement known both for

its emancipatory origins and its embrace of tough-on-crime strategies. Social movement scholarship

offers more general insights into the dynamics of elite-driven demobilization and cooptation of pro-

gressive social movements by more conservative state and non-state agendas (McCarthy and Zald

1977;Piven and Cloward 1977;Strolovich 2007). However, the specific carceral turn of feminist so-

cial movements demands closer examination of its alignment with the punitive arm of the state dur-

ing a time of an extraordinary deployment of crime control functions into the sphere of civil society

(Garland 2001).

The pro-criminalization success of social movements challenging gender-based violence first led

feminist legal scholars to turn attention to the paradox of an emancipatory social movement’s close

ties to the state’s most masculinist, repressive arm (Coker 1999;Mills 1999). The rapid growth of

the carceral state and salience of feminist social movements championing pro-criminalization strate-

gies led to further theoretical insights and empirical investigations under a broader scope of crimino-

logical inquiry. Examining the context of external factors that shaped the U.S. economic, social,

political, and economic context over the past four decades, crime policy researchers demonstrate how

the advance of neoliberalism hastened the erosion of emancipatory feminist aims. The encroachment

of individualized models of service delivery, weakened welfare priorities, and heightened attention to

crime in public discourse and policy shaped the carceral direction of feminist social movements

(Bumiller 2008;Gottschalk 2006;Simon 2007). While recognition of deep race and class disparities

inherent in pro-criminalization strategies may have impeded investment in crime control, the sup-

pression of these differences under a gender essentialist framework facilitated the continued adher-

ence to carceral strategies as a central feature of feminist anti-violence movements (Goodmark 2013;

Richie 2012;Durazo, Bierria, and Kim 2011).

This article examines the formative years of the anti-domestic violence movement from 1973 to

1983, a time of transition from the virtual absence of carceral participation in the social movement

field

to the onset of what is now a strong and persisting collaborative relationship. By looking at the

period when carceral strategies were first developed, this study answers two fundamental questions.

First, how and why did initial anti-domestic violence movement leaders, some of whom emerged

from radical racial justice movements, pursue strategies tied to enhanced policing? Second, how did

early social movement success in demanding criminal justice protections to battered victims trans-

form into the eventual subordination of the movement to its law enforcement targets?

1 Reference to the social movement as a field incorporates the contributions of institutionalist sociology that recognizes social

movements as areas of social life where collective and individual actors strategically vie for power (Armstrong 2002;Edelman,

Leachman, and McAdam 2010).

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The dynamic I call the carceral creep describes the processes and mechanisms that explain these

two paradoxes. First, it unveils the relationship between the feminist emancipatory social movement

and the masculinist arm of the state as one driven by the pursuit and delusion of feminist control,

one that embraced oppositional political strategies but in service to the encroaching politics of mass

incarceration. Second, it reveals the process through which impressive social movement success can

lead to effects that undermine the goals of movement actors and institutions to the greater aims of

the movement’s prior targets, eventually subordinating them. As I will show, emerging gender, race,

and class tropes provided justifications that served to promote pro-criminalization strategies and ob-

fuscate its detrimental impacts on marginalized communities. Hence, this is not an account of femi-

nist concessions to carceral pressures. Rather, it offers empirical evidence of a social movement’s

active role in the recruitment of carceral forces into civil society and the creation of innovative organi-

zational forms that would become key features of the punitive state.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND CARCERAL EXPANSION

The dramatic reconfiguration of the U.S. state over the past four decades has generated a body of

criminological scholarship centered on the unprecedented magnitude of carceral expansion. Research

on the salient role of civil society mobilization draws upon David Garland’s (2001:170) identification

of a “new crime control establishment” or “third ‘governmental’ sector” that describes the increasing

deployment of civil society into the activities and institutions of crime control as central to the mod-

ern punitive state. Growing research, largely focused on third party policing, provides empirical evi-

dence of how civil society actors, such as parents (Mazerolle and Ransley 2005), landlords

(Desmond 2016), and hospitals (Lara-Millan 2014) have been recruited into the functions of surveil-

lance and punishment. These studies emphasize the coercive dynamics of carceral recruitment and

demonstrate the process of annexing non- state actors as crime control functions become institution-

alized into everyday practices.

The study of feminist social movements provides a contrasting account of the mobilization of civil

society into carceral activities. Identifying feminist anti-violence movements as “one of the clearest

cases where a [social] movement has turned to criminalization as a primary tool of social justice”

(Simon 2007:180), a growing body of criminological research has interrogated the development of

pro-criminalization feminist forces, examining their relationship to the broader carceral terrain. This

focus on the relationship of feminist social movements to the overarching development of the puni-

tive state brings together research from theoretical traditions of critical criminology, social move-

ments, and critical race studies.

Theories of social movements provide insights into the overarching tendencies for social move-

ment cooptation by more conservative state and non-state entities. Classic social movement accounts

attribute the demobilization of social movements to standard processes of institutional bureaucratiza-

tion accompanying the maturation of successful social movements into “social movement industries”

(McCarthy and Zald 1977). More critical of these concessions, social movement scholars such as

Piven and Cloward (1977) and Strolovich (2007) explain the persistent failures of initially radical so-

cial movements to maintain progressive aims by illuminating the dynamics of elite social movement

leadership and the alignment of goals and strategies to those that guarantee ties to state legitimacy

and resources.

The prominent role of feminist social movements in the promotion of carceral expansion gained

broader attention as scholars examined the causes and consequences of carceral expansion into civil

society. The accumulation of legislation criminalizing gender-based violence including enhanced

criminal penalties and mandatory arrest offered ample evidence of feminist carceral contributions.

Feminist legal theorists began to critique anti-violence movements for policies promoting strength-

ened policing, over-investment in victim-centered frameworks, and the abandonment of broader eco-

nomic and political considerations (Coker 1999;Mills 1999).

The Carceral Creep 253

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Criminological scholars embedded these critiques into a broader theoretical examination of car-

ceral expansion and the more ubiquitous turn towards neoliberal policies. Pressures to conform to

professionalized, individualized models of service delivery joined by crime control as a punitive re-

sponse to economic and social problems contributed to the erosion of more progressive elements

once central to grassroots feminist social movements

(Bumiller 2008;Goodmark 2013). Marie

Gottschalk (2006) further emphasized the role of the weak U.S. welfare state that limited redistribu-

tive options for feminist social movements, leaving once progressive movements more vulnerable to

the enticements of carceral resources and access to legitimization accompanying the adoption of pro-

criminalization strategies. The reconfiguration of governance around crime control and the elevation

of the crime victim as a central actor in the U.S. polity secured the alignment of victim-centered social

movements with the interests of carceral expansion (Gottschalk 2006;Simon 2007).

