1. No coincidence: identifying unique causal factors in women’s incarceration

BL Shirelle always knew she would end up in the prison system. A Black, queer, gender non-conforming woman from Philadelphia, she remembers being policed for her appearance and identity from a young age. Shirelle was molested at 6 years old and started selling drugs when she was 13 years old to support herself and her family. From the second grade until she was 18, Shirelle was interviewed annually by researchers from Temple University, who would ask her questions about her home, family, experiences of violence, and encounters with drugs. She was first incarcerated at 18; after that, the researchers stopped calling. They no longer needed to study her once she was incarcerated, because their hypothesis had come to fruition: Shirelle’s experiences of abuse, trauma, and subsequent engagement in illegal activity had resulted in her incarceration. Shirelle has been incarcerated twice in the past ten years. Her parole finished in August 2020, and she is now living in Philadelphia with her family. She is a rapper and performing artist, as well as the Executive Director of Freer Records (formerly Die Jim Crow Records)—a record label for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists.

Shirelle’s case is not an anomaly, and although womenFootnote ¹ are the fastest growing prison population in North America (Ackerman et al. Reference Ackerman, Pahlke and MacInnes2019) they are criminalized and incarcerated in radically different contexts than men. While abolitionist theories focus centrally on the criminalization of men and boys (Davis Reference Davis2003, 24), the systematic incarceration of women and girls is often overlooked (Russell-Brown Reference Russell-Brown2004, 119).Footnote ² It is estimated that approximately 94 percent of women in certain prison populations have a history of physical or sexual abuse (American Civil Liberties Union 2011). Centering Shirelle’s story and her analysis from within the carceral system,Footnote ³ this paper argues that domestic violence against women and girls is an important socio-economic determinant of the incarceration of women. It is one of the preconditions for and predictors of criminalization and eventual incarceration of women that together create what I refer to as the Home to Prison Pipeline (HTPP).

This paper is by myself and BL Shirelle. I, Katie Clarke, write in the first person, and I wrote, edited, and researched the parts of this paper that are not BL’s words. I also recorded and transcribed BL’s contributions. I asked BL to be a co-author on this paper because having her name recognized in the creation of this work more accurately reflects the labor that she invested in sharing her story with me so that it might be shared beyond both of us. The stories she shared from within the HTPP are her decades-long lived experience, knowledge, and analysis. Having our names listed as co-authors is an attempt to recognize this experiential and lived authorship.

The HTPP is an operative system of carceral power that is not thoroughly examined in the field of prison studies and feminist philosophy. It is a crucial intervention into prison studies, as it addresses and names the compounding factors of abuse and violence that are established in the home and lead to women’s incarceration, particularly for Black women. The conceptualization of the HTPP and this paper are predicated by and expand upon Regina A. Arnold’s 1990 paper “Processes of Victimization and Criminalization of Black Women,” which identifies experiences of abuse as a strong predictor of women’s incarceration.

“Home” in the context of this work refers to a space so defined by capitalism, heteronormativity, and the gendered division of labor. The home is a complex and fraught space for Black women and women of color in particular, because systemic racism in health care, urban planning, and education often precludes Black women and girls’ access to mental health services and resources in the wake of domestic abuse (Arnold Reference Arnold1990, 158; hooks Reference hooks1982, 70; Javaid and Cole Reference Javaid and Cole2022).Footnote ^{4 ,} Footnote ⁵ As such, women and girls (disproportionately Black women and girls) who are traumatized by domestic abuse often turn to illegal activity as a source of relief, or a source of income that will allow them to leave an abusive home.

Drawing on Angela Davis’s analysis of the prison industrial complexFootnote ⁶ and expanding upon Michel Foucault’s notion of the carceral society, this paper explicitly links the effects of modern capitalism and associated state surveillance, women’s social and financial subjugation, white supremacy, domestic violence, and the incarceration of women, connecting theory and statistical evidence with BL Shirelle’s lived experience. Regina A. Arnold established “the existence of a systematic process of criminalization unique to women that magnifies the relationship between ongoing societal victimization and eventual entrapment in the criminal justice system” (Reference Arnold1990, 154). This paper builds on Arnold’s work and further examines the philosophical and sociological layers of violence that women experience in the HTPP.Footnote ⁷

This paper is also preceded by Malika Saada Saar, Rebecca Epstein, Lindsay Rosenthal, and Yasmin Vafa’s (Reference Saada, Malika, Rosenthal and Vafa2015) work on the “sexual abuse to prison pipeline.” However, this work is a more philosophical analysis of the underlying carceral society, referencing Foucault, Davis, and others alongside statistical analysis, and centering Shirelle’s story, while Saar et al.’s crucial research is a more directly statistical analysis.

In drawing attention to the role of institutional surveillance in the systemic criminalization of girls who are assaulted in their homes, my aim is to illustrate how, in the HTPP, gendered, racialized oppressions in carceral society are enacted through domestic violence in the home space; how carceral logic is embedded in intimate lives. For this reason, my analysis of the HTPP supports an abolitionist stance toward the prison industrial complex. Following Davis’s notion of prison abolition, the HTPP indicates that the current prison system as it stands cannot be reformed to create a system that is beneficial to society (Davis Reference Davis2003).Footnote ⁸

Mary E. Gilfus, a researcher for the Violence Against Women Network in the US, explains that “women’s resources for escaping and surviving abuse are so limited that they must depend on illegal activity for income. They are subjected to intensive law enforcement surveillance for behaviors labeled as criminal primarily for girls and women only” (Gilfus Reference Gilfus2002, 3). These medically recognized and predictable reactions to trauma are pathologized specifically when they appear in girls and women. Girls and women are expected to be passive, obedient, and compliant according to socially constructed Western gender norms—they are not given the space to react or rage. Instead of wondering if a girl who is acting out is traumatized, she is criminalized. This vicious cycle is especially prevalent for Black girls and women (Arnold Reference Arnold1990, 153). Arnold writes that “to be young, Black, poor, and female is to be in a high-risk category for victimization on many levels” (Reference Arnold1990, 156). Domestic violence and sexual assault are normalized within the home as tools of carceral power that keep girls subordinate to men, and women and girls’ traumatization serves as the occasion for their criminalization and incarceration. Sexual assault and rape are also used to imply the destruction of girls’ and women’s “purity” or “innocence,” marking them as disposable and suitable for criminalization under heteropatriarchy.

