From Carceral Feminism to Transformative Justice

Mimi E. Kim’s article asks how feminist responses to gender-based violence became increasingly routed through policing, prosecution, and incarceration—and what alternatives might look like. Its starting point is not a simple opposition between interpersonal violence and state violence. In its opening juxtaposition of Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander, Kim asks readers to see how ideas of “public safety” can be mobilized differently against Black people, while making clear that the two cases are distinct and that their full histories exceed this article’s scope. The point is to foreground a political problem: a response intended to protect survivors can also expose women of color to punitive systems that punish self-defense and reproduce racialized state violence.

Kim situates this problem in the U.S. history of anti-violence organizing. The movement’s roots in civil-rights and radical social movements brought sustained public attention and services to domestic and sexual violence, but some influential strategies also pursued stronger criminal penalties and police intervention. The article examines the turn toward mandatory arrest laws and the incorporation of the Violence Against Women Act into the 1994 crime bill as part of that history. It does not say all feminists or all anti-violence organizations followed one path: women of color had raised critiques of criminalization and of policies that failed or harmed their communities well before those critiques became more broadly visible. Kim gives particular attention to organizing around INCITE! and to the continuing work of Black and other women-of-color feminists. The analytic concern is how a movement can gain formal recognition while losing political room to address the social conditions that produce harm.

The distinction Kim draws between restorative and transformative justice matters. Restorative processes generally shift attention from punishment toward the harm and its effects on survivors and communities, but some programs remain embedded in or supervised by the criminal-legal system. Transformative justice is more closely connected in this article to abolitionist movement spaces: it seeks community-based responses while also changing the structural conditions—such as racism, poverty, sexism, homophobia, and ableism—that shape both interpersonal and state violence. It is therefore not just a different meeting format or a softer sanction. The question is who defines safety, whose knowledge guides the response, and whether the process changes the conditions that made future harm possible.

Kim makes this political distinction concrete through different kinds of organizing. She discusses Philly Stands Up, which developed responses to sexual assault in a Philadelphia community, and Creative Interventions, which worked with immigrant anti-violence organizations to develop tools for community-based responses to domestic and sexual violence. The article describes these as situated experiments in collective accountability, not plug-in models that can be transferred unchanged to every case. Their community orientation can make it possible to mobilize relationships, support survivors, and hold people who caused harm accountable outside routine criminalization; it also demands sustained labor, resources, and careful attention to power within the community itself.

That caution is essential to the paper’s argument. The author notes that transformative practices remain formative, informal, and often poorly documented, while practitioners and policymakers remain cautious about applying restorative or transformative processes to gender violence. “Community” is not automatically safe, and accountability cannot be reduced to asking survivors to manage harm among people they depend on. Nor are restorative and transformative justice interchangeable: reforms delivered through state institutions can keep the carceral system at the center, while non-carceral responses still need material support, protection, and a way to address repeated or escalating harm. Kim presents an emerging political field with difficult questions, not proof that one alternative reliably works in every situation.

Kim also insists that the future of anti-violence politics must be shaped by trans and gender-nonconforming people, whose experiences and leadership have been marginalized in mainstream feminist settings and sometimes within radical women-of-color movements as well. This prevents “women of color” from being treated as a single, settled standpoint and widens the analysis of gender policing, interpersonal violence, and state punishment. The paper is a U.S.-focused historical and conceptual synthesis, drawing on scholarship, archival and interview research, and the author’s movement experience; its 2018 statistics and political descriptions are not current measurements. Read it alongside Kim’s later The Carceral Creep, which follows movement/state entanglement over a specific decade, and Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us, a distinct collection of abolitionist organizing work. These are FemRes reading paths, not influences the article claims. Together, they help turn Kim’s question from “why not punishment alone?” into the harder one: what relationships, resources, and collective capacities make safety and accountability possible without reproducing the violence a movement set out to end?