The dynamics of gender, race, and class play a central role in the examination of the development

of feminist anti-violence movements as they do in the broader criminological context. Kimberle

Crenshaw’s (1991) landmark critique of the neglectful and detrimental impacts of feminist anti-

violence policies on racially marginalized communities paved the way for a body of criminological

analyses based on an intersectional framework. Studies attentive to the categories of gender, race, and

class reveal that early feminist leaders capitulated marginalized interests to a single-issue orientation

based upon gender alone; thus, they conceded a once radical social movement aware of the race and

class perils of enhanced policing to the embrace of pro-carceral policies (Goodmark 2013;Richie

2012;Durazo et al. 2011;Strolovich 2007). Posed as a counter to prevailing notions of the dispropor-

tionate criminality of people of color, gender essentialist frameworks adopted by the anti-violence

movement valorized white female victimization while neglecting the consequences of criminalization

on targeted and marginalized racial communities (Goodmark 2013;Richie 2012). Gender essential-

ism masked the dramatically unequal impact of pro-criminalization policies on targeted communities,

thereby leaving the tough-on-crime framework underlying carceral feminism remarkably resistant to

critical evaluation.

This historical investigation of the anti-domestic violence movement’s formative years is signifi-

cant in its retelling of an important social movement account of carceral collaboration. In what fol-

lows, findings reveal how feminist demands for law enforcement response and the pursuit of

collaboration result in paradoxical and perilous outcomes easily obscured by the luster of success.

The study also provides broader insights into the annexation of civil society into the carceral sphere,

suggesting civil society’s constitutive role in the construction of the carceral state, beyond merely pas-

sive concessions to the machinations of law enforcement. These lessons are not only important in

our understanding of social movements and their role in carceral expansion but also serve as a cau-

tionary tale for progressive social movements facing off against today’s punitive state. As legal theo-

rists Brown and Halley (2002) warn, rights-based success can paradoxically transform social

movement victors into unwitting agents of the state. With these forms of contentious politics, “once

you win, you are the state” (p. 10).

CARCERAL CREEP

I use the term carceral creep to suggest the incremental and often imperceptible advance of carceral

forces that led to the eventual domination of crime control within a feminist social movement field

that was once almost devoid of its presence. As this study illustrates, the process (see Table 1), as it

advanced through stages of contestation,collaboration,hybridization,replication,occupation, and subor-

dination, was not imposed by a carceral leviathan. Rather, this progressive social movement employed

a variety of protest tactics and strategies to demand law enforcement protections and punishments in

2 The dynamics of demobilization and cooptation are central to debates regarding conservative trends within feminist social move-

ments. See Frazier (2013) for her analysis of neoliberalism’s effects on feminist movements, critical to larger scholarship on femi-

nism but not specific to debates on carceral feminism.

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the face of police unresponsiveness. Strategies of engagement recruited law enforcement (through a

continuum of coercion, invitation, and subterfuge) into anti-domestic violence activities they had pre-

viously refused. Rather than following a conventional linear social movement narrative of successful

demands leading to desired policy outcomes, this process was marked by political dilemmas and con-

tradictory consequences. The outcomes that characterize the carceral creep are not only the result of

pro-criminalization strategies in the midst of an unprecedented build-up of carceral force, but also the

outcome of strategies that ultimately failed to recognize the powers of the state and the perils of its

punitive arm.

The anti-domestic violence movement began with familiar strategies of contestation, defining the

contentious activities that social movements often engage vis-a-vis state or other targets that employ

tactics and strategies well documented in social movement scholarship (McAdam [1982] 1999;

Tarrow 1998). The emerging anti-domestic violence social movement made informal demands for

police to protect victims of relationship violence and forged localized collaborative relationships with

“friendly” officers and prosecutors.

This study reveals how early initiatives to more strategically engage law enforcement took the

form of organizational innovations aimed expressly at establishing lasting collaborative ties between

domestic violence advocates and local state institutions of crime control. Early leaders, cognizant of

the subversive nature of initial contacts with movement targets, grounded their success in reliance on

Table 1. The Carceral Creep

Mechanism Brief Description

Relationship of Social Movement/Civil Society

to Carceral State

Contestation Initial form of contentious engagement be-

tween social movement actors/institu-

tions and those of law enforcement

(informal demands; protests; one-on-one

relationships with “friendly” police)

No ties (or informal, localized ties)

Collaboration Social movement demand for new organiza-

tional forms join domestic violence advo-

cates with law enforcement; resulting in

formalized collaborative relationships

Emerging collaborative ties (within new

organizational forms); feminist forces

retain subversive forms of control

Hybridization As collaborative ties become institutional-

ized within new organizational forms,

boundaries between civil society and law

enforcement blur

Collaborative ties strengthen; distinc-

tions between civil society and carceral

state blur (hybridize)

Replication Organizational forms are replicated across

localities; mechanisms to maintain subver-

sive feminist control are not part of repli-

cated models

Feminist civil society autonomy and con-

trol erodes as hybridized forms

replicate

Occupation As hybridized organizational forms replicate,

the social movement ﬁeld is increasingly

occupied by hybridized forms controlled

by law enforcement actors and

organizations

Feminist civil society power and pres-

ence diminishes; carceral power and

presence escalates

Subordination Social movement ﬁeld is dominated by law

enforcement agenda, aims, actors and

institutions

Feminist civil society in a position of sub-

ordination to the carceral state

The Carceral Creep 255

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concealing covert feminist goals and strategies under the overt guise of a collaborative organizational

structure. The three organizational forms featured in this study—pluralist coalitions, victim witness

programs, and the Coordinated Community Response—were each deployed by feminist movement

leaders to initiate collaborative relationships between domestic violence advocates and law enforce-

ment. Each also relied upon specific subversive strategies to maintain feminist control over these new

relationships with the state.

Over time, ongoing and sustained collaboration diffused boundaries between the formerly autono-

mous spaces of civil society and the carceral state, resulting in a hybridization of these two spheres.