My perspective in this paper is nuanced by intersecting privileges of white, trans identity and having been socialized as a woman. I cannot do justice to all women’s, and especially not all Black women’s, experiences of trajectories towards the prison system in this paper. This work is a collaborative case study of Shirelle’s experience, informed by Shirelle’s own analysis of her experiences and their wider systemic implications, and supported by statistical analysis and carceral and feminist philosophy. As a white person who has never been incarcerated, my work in this field is from an extremely privileged standpoint. Speaking on prison justice and abolition, I am indebted to my co-author, and to Black feminist scholars who have been initiating and upholding this work for decades, including Angela Davis, Katheryn Russell-Brown, Hortense Spillers, Robyn Maynard, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Dorothy E. Roberts, to name just a few.

This paper is grounded in Shirelle’s lived experience and testimony. I will also draw on testimony from women incarcerated in Nova Scotia featured in the 2019 film Conviction, as well as the book Policing Black Lives by Montreal-based Black feminist writer, activist, and educator Robyn Maynard. This paper also makes use of a Foucauldian analysis of relations of power and systems of punishment and incarceration taken predominantly from Foucault’s 1975 work Discipline and Punish, as well as Foucault’s 1975–76 lectures at the Collège de France titled “The birth of racism” and “Society must be defended,” through Laura Ann Stoler’s work on imperial duress.

In order to illustrate the function of the HTPP, I will first discuss Foucault’s work on the eighteenth-century turn from systems of punishment toward surveillance and incarceration, and applications of his theories within the modern prison industrial complex. This context allows me to establish surveillance as a key aspect of the home, and the contradictions of the traditional home space as one forged through the violence of racial capitalism. The discussion of home surveillance leads into my and Shirelle’s shared analysis of domestic violence as a tool of surveillance and punishment within a larger carceral system, which is contextualized in section 6 by our discussion of the social geography of racial capitalism. In section 7, I bring Shirelle’s lived experience and the work of Black feminist scholars together to examine the concept of innocence and criminalization as it is specifically applied to Black women and girls in the HTPP. Finally, I conclude mine and Shirelle’s analysis with an overview of the structural oppression of the HTPP.

2. Carceral logic, the prison industrial complex, and racial capitalism

Though we tend to identify the carceral space as the prison, Foucault’s analysis of the historical transition in eighteenth-century France from a criminal punishment system based on torture and execution to one based on incarceration illustrates that the shift to “discipline” as the end and means of criminal punishment initiated the extension of techniques of control and surveillance to every sector of society. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes this transition as the formation of a “carceral archipelago”—a widespread network of institutions and disciplinary practices that operationalize carceral logic across societal planes. In her book Duress: Imperial durabilities in our time, Laura Ann Stoler writes that Foucault’s carceral archipelago was “a set of techniques for modern discipline that turned away from the spectacle of punishment to the isolation of the cell” (Stoler Reference Stoler2016, 297). In this sense, the logic of the carceral space is operative everywhere we are subject to mechanisms of control and discipline—schools, work, hospitals—where failure to conform increases vulnerability to criminal punishment and incarceration. For the purposes of this paper, I will use the term “carceral society” to reflect both the “archipelago” of institutions that enact carceral, disciplinary logic, as well as developing social attitudes that both stem from and influence those institutions. When discussing governing bodies and state decisions or laws, I will refer specifically to the “carceral state.”

The global capitalist economy—developed through colonialism and the slave trade—depends on a racial caste system and is specifically sustained to maintain white male power. Today, the capitalist economy functions primarily on the exploitation of underpaid, overworked Black and Brown people in service of wealthy consumers of the Global North (de Sousa Santos Reference de Sousa Santos2014, 6). Black women are among the most exploited workers: “Black women have had to navigate and at times confront competing, flawed, or incomplete narratives about their work ethic, family responsibilities, and overall value that influence decisions about what they should earn” (Frye Reference Frye2019). In this way, discrimination against Black women is built into capitalist systems that protect white supremacy over capital and power by mechanisms of control preventing racialized and gendered groups from accessing economic mobility and ever enjoying the fruits of capitalism. These mechanisms include workplace discrimination and gendered and racialized pay gaps (Frye Reference Frye2019). Capitalism also relies on the forced assimilation of non-white people to white supremacist values and standards of existence and production (de Sousa Santos Reference de Sousa Santos2014, 6). Modes of thinking and community values that depart from the hyper-productive, capitalist machinery of white supremacy are suppressed—participation in the workforce as such is required for one’s survival. In The Punitive Society, Foucault explains that within the modern epoch there has been “an inversion of spectacle into surveillance” (Foucault Reference Foucault2013, 23). Notably, this shift to private, enclosed punishment (like that in the home and the prison) arises at the same time as the social sciences become a significant field of study (Foucault Reference Foucault1977, 23, 24, 27). The social sciences, including psychology, sociology, geography, and anthropology, aim to study human particularity and difference. As such, they first establish “norms”: “regular” patterns of human behaviour produced by systems of coercion that we call discipline (Foucault Reference Foucault2013, 54). One example of a disciplinary mechanism that arises out of this psychological and sociological zeitgeist that Foucault identifies is the “risk assessment” for incarceration, a series of surveys which purport to judge individuals’ risk for future incarceration. Criminologist Chris Cunneen, in his paper “Youth justice and racialization: Comparative reflections,” writes that the “‘illusion’ of scientific objectivity [in risk assessments for incarceration] creates a seamless and seemingly irrefutable link between race and propensity for crime. Race is masked in the questions which are asked, but reconfirmed in the negative results generated for particular racialized groups of young people” (Cunneen Reference Cunneen2020, 530–31). Risk assessments are one of many carceral surveillance tools used to criminalize deviation from established social norms. The prison exists to enclose those outside of these norms—considered delinquent, abnormal, or degenerate—as well as those who do not add to capitalist productivity (Foucault Reference Foucault2013, 45). In Foucault’s 1976 lecture published in Les Temps Modernes as “The birth of racism,” and his 1975–6 lectures, “Society must be defended,” he relates his study of the punitive society and its normalizing power to the emergence of modern racism, as it fractures and reflects historical colonial practices. Stoler writes: “by Foucault’s account, racism is the condition that makes it acceptable to put (certain) people to death in a society of normalization” (Stoler Reference Stoler2016, 247). The a priori “delinquency” of non-white people in the eyes of the carceral state is generated by the institutional and intellectual establishment of whiteness as norm.

