The Carceral Creep

Mimi E. Kim asks a question that cannot be reduced to “the movement was co-opted”: how did anti-domestic-violence advocates seek police responses as a means of protection, and how did those victories gradually change the movement itself? Her account focuses on the U.S. movement’s formative decade, 1973–1983, rather than locating the origins of carceral feminism only in the 1994 Violence Against Women Act.

The historical case study draws on archival material and semi-structured interviews with 60 movement leaders, legislative actors, and law-enforcement personnel. Kim follows three organizational pathways: the pluralist coalition formed around litigation against the Oakland Police Department, San Francisco’s victim-witness program, and the Community Coordinated Response in Duluth, Minnesota. These are not interchangeable examples of one policy. They show different ways advocates built working relationships with police, prosecutors, and other parts of the criminal legal system. Early organizers believed formal collaboration could secure protection while leaving the movement able to set its own terms.

“Carceral creep” names a cumulative change in relationships and organizational forms, not a single moment of betrayal. Kim traces stages she calls contestation, collaboration, hybridization, replication, occupation, and subordination. Informal engagement can become formal partnership; as collaboration is normalized, boundaries between civil society and criminal-legal institutions blur. Models replicated elsewhere may preserve the policing structure while losing the feminist strategies originally intended to retain leverage over it. Over time, law-enforcement agendas occupy more of the movement field and the autonomy of its organizations diminishes.

The feminist significance is not that seeking legal protection is inherently wrong, nor that early organizers lacked agency. Kim emphasizes that activists actively designed partnerships and tried to preserve transformative aims inside them. The contradiction is that the terms of institutional growth, funding, and collaboration were not fully under advocates’ control. She also shows how gender-essentialist appeals to “protect women” could conceal the racialized and classed costs of stronger policing and punishment. A political victory could therefore expand the very criminal-legal system the movement had hoped to influence.

This is a historical case study of a particular U.S. movement and decade, not a universal law for all anti-violence work or regions. Its interviews and archives support Kim’s account of mechanisms; they do not grant omniscient access to every organization’s motives. Read it with Elizabeth Bernstein’s discussion of new abolitionist feminism and Kim’s article on transformative justice: the first clarifies the politics of punitive governance, while the second turns toward movement practices that do not leave safety entirely to police and prisons.