Hybridization weakened the autonomy and integrity of the social movement, enhancing its vulner-

abilities to the domination of the criminal justice system. The cumulative impact of hybridized organi-

zational spaces multiplied with the rapid replication of organizational innovations. Amenable to an

expanding agenda of crime control, these strategies were reproduced in forms that aligned with car-

ceral aims while suppressing or omitting the subversive feminist goals and mechanisms upon which

they had originally relied. Replication also multiplied the institutional presence of law enforcement

into a social movement field once almost exclusively made up of civil society actors and institutions,

leading to the increasing occupation of the developing social movement field by carceral entities.

As a result, the carceral creep served to consolidate a diverse and complementary set of hybridized

spaces that constituted a constructive force behind new forms of criminal justice actors and institu-

tions. Through a process that began with successful claims-making, a once subversive feminist social

movement succumbed to eventual subordination to the criminal justice system, through the develop-

ment and diffusion of organizational forms that it had helped to create. The success of the anti-

violence social movement eventually led to its unintended opposite, that is, the submission of the so-

cial movement in its feminist civil society form to the domination of a masculinist punitive state.

METHODS AND DATA

This historical case study (George and Bennett 2005) is based on archival data and 60 semi-structured

interviews with key anti-domestic violence social movement leaders, legislative actors, and law enforce-

ment personnel active in or closely familiar with the pursuit of criminalization strategies during the for-

mative period of the contemporary movement. Selection of initial informants was based upon insider

knowledge of key social movement leaders and references in the literature. Subsequent informant re-

cruitment followed from initial interviews and archival data pointing to other influential social move-

ment actors. Interview data was supplemented by and contrasted with archival materials related to the

anti-domestic violence social movement or criminal legal policy during the formative period. This

includes documentation on litigation, legislation and other policy-making regarding crime control pol-

icy related to domestic violence, anti-violence social movement ephemera, and media.

THREE STRATEGIES OF CARCERAL ENGAGEMENT AND COLLABORATION

Historical Context

A latecomer in the contemporary women’s movement, the U.S. anti-domestic violence movement or

the “battered women’s movement” began in 1973 with the emergence of crisis lines focusing on do-

mestic violence, followed by the opening of the first specific domestic violence shelter in St. Paul,

Minnesota, the following year. The nascent anti-domestic violence movement faced a criminal justice

system that largely refused to recognize domestic violence as a crime. Within a decade, dramatic pol-

icy changes swept the country. By 1984, 49 states and the District of Columbia had enacted some

form of legislation to provide legal remedies for domestic violence (Zorza 1992).

While police responsiveness to domestic violence was a concern for early social movement acti-

vists, it was only one arena in an emergent field grappling with larger questions of gender inequality

and the radical reexamination of private versus public spheres. The formative period of the feminist

anti-domestic violence throughout the 1970s was also characterized by battles over whether or not to

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pursue strategies and resources specifically tied to law enforcement, primarily available at the federal

level

(Schechter 1982). The anti-rape movement that pre-dated the battered women’s movement

Table 2. Three Feminist Anti-Domestic Violence Strategies to Engage the Carceral State

Feminist Anti-Domestic Violence (DV) Strategy

Lawsuit against Oakland

Police Department

San Francisco Victim

Witness

Community Coordinated

Response Duluth, MN

Mechanism for Criminal

Justice Engagement

Litigation - Legal Aid

lawsuit against

OPD based on fail-

ure to protect bat-

tered women

Embeddedness -

Embed pro-victim

advocates inside

prosecutor’s ofﬁce

Coordination - Link

advocates and law

enforcement in coor-

dinated structures

and activities

Resulting Organizational

Form

Pluralist Coalition -

Coalition of social

movement actors

and law enforce-

ment form to en-

force terms of

comprehensive set-

tlement decree

Victim Witness -

Victim witness ofﬁce

established within

prosecutor’s ofﬁces

for support of DV

victims and promo-

tion of successful

prosecution

Community

Coordinated

Response joins DV

advocates and law

enforcement in struc-

ture facilitating com-

mon meetings,

agenda, goals and

activities

Initial Form of Feminist

Control

Strong Facilitation -

Feminist facilitation

of coalition meet-

ings to pressure

compliance with

terms won through

successful litigation

Inﬁltration - Covert

feminist agenda

served by inﬁltrating

prosecutor’s ofﬁce;

facilitated by “good

cop” role vis-a-vis

more adversarial out-

side feminist group

Oversight - Covert fem-

inist control main-

tained through a

feminist lead um-

brella organization

managing the over-

arching collaborative

structure

Gender/Race/ Class

Trope

Everywoman -

Championed the

“everywoman” ar-

gument, i.e., “every

woman can be a

victim” regardless

of race and class;

gender is sole cate-

gory of discrimina-

tion in Equal

Protection Cause

claim

Over-representation in

the Criminal Justice

System - “Poor peo-

ple use systems for

help” - focus on vic-

tims, not perpetrators -

provides gender, race

and class justiﬁcation

for enhancing law en-

forcement

responsiveness

Disproportionate

Incarceration of Men

of Color - Concerns

over overrepresenta-

tion of Native

American male per-

petrators (underrep-

resentation of white

males) justiﬁes turn

to mandatory arrest

policies to boost ar-

rest of white men

3 The preponderance of federal funds available for domestic violence programs was funneled through the Law Enforcement

Assistance Administration (LEAA), a branch of the Department of Justice established under Nixon. Under Carter, a $3 million

initiative emerged in the late 1970s to support non-profit organizations in the joint project of improving law enforcement

responses to victims of gender-based violence (Tierney 1982). By 1980, the final year of the LEAA, grants to battered women’s

programs amounted to $5 million. Despite widespread opposition to LEAA involvement, at least 10% of domestic violence pro-

grams accepted LEAA funding (Gottschalk 2006).

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cautioned against facile ties with the state, generally, and law enforcement, in particular (Bevacqua

2000;Schechter 1982;Thuma 2015;Whittier 2018). Beginning with crisis lines and local battered

women’s shelters emerging in the mid-1970s, many early relationships with law enforcement

stemmed from efforts to address safety for individual battered women or for the protection of shelter

personnel rather than representing a more overt political strategy.

Social movement entrepreneurs in California and Minnesota were among the first to seek more

systematic strategies to mobilize law enforcement responses beyond goodwill efforts at the level of in-

dividual actors. By 1980, three successful social movement strategies gaining law enforcement partici-

pation in the protection of battered women emerged within these two states, resulting in important

and enduring organizational forms: pluralist coalitions, victim witness programs, and the Community

Coordinated Response (see Table 2).