Beth E. Richie and Kayla M. Martensen (Reference Richie and Martensen2020) examine how the misnomer “mass incarceration” implies a kind of randomness in the rise in incarceration and carceral culture: “continued carceral expansion to capture (im)migrants, transgender and gender-non-conforming people, people with disabilities, young people, and people with physical and mental health challenges illustrate both the power of carceral expansion and the ways that the carceral state is motivated by political instincts to control groups that threaten the status quo” (Richie and Martenson Reference Richie and Martensen2020, 13). Anyone who falls outside of one or more of these categories is considered delinquent; as a result, the whole indefinite domain of non-conformity is punishable.

The modern surveillance state specifically oversees people who transgress norms and targets those people for criminalization (Richie and Martenson Reference Richie and Martensen2020, 13). Police, social services, and other government affiliated organizations maintain a close watch over marginalized communities with the rhetoric of preserving community safety. Richie and Martenson also explain how the modern surveillance state is made possible by divestment of capital away from essential community services in the communities that need them most, including “health and mental health services, schools and other youth-oriented programs, transportation infrastructure, community-based service organizations, parks, and other public services” (13). The structural disinvestment in poor communities of color contributes significantly to the social geography that produces and reproduces the HTPP, which will be the focus of section 6.

3. Carceral society in the heteronormative domestic sphere and the home to prison pipeline

This line, from the song “Conspiracy” on BL Shirelle’s 2020 album Assata Troi, describes the complexities of the home as a site of carceral discipline and comfort at the same time. Leaving prison, Shirelle wants to go home, but the home space she is searching for as a site of safety and protection does not exist—it is corrupted by experiences of abuse and the socio-economic disenfranchisement of her community. Thus, the verse poignantly expresses the omnipresence of carcerality—Shirelle cannot return to a distinct “home” space on parole because all the spaces she occupies are saturated by disciplinary and regulatory forms of violence.

Davis notes that there is a “generalized tendency to punish people who are persecuted in their intimate lives as a direct consequence of pandemics of violence that continue to be legitimized by ideological and legal structures” (of capitalism and heteropatriarchy, namely) (Davis Reference Davis2003, 45). I argue that these disciplinary measures also reinforce the heteronormative conception of gender that rationalizes the sexist distribution of power whereby women are expected to be chaste and docile, and punished for acting otherwise (e.g., school dress codes penalize girls whose skirts are too short, which is read as an expression of promiscuity) (Warren Reference Warren2021, 223). These institutions and oppressions are the backbone of carceral society, hidden beneath layers of racist policy, egalitarian rhetoric, and the bolstering of white male sensibility and privilege.

This cultural and institutional demand that girls be compliant and obedient is enforced in the home, internal to the logic of the HTPP that exists alongside and is inextricably intertwined with the more commonly known “school-to-prison pipeline” (STPP). The American Civil Liberties Union (2021) defines the STPP as a disturbing trend where children are funneled out of public schools and into juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse, or neglect, often because of structural inequities in housing, healthcare, and social services. Most would benefit from additional educational and social services. Instead, they are isolated, punished, and pushed out (ACLU 2021). The School-to-Prison-Pipeline focuses specifically on the criminalization of boys, as they are often those categorized as delinquent in the school space. The HTPP is a similar funnelling of children into juvenile and criminal justice systems; however, it focuses on the feminized aspect of this trajectory. Young girls in the HTPP experience a particularly high rate of domestic and sexual violence and abuse in the home, especially Black and racialized girls and girls living in poverty (Russell-Brown Reference Russell-Brown2004, 128–129; DuMonthier et al. Reference DuMonthier, Childers and Milli2017, 122). The racist, capitalist exploitation of Black and racialized people and those entrenched in generational poverty often creates precarious, under-resourced living environments, in which safe, protective spaces are not always available to young girls, and the adults surrounding them are often living with extremely high levels of violence and discrimination in their own lives.

Girls are often overlooked in the STPP model because they are criminalized specifically for their non-conformity to feminine complacency in the home after experiences of abuse. There is a striking correlation of rates between the abuse and eventual criminalization of racialized girls and women in the United States. In Canada, the statistics are similar. In Conviction, senator and prison justice advocate Kim Pate explains that: “more than half the women who are in prison are racialized women. Most of them are mothers, most of them are poor, many of them have experienced horrific violence as children or and adults” (Ackerman et al. Reference Ackerman, Pahlke and MacInnes2019, 08:45).

The subjugation of women is a contingent historical condition that has proved essential to the expansion of the global capitalist economy, which is invested in their discipline and surveillance as part of the carceral state.Footnote ⁹ In an 1896 speech, women’s rights activist Clara Zetkin explains that “the contrast within the family between the husband as proprietor and the wife as non-proprietor became the basis for the economic dependence and the social illegality of the female sex” (1984, 72; emphasis added). In her “social illegality,” the wife is expected to remain constrained to the home, where she is considered docile and obedient to her husband, rather than active in the external socio-economic sphere. Modern systems of punishment (centered around the prison) in the nineteenth century develop alongside the industrial revolution and its reinforcement of gendered divisions of labor, along with the devaluation of all domestic labor in its “feminine” categorization. As such, the domestic space is romanticized as a site of shelter and safety, apart from capitalist oppression. Its historical positioning as such often prevents us from recognizing the home as a site of danger.

