In her book The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption, N. Jones (2018), an African American, feminist, criminology scholar, reports on a five-year ethnographic study she conducted of San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood. “The Chosen Ones is written from the perspective of Black men who see the ghosts of the destruction they brought to their neighborhoods as young boys and who now want to make good” (p. 86). Jones identifies the confusing and contradictory messages Black men confront about Black masculinity while trying to both “find a new place in their families and in their neighborhood” and redefine “in word and deed what it means to be a man worthy of a measure of respect that is not solely rooted in physical dominance” (p. 16). Indeed, these men must negotiate this while the criminal legal system (CLS) is “organized around the bodies of Black men” (p. 27).
Feminist theory, overall, “is a woman-centered description and explanation of human experience and the social world. It asserts that gender governs every aspect of personal and social life” (Danner, 1991, p. 51). Yet it is important to recognize there are variations of feminisms. “The subject of feminism is by no means static or consensual but rather is a field of arguments, disagreements, transformations, and problematizations that vary over time” (Martinez, 2018, p. 327). For example, there are Marxist, socialist, liberal, radical, postmodernist, intersectional, Black, African American, Chicana, Asian American, Indigenous, Native American, Queer, Spanish, Brazilian, French, second wave, third wave, institutional, para-institutional, and many other feminisms and feminists. Crossley’s 2017 book, Finding Feminism: Millennial Activists and the Unfinished Gender Revolution, is a study of diverse millennial feminist activists (e.g., racial diversity, women, men, queer, trans, etc.) on three U.S. college campuses, identifying and documenting a range of young activist women and men engaged in intersectional feminism, and challenging the enactments of privilege and discrimination in the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, and other inequalities.
Thus, not all feminists think alike. On the other hand, there is a common thread among feminists: Gender inequality and discrimination exist, are disproportionately experienced by and perpetrated against girls and women, and need to be challenged. Increasingly, feminists have embraced hooks’s (1984) perspective that fighting sexism cannot be achieved without also fighting racism, classism, homophobia, and so on. Despite the differences between some of the “feminisms,” they all push to rethink and improve women’s, girls’, and gender-nonconforming individuals’ lives. Feminist changes may help men and boys, too; for example, feminism has been key in improving fathers’ roles in nurturing their children (Berton, Bureau, & Rist, 2017).
Criminology has often included the field of deviance whereby crime is deviant, but so are other instances of marginalized people acting and being out of culturally and often legally prescribed spaces. Wodda and Panfil (2018) document sex-negativity, “a perspective that treats any form of sexuality aside from heterosexual marital sex as deviant and abnormal,” as a method practiced by both early CLS practitioners and criminologists preoccupied with women and girls’ sexuality” (p. 583). Thus, Wodda and Panfil advocate for moving toward sex-positive feminist criminology, which includes “positive notions of [sexual] desire, affirmative (or ‘yes means yes’) [sexual] consent, and concern for the well-being of self and others” (p. 589) and “recognizes the uniqueness of individual sexuality” (p. 590). Sex-positive feminist criminology is “more than merely endorsing the right to engage in (or not engage in) sexual behaviors. The kind of sex-positivity we support is structural—a way to think about sexuality, wanting, and desire in a way that encompasses a wealth of intersectional human experience” (p. 600).
An important and contested development in feminisms has been concern about the incongruency of advocating for more state-sanctioned punishment of perpetrators of gender-based abuses (GBAs, such as rape and intimate partner abuse) while many feminists, and particularly feminists of Color, have provided significant and realistic concerns about the sexist, racist, classist, and counterproductive police, court, and prison systems. Following World War II, and mostly in the 1960s through the 1990s, the liberal law-and-order era in the United States started whereby liberal social policies were “balanced” by implementing conservative CLS policies that resulted in more police, prisons, incarceration, and no one was more criminalized and targeted than people of Color, primarily African Americans (Bumiller, 2008; Mack & McCann, 2018; Murakawa, 2014; Thuma, 2014). Significantly, many scholars stress that liberal Democrats, such as President Bill Clinton, were central to the carceral and racist state (e.g., Middlemass, 2017; Murakawa, 2014; Stevenson, 2015). The resulting “racialized and gendered policies … not only fail to respond to the needs of those harmed, but also target and disenfranchise communities of color” (Mack & McCann, 2018, p. 331). To this end, in 2000, a number of well-known feminist criminologists of Color, including Angela Y. Davis and Beth Richie, formed INCITE!, a grassroots organization specifically designed to address these inconsistencies between advocating for victims of GBAs at the same time as addressing the violence perpetrated against people and communities of Color in and by the criminal legal system (see http://www.incite-national.org/page/about-incite).
Bumiller’s (2008) powerful book In an Abusive State convincingly documents how feminist campaigns against sexual violence “evolved in alliance with the state,” placing “cultural anxieties associated with sexual terror … on the public agenda, polarized gender- and race-based interests and fueled notions” (p. xv). Whittier (2016) identifies carceral feminism as “feminist activism aimed at increasing state enforcement against violence against women” (p. 792). Stated alternatively, carceral feminists ultimately favor the more official CLS “justice” responses to social justice responses; the latter are aimed at addressing structural problems that intersect with gender inequality, such as poverty and racism. Whittier stresses that it is unlikely anyone identifies as a carceral feminist, as “carceral feminism is a term of critique meant to point out the dangers of relying on the state’s punitive power to advance women’s liberation” (p. 792). Perhaps nowhere has carceral feminism played a larger role than in responses to sex trafficking, as carceral feminism is most heightened in cases of gender, sexuality, and the law (Bernstein, 2010, 2012), which will be addressed later in this book. Goodmark’s (2018) book Decriminalizing Domestic Violence provides a compelling analysis for how domestic violence laws are harmful not only to intimate partner abuse offenders but also to the victims, arguing that responses and policies be developed more through viewing this as a human rights, public health, community, and economic concern rather than a CLS concern. Collectively, in contrast to what has been identified as carceral feminism is abolitionist feminism or anti-carceral feminism, an approach initiated by INCITE!, which is increasing in support and referenced repeatedly in this book.
Women and Girls’ Invisibility
The title of this book was chosen to reflect the strong theme of invisibility in the three major areas covered in the book: (1) women and girls as offenders, (2) women and girls as victims, and (3) women professionals working in the CLS. Before the 1980s, the research on women, girls, and crime was scant, practically invisible. It was as if their victimizations, offending, and existence were