Litigating Police Protection for Battered Women: Oakland’s Scott v. Hart

Among the initial significant challenges to law enforcement was the first major lawsuit citing failure

to protect battered women. In November 1976, four women attorneys at Oakland’s Legal Aid Office

filed the nation’s first significant domestic violence lawsuit, Scott v. Hart, against the City of Oakland

and local police for failure to protect battered women. Litigation was then a familiar mechanism for

contesting the state, buoyed by civil rights successes and legal aid organizations and led by young, en-

ergetic attorneys eager to create new opportunities to push for high impact litigation (Sarat and

Scheingold 2006).

Eva Jefferson Paterson, an African-American attorney, and Pauline Gee, an Asian- American attor-

ney, were two recently graduated lawyers, part of a new cohort of women attorneys in a field still

strongly dominated by white men. Both women worked together at Legal Aid of Alameda County on

East 88th Street in the heart of East Oakland, an impoverished section of the city. Almost all of the

clients at the 88th Street office were African-American. And many were battered women, although

the problem of battering had not yet risen to the level of public recognition. The situation in

Oakland was similar to that in many other parts of the country. Police called to intervene in domestic

violence did little to stop the violence. Oakland Police were guided by an explicit “avoid arrest” policy

in matters of family violence, a policy aimed at avoiding undue embarrassment of perpetrators of vio-

lence or fracturing a yet intact family. Official police references to the tender dynamics of gender and

family psychology would soon become public record.

Battered women who wanted to take action were sent by the police to the offices of Legal Aid to

handle what the police considered a civil matter. At that time, protective orders were granted only to

married women who wanted a divorce. Those who were unmarried or uninterested in divorce had no

civil recourse and were thus shuttled back to the Oakland Police by Legal Aid to handle violence as a

criminal matter. After all, assault and battery were on the books as a crime. The Oakland police, how-

ever, still considered assault and battery among intimates as a civil matter. A copy of the Oakland

Police protocol on family violence stating the same was used as evidence in the lawsuit.

The Legal Aid office participated in this legal Catch-22 for a number of years, pausing to take

more serious notice only when an office administrator, a future plaintiff in the lawsuit, showed up to

work in sunglasses, covering up injuries that she eventually revealed were perpetrated by her husband,

a man the attorneys never suspected would strike his wife. The employee explained to office attor-

neys what domestic violence and the unresponsive public and legal system meant to her as a battered

African-American woman. Her situation encouraged the attorneys to contest both the Oakland

Police and the City of Oakland; the latter defendant was added as a strategy to force city funds to-

wards the building of a battered women’s shelter.

Over the next year, the lawyers gathered three other plaintiffs and sued as a “class of married and

unmarried women in Oakland, California,” women who received inadequate or no protection from

the police (Gee 1983:556). The primary argument was based on the Equal Protection Clause of the

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Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1871. The issue of race was dropped from the

case even though all plaintiffs were African American women.

Support for a lawsuit increasing police powers, however, proved to be problematic for these civil

rights attorneys. Gee, a former student at Berkeley, had witnessed the police tear gassing student pro-

testers and considered herself a radical proponent of racial justice. As Gee explained:

Part of our problem with suing the police department to enforce more arrests was we recog-

nized that it would have an adverse effect in terms of who are the men that are going to be

arrested, low-income Black men. We were concerned about the civil rights aspects of the bat-

terer, partly because in the 70s, this is the days of the Black Panther, a lot of police brutality, a

lot of already hostile feelings between the police department and the Black community. And

originally we both saw it as more of a racial issue because the victims that were coming in our

ofﬁce were primarily Black women, and so we thought maybe the police had a racist attitude

towards low-income African-American victims and that that was the reason that they weren’t

enforcing the arrest or enforcing the law essentially.

The news of the lawsuit also brought greater public attention to Legal Aid. Callers to Legal Aid

offices were no longer just from low-income, African-American neighborhoods. Paterson described

her impressions of this as the “perfect case” to pursue her dream to “litigate under the 14th

Amendment under the Equal Protection Clause and to sue people who were discriminating against

black people.” However, the issue of race turned out to be vexed, as white women from the affluent

Oakland Hills began to call with similar complaints of inadequate police response. Paterson and Gee

began to formulate a legal and political argument focusing on gender discrimination rather than one

based on race and gender. The switch from a race/class/gender analysis to one based on gender

alone also facilitated the use of the Equal Protection Clause, one that would respond more easily to a

single category of discrimination than to the real world complexities of intersectional identities. The

“everywoman” argument insisting that “every woman can be a victim” of gender-based violence re-

gardless of race, class, or other categories would remain a fixture of the movement over the next four

decades (Richie 2012).

In November 1979, the suit was settled with a comprehensive settlement decree. It prohibited the

“arrest avoidance” policy that informed police practice regarding domestic violence and mandated

the Oakland police treat domestic assaults as they would any other crime. The decree also dictated

that the police department document domestic violence calls and arrest statistics and establish a mon-

itoring team to review compliance. Additionally, according to what Gee saw as the “holistic” goals of

the suit beyond the scope of policing, the City of Oakland agreed to fund the first shelter in the San

Francisco East Bay. While the comprehensive settlement decree mandated these policy changes, the

attorneys also understood the precarity of implementation. Assurance of success depended upon

maintaining a strong arm of feminism in an ongoing struggle with a recalcitrant criminal justice

system.

Soon after the negotiation of the comprehensive settlement consent decree, Gee organized a plu-

ralist coalition to ensure that the gains of the decree would be sustained in Oakland’s Alameda

County, while Paterson lent her skills and leveraging power to activities across the bay in San

Francisco. Gee set up the Alameda County Coalition against Domestic Violence, bringing together

representatives from the police department, the District Attorney’s office, the Public Defender’s of-

fice, shelter staff, and other community members. For the next eight years, Gee staffed the Coalition,

crafting Oakland Police Department domestic violence protocol and conducting weekly police train-

ings. She was also appointed to California’s Police Officer’s Standards and Training Commission

(POST) where she contributed to the development of statewide domestic violence training protocol.

The policies developed locally in Oakland and expanded through POST trainings provided a prece-

dent leading to the 1983 passage of SB 1472 that created and enforced statewide police trainings.

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Embedding Advocacy within the State: The San Francisco Victim Witness Program

In San Francisco, social movement leaders leveraged the successes of litigious action across the bay in

Oakland and sought further gains by establishing the first model victim witness program in 1980.

While victim witness programs highlighting victim-targeted advocacy within prosecutorial offices

were also emerging in other arenas of criminal prosecution, they were still relatively unknown by

1980 with no other model for domestic violence cases.