Under modern capitalism, women are subject to extremely high rates of sexual and physical abuse by male partners, and they do vastly disproportionate amounts of unpaid care work (which includes childcare, cooking, and caring for elderly people) while also participating in the public workforce, earning significantly less than their male counterparts (Javaid and Cole Reference Javaid and Cole2022, 5; Coffey et al. Reference Coffey, Revollo, Harvey, Lawson, Butt, Piaget, Sarosi and Thekkudan2019). Care work is essential to our societies and the economy, but it gets relegated to women to preserve heteropatriarchy and keep women out of the paid work force. Women’s subjugation in this cycle of unrecognized and unpaid care work mainly is ensured by both remote forms of control (e.g., surveillance of women to ensure their conformity to the “norms” of femininity and motherhood) and proximate violence (within a domestic or so-called “home” space). This cycle is especially prevalent for those who face intersecting forms of oppression, transgressing multiple “norms.” The heteropatriarchal, capitalist nation state ensures that women are continuously among the most intensely exploited populations (Maynard Reference Maynard2017, 73). Kimberlé Crenshaw (Reference Crenshaw1991) coined the term “intersectional” to describe the intersecting oppressions that Black women face: namely, but not limited to, racism, sexism, and the combination and permutations of both (1241–99). The aforementioned “social illegality” of the female sex that Clara Zetkin describes is especially present for Black women and women of color, who have been criminalized by white political and social systems of power since the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Maynard Reference Maynard2017, 18).

4. Domestic violence: punitive practices in the domestic sphere

Shirelle grew up in a home where men selling drugs frequently passed in and out of the home. Male drug dealers held a lot of power and economic control over the home site. Shirelle is a self-identified “crack baby;” her mother used crack cocaine in the 1980s, a drug epidemic which specifically targeted Black neighborhoods. Gilfus (Reference Gilfus2002) explains:

Shirelle herself faced violence in her home and was molested at 6 years old. Punishment and abuse within the home is reinforced by the state because victims of domestic violence often carry unresolved trauma and PTSD which can cause them to act violently, re-enacting violence which is then criminalized, rather than interrogated as part of the effects of trauma.

At 13 years old, Shirelle began selling drugs to gain a sense of control over the home environment for herself, her mother, and her siblings, and to keep money in the home. She gained some autonomy and created a semblance of safety in their home environment. As she expresses in the lyric at the beginning of this section, “I had to rewind before the first time I sold to mom I had to rewind the times I don’t want reminded”. When Shirelle sold drugs to her mother, she took some control over the financial and familial dynamic at home, but she also could not help her mother overcome her dependency. The cycle of subjection and violence provided Shirelle with no real choice as to how she and her family could survive: selling drugs was the only way she could make enough income for her family to eat, and it allowed her more control over who came through their home. This rewind and revisitation of trauma that “I don’t want reminded” makes evident the constraints of the HTPP, which were inevitable given Shirelle’s circumstances: her efforts to survive trauma, her refusal to submit and die were what marked her as criminal in the first place.

While Shirelle was working towards the stability and safety of her family, she was also transgressing the heteropatriarchal norms of women in the home. As a gay woman, who was open about her sexuality from a young age, Shirelle’s identity is in opposition to heteronormative expectations of maternal domestic labor and reproduction. Maynard explains that since the trans-Atlantic slave trade, “Black women’s sexuality [is] represented as a threat, and those deemed to be exercising their sexuality outside of established social norms [are] deemed criminal (Maynard Reference Maynard2017, 45). Black women are disproportionately criminalized for their sexuality and sexual relations, especially if they do not conform to gender norms and heterosexuality. Shirelle’s transgression of established “norms” (whiteness, femininity, heterosexuality, submission to maleness) positions her as particularly deviant in the eyes of the law. Supporting her family by selling drugs, she also reversed her feminine normative role and stepped outside the bounds of domestic work deemed acceptable for Black women (Maynard Reference Maynard2017, 72). This “acting out” as a survival strategy is particularly deviant because of Shirelle’s identity as a Black, gender-nonconforming lesbian woman.

Foucault (Reference Foucault1977) explains that with the shift from torture to prison, punishment “will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process” (9). Punishment exists at the very core of the carceral society, enacted in every institution with disciplinary mechanisms upon those caught deviating from the norm through the apparatus of surveillance. Foucault continues: “its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity” (9). While the threat of public physical torture is no longer present, the constant threat of surveillance and incarceration hovers above women, building a certain psychological and physical vigilance in women’s bodies—especially Black women, Indigenous women, and women of colour (Maynard Reference Maynard2017, 118). Women, and particularly marginalized women, must constantly live in a state of self-regulation, monitoring and restricting their movements to socially acceptable positions (e.g., full-time motherhood, straightness, feminine presentation, whiteness). Foucault (Reference Foucault1977) describes this logic as a “carceral continuum that diffused penitentiary techniques to the most innocent of disciplines, transmitting disciplinary norms to the very heart of the penal system” (297) and “to the depths of the social body” (301). Women’s physical bodies become sites of extreme vigilance as they brace themselves against a culture of carceral logic which seeps into every waking moment, reinforced by violence in the home.

Transgression of social norms is weaponized against women by the state. Anger and distress resulting from masculinist oppression and sexual or physical assault is considered deviant behavior in girls and women, because these embodied, affective qualities are an affront to the ingrained social expectation that girls and women remain docile and obedient. Anger and rage are also a form of protest against physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and thus present a threat to institutionally and socially ingrained misogynistic norms. This is especially true for Black women, who are highly policed for their expressions of affect (Maynard Reference Maynard2017). The logics of state violence—discipline, surveillance, and punishment—are often replicated within the home, where patriarchal authority is exercised through coercion and control. Domestic violence, then, reinforces this psychosocial reality—disproportionately affecting women, and women who occupy several marginalized identities.

Violence taken out on women’s bodies can be seen as a part of the greater carceral logic which runs through Discipline and Punish, which is compounded by gender norms and racism. Carceral logic can be understood as the routinization and regulation of bodies under strict surveillance to ensure their conformity to systems of production (Foucault Reference Foucault1977, 23, 24, 45). Historically, men in the work force were seen to take out their aggression on their wives upon returning home—transferring their own oppression and frustration to someone further subjugated (Zetkin Reference Zetkin and Foner1984). Globally, approximately one in three, or 35 percent, of women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner or non-partner (World Health Organization 2017). It is estimated that approximately 94 percent of women in certain prison populations have a history of physical or sexual abuse (American Civil Liberties Union 2011). In Conviction, one incarcerated woman explains, “when I was a kid I was abused, no one really helped me out—I was just kind of a lost cause I guess” (Ackerman et al. Reference Ackerman, Pahlke and MacInnes2019, 22:20). She could not see herself existing outside the trajectory of criminality and violence into which she was thrust as a young person.

Surveillance and discipline are enacted by the state and replicated within the home. Shirelle’s experience is not uncommon: in the United States, one in nine girls under 18 experience sexual abuse or assault at the hands of an adult (compared to one in 53 boys) (Finkelhor et al. Reference Finkelhor, Shattuck, Turner and Hamby2014, 329–33). Perpetrators of child sexual abuse are almost always known to the victim: 93 percent of perpetrators are acquaintances or family members (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network 2021). It seems likely that many of these assaults are made possible in domestic or home spaces, where acquaintances and family members have private, unmonitored access to child victims.

In an interview on October 27, 2020, Shirelle commented on the correlation between women getting beaten, abused, and raped and rates of incarceration: “the trauma usually leads to different self-destructive behaviours. Number one, substance abuse, then if it’s not substance abuse it may be some type of mental health thing that’s not being addressed if it’s not that then it may be some type of internal rage issues.” Women and girls’ illegal activity is often a survival tactic, a mode of existence in a society that blames her for her own victimization. Commenting on Arnold’s 1990 article, Russell-Brown (Reference Russell-Brown2004) writes:

Black women and women living in poverty are disproportionately refused access to resources to manage trauma. Consequently, Black girls and women who act out because of their PTSD or participate in illegal activity as a survival tactic are criminalized for their non-conformity and non-compliance.

Domestic violence against women is intricately interwoven in the disciplinary measures of the home space, as women are victimized by partners and family members who are not deterred by the state. Patterns of violence, abuse, and criminalization are essential to the state’s categorizations of normative versus “criminal” behavior, because they lead unsupported and unrecognized victims/survivors of abuse to “act out,” often engaging in illegal activities and self-destructive behaviours (Arnold Reference Arnold1990, 154). In the HTPP, the omnipresence of domestic violence is condoned and reinforced by the state, as the strictures of capitalism reinforce the economic and social subjugation of the masses, which perpetrators take as their own model in enacting violence against women.

5. In plain sight: the invisible indiscretion of carceral surveillance in the home

In this verse, Shirelle explains the reality of her existence in the HTPP: as a Black girl living in poverty, she was not given the same rights as her white peers to begin with. When the police and the state “violate [her] rights and [her] amendments,” it is not perceived as a violation, but rather an invisible disciplinary measure to uphold white male supremacy.

I asked Shirelle when it became clear to her that she would likely end up incarcerated. Shirelle explained that in the second grade, a group of researchers from Temple University came into her school to ask questions about her family and home life, her parents, and her experiences of violence. Shirelle disclosed that her mother used drugs, that she was molested at 6 years old, and that she did not often have access to enough food, let alone healthy or nutritious food. She also told them about her frequent proximity to police and police surveillance. The researchers came back every year until Shirelle was 17, asking similar questions and recording her answers. Shirelle notes: “I had like a really trusting relationship with these people, and I think they were students at first, and then … they graduated, like this was a very longstanding relationship.” They conducted a form of institutionally funded surveillance which documented Shirelle’s condition, without providing support or offering alternative options. Foucault explains that the disciplinary power of surveillance is “both absolutely indiscreet, since it is everywhere and always alert; … and absolutely discreet, for it functions permanently and largely in silence” (Foucault Reference Foucault1977, 177). Shirelle’s experience of institutional surveillance as a form of epistemic violence is entirely within the norm of the carceral society. Her experience of abuse and domestic violence establishes the need for her surveillance and monitoring in the HTPP. The Temple University research project could operate discreetly, at an arm’s length from the violence occurring in Shirelle’s life. At the same time, this surveillance-based research project was entirely transparent and self-aware—absolutely indiscreet. The researchers were complicit in setting up Shirelle’s trajectory to the prison system because they recognized her experiences of abuse, engagement with drugs, and unstable housing situation as likely factors leading to her criminalization, yet they did nothing to offer her support or intervene. Shirelle’s illegal actions were survival strategies in a system which was explicitly conceived to lead her into the criminal justice system—she had very few options to generate income and keep herself safe from further abuse, given her proximity to drugs and drug sales which operated in her home. The researchers’ attempt to study her “at an arm’s length” without supportive intervention assumed that they were unearthing a new or revelatory research project, when in fact they were simply documenting state policy as it has existed since the initiation of the prison system.

When Shirelle was first incarcerated at 18, she called her grandmother from prison and asked if the researchers had called her home:

The researchers tracked Shirelle’s journey to incarceration as they had predicted. They conducted a form of surveillance separate from the state, with no intent to cause active harm to their study participants. Foucault (Reference Foucault1977) explains that “the examination is at the centre of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge” (192). The researchers’ scrutiny of Shirelle situates her as an object of carceral power, and they extrapolate her experiences in the HTPP as knowledge in the institution of the university. The discreet and self-evident surveillance of individual women within the HTPP allows it to function and repeatedly predict women’s incarceration.Footnote ¹¹ George Lipsitz analyzes the preconditions for incarceration for women of color, and comments succinctly on the concentration of tracking and surveillance:

The political system and the law are meant to operate discreetly so that the violence of state systems remains invisible, or at least inoffensive, to those unaffected by them (e.g., white, wealthy, cisgender, straight people). The HTPP permits the continuous functioning of our heteronormative, white supremacist society as such, discipling women who act outside of feminine norms.