The Family Violence Project in San Francisco was founded in 1979 by local feminists already

savvy in governmental politics through leadership in such institutions as California’s Department of

Substance Abuse and the local Commission on the Status of Women. From the beginning, the

Project had its eye on large-scale systems change. Unlike shelters or legal advocacy programs that

dominated the social movement field especially in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Family Violence

Project was not committed to serving a local client base of women seeking safety through shelter or

civil legal actions. Rather, it was organized to provide flexible advocacy or policy functions that could

serve a broader movement mission. The program immediately situated itself within the criminal jus-

tice system, responsive to women victims of domestic violence or “victim-witnesses,” in the parlance

of criminal prosecution.

The Family Violence Project was the nation’s first publicly visible program to experiment with a

victim witness model specifically addressing domestic violence as a crime. Its founders successfully

vied for new LEAA funding open to domestic violence, aware of incendiary social movement critiques

but eager to take advantage of its opportunities. Despite ambivalence, at least among some of the

new staff recruited for the Family Violence Project, the orientation towards systems change work and

the salience of the criminal justice system as a new institutional target motivated them not only to

“take on” the system but to situate themselves within its very walls. Sue Martin, the project’s coordi-

nator recalled, “I was mixed if I wanted to work within the institutions because it was clearly going to

be an inside the institutions job because it was part of the District Attorney’s Office.” But she was also

enthusiastic about the prospects of a program that could “basically [change] the way the justice sys-

tem was responding to domestic violence.”

While the Family Violence Project had no model to guide them, they moved forward with a sense

of confidence and a community of Bay Area feminists who were not new to the arena of police re-

form. Eva Jefferson Paterson across the bay in Oakland had successfully taken on the Oakland Police

Department in the Scott v. Hart lawsuit. Del Martin, a long-time San Francisco lesbian activist who

had written an influential book on domestic violence, Battered Women (1976), had been involved in

San Francisco police reforms stemming back to days of widespread and public police brutality against

the gay and lesbian community. Mimi Silbert, a celebrated leader who was involved in local re-entry

programs for formerly incarcerated people, also lent her access to and knowledge of the San

Francisco police. Together, they formed the core of an emerging San Francisco-based feminist advo-

cacy group that named themselves the Coalition for Justice for Battered Women.

The formation of a victim witness program for battered women and the establishment of the

Family Violence Project within the physical space of the Hall of Justice, which housed the District

Attorney’s Office, required a strategy that could guide and justify a potentially troubling project.

Project staff informally conceptualized the arrangement in terms of “infiltration,” a contentious posi-

tioning which covered the pursuit of feminist control of this state institution under the mask of col-

laboration. As Sue Martin recalled:

It was like this little activist hub within the government, within a government agency. It was

more like we felt we were infiltrating. That was totally our view. We totally saw ourselves as

community organizers at that point. There wasn’t a model for it, but that was a way for us to

4 Santa Barbara was the actual home to the first domestic violence-related victim witness program, but it was established as a local

program, never recognized as a national model.

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figure out how to influence the DA’s office. Our goal was to change the system, so we figured

we had to be seen as part of the system. So we were...inside the system and then we kept orga-

nizing to create the domestic violence consortium, the Coalition for Justice for Battered

Women ...[as the] outside pressure on the police department.

Successful infiltration required finesse and subterfuge on the part of victim witness staff. Martin,

who directed the victim witness program, quietly observed police trainings and operations, gaining

knowledge of the internal culture of the Police Department, a task that the Family Violence Project

focused on for six months in preparation for what they believed to be deeper work towards systems

change. She quickly learned the social cues that could disarm an otherwise distrustful or hostile law

enforcement officer. Martin eventually became an inside “good cop,” offering to law enforcement her

wisdom on how to respond to the more unruly and menacing feminist adversary as embodied in the

Coalition for Justice for Battered Women. The Family Violence Project worked inside, while

Paterson and the Coalition for Justice for Battered Women pressured from the outside, threatening

to sue law enforcement if they did not comply. The success of the lawsuit against the Oakland Police

Department created a viable threat.

Learning from the inside of law enforcement contributed to a strategy that at least overtly aligned

with the culture of law enforcement. For one, the Family Violence Project came to hold the convic-

tion that promoting “domestic violence as a crime” would serve the goals of systems change. This

would also link an internal strategy that would resonate with law enforcement with the rising external

or public pre-occupation with crime. As Martin explained:

We felt that if domestic violence was seen as a crime that then it would be seen as a serious is-

sue, socially. So the reason for going the criminal justice route wasn’t necessarily because we

wanted to see guys in prison. It was much more that we wanted the social attitude to change

and if it started being seen as a crime, the social attitude would change; public attitude would

change.

Although Family Violence Project staff were aware of the racial implications of heightened arrest

strategies, they also recognized that poor women and women of color were disproportionately repre-

sented within this system; they thereby argued that the responsible position would be to direct their

energies towards the criminal justice system, one that victims of violence were encountering whether

they liked it or not, and one that poor women and women of color were disproportionately exposed

to, regardless of one’s political analysis of that situation. As founding Executive Director Esta Soler

recounted:

From an organizer’s point of view, it’s a lot easier to meet people where they’re at than to try

to create alternative institutions, which we also need to do. But we very much understood that

for every one person who was calling a shelter, thousands more people were going to call the

police department...Poor people call systems for help, and we know that.

The success of the insider strategy relied on the forging of a personal alliance between Project staff

and law enforcement. Close contact between Project leadership and certain key law enforcement offi-

cials occurred first under the cover of an infiltration strategy, but eventually through authentic bonds

of trust and camaraderie, lending more immediate access and legitimacy to the Family Violence

Project within a previously inhospitable criminal justice terrain. A relationship that started as contes-

tation quickly moved to a more authentic collaboration and the softening of the initial oppositional

stance of domestic violence advocates vis-a-vis law enforcement.

The new victim witness office embedded within the prosecutor’s office provided immediate

victim-centered support for a group that was still comprised almost exclusively of battered

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women. This included emotional support, education on the criminal process, ongoing advocacy

with criminal cases, community referrals, and access to victim compensation. Prosecutors, now

collaborators within the victim witness program, were more likely to pursue prosecution of do-

mestic violence, with rates of successful prosecution enhanced both by the willingness to prose-

cute cases and the cooperation of victims supported by the services of the victim witness

program.