6. The social geography of the HTPP

This immaculate lyric from Shirelle’s debut album Restricted Movement (available on SoundCloud) is a cutting analysis of the way geographic segregation of racialized communities contributes to the creation and recreation of the HTPP. The almost cliché concept of “investing in young people’s futures” is often parroted by governing bodies when discussing monetary contributions to educational or social resources for young, wealthy white kids. For Shirelle, as a Black girl living in poverty in the “hood,” investing in her future meant ensuring her incarceration through the discipline of the HTPP. Shirelle was denied access to social and educational resources that may have helped her escape the cycle of poverty (e.g., the community and academic support often available through library programming) and instead grew up in the shadow of the proliferating prison system.

Shirelle’s work in market research and her experience of the HTPP has provided her with further insight into the way that urban planning and geographical context facilitate the surveillance of Black people, people living in poverty, and other marginalized populations. She describes the economic and material reality of her childhood as a central factor in her experiences of poverty, violence, and her eventual incarceration: “even in the daily life … the violence is so ingrained.” Shirelle continues

Shirelle emphasizes the self-perpetuation inscribed within systems of oppression. The systems which ensure these material conditions make it incredibly difficult to question the conditions themselves, especially when women are facing domestic violence. Domination by systems of juridico-political power (e.g., housing insecurity, increased police surveillance) is replicated in the home as the regularities of domestic life (e.g., cooking, eating meals, resting) are interrupted by limited access to healthy, filling food and the necessity of working longer hours, under high physical and emotional stress, for less pay. Further, women who are subjected to the situational and social violence of poverty in disenfranchised neighbourhoods often cannot afford to make lifestyle choices that will benefit their physical and mental well-being. By virtue of their social geography, they are denied the means to cope with the traumas they suffer from in the home and punished for suffering as a sign of their criminal behavior as girls, insofar as they deviate from the feminine ideal of passivity and compliance.

When I interviewed Shirelle on October 27, 2020, she was preparing to move, looking at new houses with her wife. She describes the visual geography driving from one suburb to the next through the “hood”:

The structural disenfranchisement and destruction of Black, poor, and otherwise marginalized communities geographically separates these individuals and creates a class of supposedly delinquent people. Lipsitz explains that “segregated and impoverished inner-city neighborhoods are also generally physically distant from sites of employment and disconnected from affordable and efficient means of transportation to the places where jobs are plentiful” (2012, 1754).

Housing discrimination often drives Black people and people of color to what Lipsitz calls an “artificially constrained sector of the housing market” in which they are forced to pay “higher prices for inferior residences” (2012, 1753–54). This residential segregation enforces conditions of poverty, confining young people of color to underfunded schools and decreasing their opportunities for future economic success. This in turn leads to decreased physical and mental well-being, which often lead to housing instability and a lack of social support—as well as the criminalization of young Black women (2012, 1754). By contrast, the norms of white supremacy, thinness, and the image of the nuclear family are reinforced by the planning and reification of wealthy, mostly white communities, where local businesses, healthy food, and access to quality education and social resources are readily available.

The surveillance and discipline enacted in geographically marginalized communities is traumatizing for women victims of violence. The HTPP becomes a fatal loop because there is no safety, access to care, or support in the home space in which many women have experienced violence. In Canada, this convergence of safety and criminality within the HTPP is compounded by institutional decisions. Kim Pate explains: “we’re building more and more prisons and acting as though we think prisons can somehow be treatment centres, shelters for battered women, adequate housing, and then we take people in and then throw them back out on the street and expect them to fend for themselves” (Ackerman et al. Reference Ackerman, Pahlke and MacInnes2019, 24:44). The HTPP becomes a cycle of poverty, abuse, and criminalization for women who have nowhere else to go. Many of the women featured in Conviction describe a desire to come back to the prison because it is the only place that feels remotely safe.

In Conviction (Reference Ackerman, Pahlke and MacInnes2019), the mother of a young woman incarcerated in Nova Scotia explains that, because her daughter’s access to mental health care outside of the prison is so limited, it is safer for her to be incarcerated. This woman did not have the same access to a secure, supervised environment outside of the prison, and her family could not afford to pay for some of her essential medication. As such, her trajectory to incarceration (and subsequent reincarceration) was both informed by her trauma and necessitated by it—there was nowhere else for her to go for support or mental health treatment (Ackerman et al. Reference Ackerman, Pahlke and MacInnes2019).

Shirelle also explains that survivors of the prison where she was incarcerated often express similar sentiments, feeling like they are more secure within the prison than without, despite the abuse they face inside. Women entering the prison system are often crossing between two intimately connected spheres of violence, subjugation, and psychological distress that are connected through their social geography and the disciplinary practices inflicted against them as women that pave the path of the HTPP and reinforce the trajectory from the home to the prison.

7. Innocence and criminalization

The construction of a normative young girl is dictated by her socio-economic circumstances, as she is either granted or denied access to mental and physical health support, resources, and social educational opportunities. If she does not have access to these supports and is deemed to be deviant or acting out in response to trauma or harm, she is criminalized and disciplined for taking up too much space and not fitting the mould of docile, acquiescent femininity. Foucault describes the totalizing nature of this discipline: “the perpetual penality that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (Reference Foucault1977, 183). Carceral culture is imposed on the minds and bodies of poor and marginalized girls from a young age, as domestic violence and sexual assault are weaponized against them to ensure their subjugation and docility. Foucault explains that “a body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved” (Reference Foucault1977, 136). When girls act out in response to the trauma of violence, they transgress the expectation of subjugation and docility—and as such, they are criminalized and disciplined by the state. Richie and Martensen (Reference Richie and Martensen2020) note a crucial aspect of carceral logic and the HTPP: “important to a critique of the expansion of the carceral state hinges on an understanding of how crime is more of a social construction rather than an absolute phenomenon. What is considered a crime is fluid, not static” (13). Women are criminalized as they transgress norms of femininity. “Innocence” or criminality is predefined by fluctuating material and social conditions, however innocence is almost always associated with wealth and whiteness. Foucault (Reference Foucault1977) explains that within a carceral culture built on systems of discipline “it is always the body that is at issue—the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission” (25). When violence is enacted on girls’ bodies in the home, refusal or resistance to bodily and political control reifies the person as a social criminal because she refuses the normalizing disciplinary measures and instead acts outside of normative femininity.

The criminalization of young girls and women, and particularly racialized women, is also inextricably tied to the idea of innocence as it is applied to or withheld from young girls. Foucault explains that the disciplinary nature of carceral society is internalized in the body as a “penality of the norm,” “quite simply bringing into play the binary opposition of the permitted and the forbidden” (183). Saidiya Hartman (Reference Hartman2019) explains the historic use of Blackness to negate young girls’ “innocence,” and therefore their value in the eyes of the law, or their being deserving of protection and safety. She writes: “innocence (that is, virginity) was the issue … previous immorality meant a man could do whatever he wanted. Colored girls were always presumed to be immoral” (45). The little white girl does not know what she is doing, she is not in control of her actions, and as such she is never guilty. The young Black girl, however, is adultified: she knows exactly what she is doing, she has criminal intent, and she deserves to be disciplined. Black feminist scholar S. R. Toliver (Reference Toliver2018) explains the way different stereotypes of Black women as “hypersexualized, naturally promiscuous, and sexually deviant … [or] loud, rude, malicious, overbearing, and angry” are extended to Black girls, adultifying them and excluding from the norm of white innocence. Toliver continues: “distortions of Black girlhood create a form of age compression, in which the young girls are likened more to adults than children, rendering Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood” (6). Due to this compression, Black girls are often seen as less innocent than their white peers. Specifically, Toliver cites a study conducted by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality found that “Black girls between the ages of 5 and 14 were perceived to be more independent, know more about adult topics and sex, and require less nurturing, protection, support, and comfort than white girls” (6). This deviancy is socially inscribed in Black girls’ bodies, exposing them to increased discipline and criminalization.

Davis (Reference Davis2003) also explains how many female criminals are considered “insane” because their behaviour is so emphatically deviant from social expectations of domesticity and docility imposed upon them. She notes “gendered as female, this category of insanity was highly sexualized. When we consider the impact of class and race we can say that for white and affluent women, this equalization tends to serve as evidence for emotional and mental disorders, but for black and poor women, it has pointed to criminality” (27). Sexual abuse perpetrated against Black and poor women marks them as sexually deviant and criminal, while the perpetrators of said violence remain irreproachable, as they act within the norms of racist, heteropatriarchal carceral society. This violent and accusatory kind of victimization continues from the logic of sexual violence enacted by white male slave owners against Black women during slavery, when “the deviance of the slave master was transferred to the slave woman, whom he victimized” (27). Black and poor women are hypersexualized in their supposed “insanity” (which is often a trauma response to physical or sexual abuse, associated with PTSD) because their embodied existence represents deviancy from racist, heteropatriarchal feminine norms of chastity, compliance, and obedience. The adultification of Black girls and the removal of their supposed feminine innocence is wrapped up in the hyper-criminalization of women who transgress social expectations, norms, and sometimes (but not always) laws, as well as their hyper-sexualization relative to white women.

This adultification and hypersexualization has further destructive impacts when young Black girls are victims of domestic violence. Being assaulted (especially in a sexual manner) in childhood carries the typically Christian implication that the girl is no longer “pure,” “innocent,” or “valuable,” despite the fact that the same system that upholds these valuations encourages violence against women. This systemic violence is cyclical: “the criminalization of black and Latina women includes persisting images of hypersexuality that serve to justify sexual assaults against them both in and outside of prison” (Davis Reference Davis2003, 32). Gilfus (Reference Gilfus2002, 7) explains that among girls and women in prison in the United States who have experienced sexual or physical violence in childhood:

Gilfus’s explanation allows us to see how the social valuation of Black girls as “not-innocent” often leads to very concrete and traumatic consequences, including criminalization and incarceration. The concept of “structural dislocation” has significant implications for Black girls’ access to support and care in childhood: the things that allow you access to care are always coded white. Shirelle was a young girl when she became the subject of a longitudinal study predicting her future incarceration. Her account of her relationship with the researchers at Temple University makes it painfully clear that there was no attempt at intervention or care as Shirelle experienced innumerable predictors of incarceration. Despite recounting her experience of rape, family instability, and proximity to drugs and drug use at a young age (which are all predictors of incarceration identified by Arnold in Reference Arnold1990), Shirelle was not offered sustainable or long-term care or interventions. Rather, she was tracked systematically as the researchers predicted her outcomes in the HTPP. Shirelle was not seen as socially “valuable” because she never possessed the “innocence” of childhood that is so valued in young white girls. The systems of oppression and control that denote these oppositional qualities of “good” and “bad,” “innocent” and “criminal,” are effective because they monitor and control the human body in meticulous detail. Carceral society thrives on the rationalization and organization of supposedly “moral” valuations which are enacted in service of white supremacist, heteropatriarchal norms.

After her arrest and during trial, Shirelle faced further scrutiny and discrimination because she did not conform to gender norms in her masculine presentation. The details of her image and identity were wielded against her in court as evidence of moral failing and criminality. Shirelle has had a full beard since she was a teenager, which is now a core part of her image and identity: in her artist name “BL Shirelle,” BL stands for “bearded lady,” a nickname she got in prison. Prior to her trial, Shirelle’s lawyer was adamant that she shave her beard, wear a feminine hairstyle, and switch out some of her more masculine clothes for feminine alternatives. Shirelle knew she needed to appear more feminine: “I was going to trial. So the night before, I shaved my beard, I took out my braids … I got my hair bumped and wrapped, like a literal wrap—I didn’t put a dress on I didn’t go that far—I still was—I still had like you know—like a button down t-shirt, some jeans, you know.”