Beyond the introduction of a pilot victim witness program, the Family Violence Project also pub-

lished national protocols guiding prosecution of domestic violence misdemeanors and felonies. A re-

port published in 1982 titled “Domestic Violence Felony Prosecution Protocol” was followed three

years later by one on misdemeanor prosecution. While Oakland’s litigation strategies strengthened lo-

cal police arrest protocols, San Francisco’s victim witness program produced guidelines for criminal

prosecution meant for a national audience.

Meanwhile, legal advocates were inspired by the successful lawsuit and others who were active

participants in the newly formed state-wide California Alliance Against Domestic Violence

(CAADV), a consortium of three regional alliances which worked together to move forward

statewide legislation, build upon local successes, and further enhance domestic violence-related

crime control measures. California advocates, with strong leadership by staff of the Family

Violence Project, worked together not only to demand SB 1472 but to write the legislation, us-

ing local protocol written with police as a template for the statewide bill. While members of the

Women of Color Caucus, as part of CAADV, raised questions regarding the disproportionate ra-

cial effects of pro-arrest policies on communities of color, the police training did not immedi-

ately elicit these concerns.

The bill moved from introduction to passage in six short months. In 1983, SB 1472 was the

nation’s first bill mandating police training on domestic violence. What followed was a closer knitting

together of advocates who would from then on be involved in police trainings throughout the state

and the eventual creation of special police units dedicated to domestic violence. The local success of

Oakland became the template for a statewide model of advocate and police collaboration, increasing

the engagement and attention of domestic violence advocates to the activities of policing, and pro-

ducing and reproducing relationships once adversarial to increasingly collaborative.

Formalizing Advocate-Law Enforcement Ties: Duluth’s Community Coordinated Response

Minnesota was known as the home of the first shelter explicitly created for victims of domestic vio-

lence. Women’s Advocates in St. Paul opened its doors to battered women in 1974 following a pat-

tern of crisis calls from women desperately seeking safety from violent partners. However, Minnesota

is better known as the home of the internationally celebrated Duluth Model and its Community

Coordinated Response.

Like the social movement leaders initiating the Family Violence Project, Ellen Pence, the founder

of the Duluth Model, was already familiar with governmental programs. She was a young lesbian fem-

inist rabble rouser, using her position within the Model Cities program to fight for affordable housing

for poor women of color and to initiate an internal feminist newsletter written in shorthand so only

the women administrative staff could read its contents.

Joining in the anti-domestic violence movement that had an early start in Minnesota’s Twin

Cities, Pence was interested in piloting a model program, one that would emulate the successes of

the civil rights movement and “take on patriarchy” one system at a time. The achievements of the

civil rights movement paved the way for a rights-based frame that demanded equal protection from

the state as a starting point for Pence’s project.

5 When California later introduced a “mandatory arrest” bill, the Women of Color Caucus, for the first time, unified against the en-

hancement of further penalties, writing a position statement opposing “mandatory arrest” and supporting an “encourage arrest”

option, which passed.

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We wanted to do just an institutional change project. We were going to start with the criminal

justice system and then go to the schools. Two years in the criminal justice system; two years

in education. It was going to be ten years. There was lots of talk about “psych” system and giv-

ing people a lot of drugs. We wanted to deal with that. Medical institutions. Faith communities.

Those were the ones we talked about. The reason why we focused in on the criminal justice

system was not because it was the biggest one to do, but because it was the easiest. One of the

reasons is that they were public agencies so you had a way to confront them. Who’s the agency

to go to in terms of medical institutions, faith communities? There wasn’t a vehicle for confron-

tation—especially with the history of the confrontation of the law. The civil rights movement

was a model for confrontation of the law. And the women’s movement followed that strategy,

saying that the system of protection should protect us, too.

Pence won a state-wide grant opportunity not for services, but explicitly for coordinated systems

change. Seeking out a city with a solidly established battered women’s shelter program that would

not be opposed to the introduction of a new project and a criminal justice system with some level of

openness to collaboration, she placed the project in the northern city of Duluth that had already

established cooperative relationships between the local shelter and law enforcement. The city had

also been jolted by a recent case in which a domestic violence victim killed her husband in a lurid yet

publicly sympathetic situation of self-defense. Shaken city advocates and law enforcement officials

were ready to welcome Pence’s proposed innovation.

The Community Coordinated Response was a casually written title for a document describing

their project and approach, but the title stuck. The Community Coordinated Response, or what

more familiarly became known as the CCR, rested on a deliberate, integrated and, most importantly,

advocate-led coordination between local advocates and law enforcement, all focused on one broad

goal, safety for women victims of domestic violence. It combined a service delivery model including

shelter, support groups, and a soon to be internationally recognized batterer intervention program co-

ordinated with law enforcement response, from policing to prosecution and probation.

Structurally, the Community Coordinated Response retained feminist social movement leadership

by creating an autonomous organization called the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP)

that took on an explicit management function beyond that of domestic violence advocates in the shel-

ter program. As Pence understood that domestic violence advocates alone were unlikely to sustain

the upper hand in power negotiations with law enforcement, she created another organizational struc-

ture focused on coordination and integration of systems change centered on the experiences and

needs of battered women. This original Community Coordinated Response employed a subversive

form of feminist oversight through the establishment of the umbrella organization, DAIP, as a central

coordinating body with the potential to trump the usual advantages of state control.

In 1981, one year after the establishment of the project, the Community Coordinated Response

initiated concrete domestic violence policy change by implementing one of the first mandatory arrest

policies in the country. The insistence that law enforcement take the crime of domestic violence seri-

ously had a strong racial justification. Although Duluth, at that time, was over 90 percent white,

Native Americans made up five percent of the local population and constituted an important, if mar-

ginalized, community within northern Minnesota. Discretionary arrests for domestic violence-related

offenses were said to disproportionately fall upon Native American men. Mandatory arrest, advocates

argued, would greatly reduce the level of disproportionality, not reducing Native American arrests,

but increasing the arrests of white men. Indeed, arrest records following the institutionalization of the

mandatory arrest policy resulted in a dramatic increase in overall arrests for domestic violence.

Notably, the arrests of whites rose from only 11 percent of total arrests for domestic violence to 80

percent within the first year (Paymar and Barnes 2007).