When Shirelle arrived in court, her more feminine and “innocent” appearance was evidently to her benefit, but it did not stop the prosecutors from using her appearance against her as proof of her guilt. Shirelle explains:

The discrepancy between Shirelle’s appearance the night of her arrest and her more socially normative appearance in trial is a blatant example of the weaponization of a normative aesthetic of “innocence” and opposing criminality. A white, feminine-presenting woman in the same situation as Shirelle on the night of her arrest would likely have been seen as vulnerable, whereas Shirelle was deemed dangerous, criminal, and aggressive (Maynard Reference Maynard2017, 45).

Despite Shirelle’s forced conformity and the scrutiny of her appearance in court, her lyrics deconstruct the link between whiteness and innocence. When Shirelle raps “who the fuck you know that look like me/and that’s exactly how she moulded me,” she defiantly refutes her categorization as criminal because of her non-normative appearance: she is a masculine-presenting Black woman with a beard. Asserting that it’s god herself who moulded her this way, Shirelle dissects the concepts of femininity which are often associated with Christianity—conformity, docility, and whiteness.

8. The cost of the carceral system

The HTPP works effectively by design. The system of the home to prison pipeline ensures that women and girls living in poverty, especially Black and racialized girls, have no supports or access to resources in the prison or in their homes—they realize that “nobody miss[es] them” when they are incarcerated because they are exactly where they are supposed to be in the systems of carceral society.

Women are the fastest growing prison population in Canada and the United States (Ackerman et al. Reference Ackerman, Pahlke and MacInnes2019). In both countries, it is largely acknowledged by lawmakers, prison administrations, and democratic institutions that most women entering the prison system have prior experiences of abuse. These experiences are known to contribute to serious mental illness, the use of illegal drugs, and poverty and housing instability when fleeing from violent situations. The self-evident nature of the HTPP is its most significant stronghold: it is hidden in plain sight. This is the powerful grip of carceral society, tightened by the tools of surveillance and discipline.

Carceral society seeks to control and suppress those outside of the norms. Institutional violence against women, a lack of social supports and access to shelters from domestic violence, and housing discrimination are just a few of the weapons wielded against non-normativity. These concrete structures influence and uphold normative stereotypes deeply embedded in policing, legislation, and social existence. Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color, especially those living in poverty, with disabilities, or who do not conform to cisgender heterosexuality, are all othered, controlled, and subjected by normative legislation in Canada and the United States. For example, in Canada, “wellness checks” are a form of surveillance and violence instituted by armed police forces when people are experiencing mental health crises. Instead of providing adequate mental health responses and care, Canadian legislation mandates that the police respond with violence and discipline (Canadian Mental Health Association 2020). Compounded with institutionalized racism in the police force, these “wellness checks” are fatal: in June 2020, Chantel Moore, a 26-year-old woman from Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, was shot dead by police in her own home while in a mental health crisis (Magee Reference Magee2020). Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a Black-Indigenous woman living in Toronto, died in the week before Moore’s murder after falling from a high-rise balcony when police entered for a “wellness check” (Cooke Reference Cooke2020). Racist, oppressive legislation around “wellness checks” was fatal for these women, among many others. The criminalization of non-“normative” women, if it is not fatal, ensures the continuity of the HTPP.Footnote ¹¹

In Conviction (Ackerman et al. Reference Ackerman, Pahlke and MacInnes2019), the filmmakers give video cameras to a group of women inmates to document the days after their release. Many of them have no permanent residence to go home to, and some do not even have a ride, let alone a friend, family member, or acquaintance to help them reintegrate into life on the outside. Five women document their release, and all five of them are reincarcerated within a few weeks. For some of them, it is because they have nowhere else to go, and houselessness leads to sleeping rough or selling drugs.

For others, being released without access to support or resources leads to illegal drug use, self-harm, or back into an abusive relationship. While prison justice organizations like Elizabeth Fry do incredible work in supporting incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women, a lack of government funding and strict carceral policies make it difficult, if not impossible to provide long-term support for increasing numbers of incarcerated women in Canada (Ackerman et al. Reference Ackerman, Pahlke and MacInnes2019). Each woman describes a distinct sense of isolation, shame, and frustration in returning to the Nova Scotia Women’s Correctional facility. Inside, they imagine prison alternatives: a project entitled “From the Ground Up”—a haven for women who have experienced abuse and a halfway house for formerly incarcerated women. One of the inmates, Trish, explains that “From the Ground Up” would provide a safe shelter for formerly incarcerated women, while being run and maintained by the women themselves. After completing integration and programming, the women would become mentors for newcomers. Alternatives to the cycle of incarceration and the violence that is the HTPP are possible, accessible, and affordable, but they do not resemble the prison system as it currently exists.

Shirelle’s transcendence of the HTPP is a result of indescribable resilience. Shirelle’s work with Freer Records alongside her immensely impactful music career (including her latest album, Assata Troi) are revolutionary acts of survival and resistance. However, her work is not necessary to justify her being deserving of care and safety. The reality of the HTPP is that it is a structural oppression—the expectation should not be that incarcerated women transcend the system, but rather that the carceral system itself is eradicated. Alternatives to prisons and policing will not be “one single alternative system” (Davis Reference Davis2003, 43), but rather expansive, multi-faceted, and generative ecosystems of care, accountability, and reparative justice. Community organizers and abolitionists, led by Black women, have been imagining, creating, and studying alternatives to incarceration for decades, and the work of decarceration can indeed be joyful, generative work. In understanding the complex, structural, intentional harm of the prison industrial complex, we can work towards decarceration and abolition, in our communities, in our homes, and in our day-to-day lives.