The success of the policy was based largely on the close relationships possible within a small, con-

centrated local community and the fine tuning of coordination within the confined parameters of the

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city’s advocacy community and the institutions of law enforcement. Although mandatory arrest had

been attempted in only one state-level setting at that time, passing in Oregon in 1979, Pence saw the

backlash of police response in Oregon as evidence of careless social movement actions. She argued

that relationships nurtured within Duluth’s Community Coordinated Response were meant to ensure

that such policies would be monitored jointly by law enforcement and the advocacy community,

rather than seen as an alien feminist imposition to be resisted at all cost. In fact, Minnesota passed a

state level bill to encourage arrest, not to mandate it, leaving such strong measures to local jurisdic-

tions. Control by feminist advocates, a fundamental component of the Community Coordinated

Response, would be held covertly within the frame of feminist oversight or central coordination of an

overtly collaborative institutional form.

FROM LOCAL INNOVATION TO NATIONAL REPLICATION: THE DECLINE OF

FEMINIST CONTROL

Autonomy to Hybridization: The Joining of Civil Society and the Carceral State

The success of each of these strategies generated a sequence of pro-criminalization policies based

upon and strengthening the collaborative relationship of feminist social movement with that of law

enforcement. In order to guarantee the enforcement of the comprehensive settlement decree, one of

the litigating attorneys became a primary trainer of the Oakland Police and elevated her position to

California’s POST Commission. Growing influence led to the 1983 passage of SB 1472, which man-

dated statewide police trainings and served as a model for other states. The advocates at San

Francisco’s victim witness program forged their pilot program and then promoted it as a national

model for misdemeanor and felony criminal prosecution of domestic violence. Proponents of the

Community Coordinated Response joined with local law enforcement to implement a mandatory ar-

rest policy that inspired similar policies nationally.

These close collaborative relationships prodded police and prosecutors toward renewed roles as

pro-victim advocates; but they also transformed feminist social movement actors into active agents of

the carceral state. As the advocate-law enforcement divide blurred, so did the boundaries between

civil society and criminal justice system contained within these new organizational forms. The hybrid-

ization of the local pluralist coalition, victim witness program, and Community Coordinated

Response set the stage for a broad diffusion of diverse institutions that held in common what had

once been distinct identities, roles, and aims across the divide of civil society and the punitive state.

They Weren’t “Sisters”: Replication and the Advance of Carceral Occupation

The success of each of these organizational innovations and their impressive policy outcomes spurred

widespread public interest, particularly as the issue of domestic violence achieved greater legibility

and the legislative appetite for pro-victim and pro-criminalization policies grew. This was occurring

during a time of more inflamed concerns about crime, stoked by conservative political forces and

affirmed by feminists who rallied behind the call for tough–on-crime measures. Feminist forces, their

success now tied more tightly to the fortunes of carceral expansion, lost much of their original auton-

omy as well as critical discernment regarding the consequences of this new partnership. Skillfully

crafted, remarkably effective, and aligned with the rapid forward movement of the policies of mass in-

carceration, each of these models found eager public audiences, keen on replication.

While not the first public interest litigation to address domestic violence, Scott vs. Hart prompted

similar actions across the nation. The lawsuit served as a model for successful litigation, buttressed by

a similar victory in New York City with Bruno v. Codd which was initiated only days after that in

Oakland. The success of Scott v. Hart fueled feminist confidence in their ability to achieve systems

change. It also sent law enforcement a clear message that protocols exempting domestic violence

from public response faced formidable challenges, accompanied by significant political and financial

consequences.

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Gee, of Oakland’s Legal Aid, led the newly formed pluralist coalition, the Alameda County

Coalition against Domestic Violence, to secure the gains promised by the comprehensive settlement

decree. While such a coalition was not unique in the wake of civil rights and women’s rights wins, it

represented the way in which the formative anti-domestic violence movement sought to muscle im-

plementation through invitation and pressures to comply to a social movement agenda. It also dem-

onstrated how, upon success, a fairly aggressive litigation strategy immediately invoked a softer

collaborative organizational form in order to ensure that the winning terms would translate into last-

ing policy change.

The highly publicized victory of Oakland’s Scott vs. Hart sent a political boost across the bay, forti-

fying the local conditions under which the San Francisco victim witness program was initiated.

Envisioned as a national model from its onset, the program founders also took advantage of new

LEAA domestic violence funding that resulted, in part, from federal research identifying lack of victim

support as a key reason for failed prosecution (Cannavale 1976).

Family Violence Project’s victim witness program legitimized close advocacy ties between civil so-

ciety and law enforcement by embedding feminist social movement actors as partners within the

physical and institutional boundaries of the criminal justice system. The subversive infiltration strat-

egy of the Family Violence Project and the outside pressure from the Coalition for Justice for

Battered Women, bolstered by the more overtly contentious success of Scott vs. Hart, served as an ex-

ample of covert and multi-pronged organizing strategies. However, with replication, these subversive

strategies were not disseminated.

Victim witness programs based upon San Francisco’s pilot rapidly replicated across the country.

Devoid of explicit mechanisms for feminist control and embedded within the institutional constraints

of the criminal justice system, this model easily devolved into one vulnerable to the domination of

law enforcement. As national domestic violence leader, Donna Medley, explained:

[T]he [criminal justice] money was there. However, the fact that victim witness was now be-

coming part of federal funding was pretty big because that was...soft money. There wasn’t a

gun in the whole funding package. This was like this softening of law enforcement which also

seemed like a good thing. What happened...was that [there] was steady pressure to be

coopted by the DA’s. Over time, people who are in victim witness were the bottom of the to-

tem pole, particularly in DA’s offices, where it’s very hierarchical and attorneys are gods. So vic-

tim witness was there to serve. And [the DA’s] can hire the people into victim witness...And

the ones that they hired, a lot of times they wanted to please the attorneys. You know... the

civil servants...they’re good law enforcement backers and they cared about these victims. But

they weren’t “sisters.”

For the Community Coordinated Response, the success and the degree to which the project was

known, the charisma of its proponents and rising public interest in the issue of domestic violence

quickly garnered national media attention. The concept of the Community Coordinated Response,

mandatory arrest and the model featuring such a strong criminal justice component disseminated na-

tionally and globally with Duluth as its training hub. The “community” in the Community

Coordinated Response became circumscribed to the joining of domestic violence agencies to law en-

forcement. The name offered a grassroots patina to the model while crowding out alternative formu-

lations of community engagement.

Throughout regions adopting new policies to combat domestic violence, any semblance of success

required that advocates turn their attention to law enforcement, emulating the Duluth Model, regard-

less of the local political context. The autonomous organization, DAIP, critical to the success of the

Duluth example, was not identified as a necessary component of the overall Community

Coordinated Response model, nor was the subversive nature of DAIP strategies.

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Rather, a reduced version of that model, that is, domestic violence advocates in coordination with

law enforcement and, to a lesser extent, other community partners, left those implementing the

model vulnerable to the power imbalances inherent in any community partnership with the criminal

justice system. Despite intentions to uphold feminist control vis-a-vis law enforcement, its replication

legitimated and enhanced carceral powers.

Reflecting on the results of widespread dissemination of the Community Coordinated Response,

Denise Gamache, an early proponent of the model, explained:

[The Community Coordinated Response] got ... picked up and bastardized in different ways.

[One person] picked [it] up and ... promoted a prosecutor-led council...And [another]...got

a huge grant to promote judge-led councils, which I think are useless ... . It can really go

wrong when you have basically devolved into a council that gets together under the judge ...

or people pick up the structure without picking up the priorities ... .What are the priorities

and the goal of this actual coordination? It’s not just to quote “coordinate.” How are you look-

ing at how this is impacting victims ... . How is it promoting some sort of offender account-

ability? What’s the impact on children? What’s the impact on marginalized communities? I

mean there’s all of these things that should be what the goals are about. And if it gets lost ...

you know, it’s really the advocacy programs’ roles to keep those front and center. And some-

times they’re successful and sometimes they’re not. And sometimes they’re drowned out or

squeezed out.

Absent the subversive feminist mechanisms of control that characterized the early innovations,

replication set the stage for the rapid expansion of hybridized law enforcement entities into the devel-

oping social movement field. The occupation by organizations dominated by law enforcement and

the carceral creep’s eventual denouement, hastened by the galvanizing of the carceral state, eventually

resulted in the subordination of feminist forces to the carceral actors and institutions that were ini-

tially of their making.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

This article contributes new findings and theoretical insights regarding feminist social movements

and their relationship to carceral expansion. While the advance of neoliberalism hastened the erosion

of emancipatory feminist origins, this study demonstrates that key social movement choices made

earlier in the movement’s formation set the conditions for a pro- criminalization strategy. Data from

the anti-violence movement’s first decade reveal how early feminist forces opened with conventional

social movement strategies to counter police impunity. However, the entrepreneurial creation of new

organizational forms figured significantly in the early anti-domestic violence movement. The three or-

ganizational forms discussed in this article employed different mechanisms of engagement, institu-

tional arrangements between advocates and law enforcement, and subversive forms of feminist

control. But their common aim was to create and maintain lasting collaborative relationships with law

enforcement. Far from the familiar narrative of coercive carceral impositions into the sphere of civil

society, this study illustrates how civil society also initiated demands for carceral expansion from a pu-

nitive state resistant to partnership.

Focused on the motivations and perceptions of early feminist leaders in their active pursuit of pro-

criminalization policies, the study reveals how and why politically progressive activists chose a puz-

zling course. Through the use of oppositional strategies and the incorporation of organizational prac-

tices and structures that covertly offered feminist advantage, early movement leaders claimed a sense

of control that obfuscated incremental losses over the next decades. Early leaders were politically pro-

gressive and astute; many identified with or were strongly influenced by radical racial justice ideolo-

gies. They were well aware of the race and class perils of enhanced policing and included women of

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color in strong positions of leadership who wrestled with seeming contradictions. However, this study

demonstrates how feminist endorsement of these strategies ultimately relied upon racial equity argu-

ments to justify collaboration with law enforcement. Indeed, three different arguments motivated by

considerations of race, gender, and class (see Table 2) enhanced rather than condemned the embrace

of pro-criminalization strategies.

This study also explains the endurance of carceral feminism and the diminution of feminism’s

power despite the movement’s apparent vigor. The developments that unfolded reveal the dynamics

through which contestation and success against state targets can quickly transform today’s laudatory

victories into the conditions for tomorrow’s less evident defeats. The process I call the carceral creep

(see Table 1) demonstrates how each successful demand for criminalization enhanced the power of

the criminal justice system through strategies that also changed the constitution of the social move-

ment field. Each advance weakened feminist autonomy, diminishing its power and presence within a

field increasingly occupied by hybrid institutions that have come to represent the hallmark of social

movement success. The eventual construction of carceral feminism can be understood as an unwit-

ting result of an emerging feminist leadership that believed (and may continue to believe) that it can

maintain feminist control and a subversive agenda, even as the carceral creep has dominated and

overtaken the movement.

The consequences of these social movement choices extend beyond the confines of carceral

feminism. By inviting carceral actors into new hybrid organizational forms, these strategies con-

tributed to the architecture undergirding the construction of the expanding punitive state.

Collaborative strategies legitimizing the key role of the criminal justice system and their accom-

panying gender, race, and class justifications forged the foundations for enduring frames and stra-

tegic directions that bolstered public support for pro-criminalization legislation and muted

feminist opposition to carceral expansion. This narrative continued for at least three decades, fix-

ing the feminist gaze on the promise of carceral protections at the expense of more emancipa-

tory movement directions.

Despite today’s critique of carceral feminism, demands for crime legislation to curb violence tar-

geting oppressed groups such as LGBTQ communities and religious minorities have readily adopted

the pro-criminalization frame promoted by feminist anti-violence strategies (Jenness and Grattet

2001;Spade 2015). Establishment of a Community Coordinated Response is now a familiar criterion

for federal funding and has been implemented within jurisdictions in all 50 states and 13 countries

abroad (Gondolf 2010). The most recent reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in

2013 again tied federal funding for new campus sexual violence programming to participation in a

Community Coordinated Response.

Renewed attention to familiar yet persisting manifestations of gender inequality in the form

of sexual harassment and assault are re-energizing public demands for both culture change and

policy response. The compulsion for punitive responses tied to the carceral state remains.

However, public recognition of the excesses of criminalization and growing awareness of the

complicity of feminist movements have begun to shift the ground. As conventional anti-violence

forums have begun to reflect on the consequences of decades of pro-criminalization strategies

and legislation, policies reversing prior carceral mandates have begun to pass; new opportunities

for innovative strategies are emerging. Talk of dismantling the ties between advocacy groups and

law enforcement are now commonplace among conventional anti-violence providers alongside

once suppressed critiques of the movement’s pro-criminalization legacy. Options for radical alter-

native strategies, such as transformative justice and restorative justice, championed largely by

women of color at the peripheries of the feminist anti-violence movement, have moved to the

forefront. As the social movement’s gaze averts from the carceral state, new emancipatory possi-

bilities have been raised, some of which recast visions from the dawn of this contemporary

movement.

The Carceral Creep 267

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