The Struggle to End Criminalized Survival Continues

Reflections on 10 Years of Survived and Punished. [TW: domestic, sexual and state violence]

Cover: Women walk along a corridor at the Los Angeles County women’s jail in Lynwood, California April 26, 2013. The Second Chance Women’s Re-entry Court is one of the first in the U.S. to focus on women, and offers a cost-saving alternative to prison for women who plead guilty to non-violent crimes and volunteer for treatment. Of the 297 women who have been through the court since 2007, 100 have graduated, and only 35 have been returned to state prison. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson, via https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/american-prisons-are-hell-for-women-theyre-even-worse

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Prison Culture || March 2026 marked ten years since we launched Survived and Punished (S & P) – a national organization that includes survivors, organizers, victim advocates, legal advocates and attorneys, policy experts, scholars, and currently and formerly incarcerated people. S&P organizes to de-criminalize efforts to survive domestic and sexual violence. It also works to support and free criminalized survivors, and to abolish gender violence, policing, prisons, and deportations.

Last month, I co-organized a virtual event to mark a decade of our collective work to address both gender-based violence and state violence. It was a profoundly moving gathering. We heard from some formerly criminalized and incarcerated survivors who are now free. We heard from some currently incarcerated survivors. Some organizers spoke about their freedom work.

I closed out the event by speaking about the ongoing violence to which women and gender-non conforming people are subjected. I spoke about the importance of the Archives as sites of memory work and also as sites of violence. I spoke the names of some of the survivors who have transitioned from our world. I reminded all of us that we are fighting for a world without criminalization and that this is one of the most important things that we can be doing at this moment.

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Juanita Thomas

One of the key moments that led to my organizing with Survived and Punished occurred in 1996, when I learned about Juanita Thomas through the Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project.

Juanita killed Willie Hammond while resisting his physical and sexual attacks. Prior to that night, she had endured several years of abuse, including beatings, verbal abuse, physical and verbal threats against her life, threats of sexual violence against her children, and economic coercion. On the night of July 28, 1979, Juanita and Hammond had come back from a party. Forced onto her bed, Juanita refused to perform oral sex on Hammond. According to her, “He said you will do it. He hit me and was bringing his cock up near my mouth. I was laying on my back. He reached on the dresser which was near the bed. There was a letter opener on it. He got it and I reached under the bed, got the butcher knife out and just started to hit him again and again.”

After an inadequate and biased trial, an all-white jury convicted Juanita of first-degree murder and sentenced her to life in prison without parole. She spent 18.5 years inside until law professor Andrea Lyon and her students helped release her from Michigan’s Coldwater prison. They uncovered evidence that would have helped Juanita, which the prosecution destroyed. I corresponded with Juanita for several months and felt overjoyed when she gained her freedom from prison in 1998.

Unfortunately, Juanita’s story was not unique. In the 2010s I & others advocated for the release of Marissa Alexander, a Florida woman who was convicted and incarcerated in 2012 for firing a pistol to deter her husband after he threatened her life. Survived and Punished exists because there are still many Juanitas and Marissas incarcerated across the United States today.

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The beginning of Survived and Punished

In 2015, at the Incite! Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence Conference in Chicago, I participated in a panel discussion with people from the Stand with Nan-Hui defense campaign and the Free Marissa Now National campaign. I was there representing the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander (now Love & Protect) which I had co-founded. Listening to everyone speak was cathartic and affirming. That panel was the seed for Survived and Punished.

In March 2016, members of Love & Protect, Stand with Nan-Hui, the Free Marissa Now National Campaign, and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) gathered for our first planning retreat. There, we discussed the fact that racialized aspects of gender violence and gendered aspects of mass criminalization have generally been overlooked. Carcerality, we all agreed, is a strategy that does not attend to the root causes of violence or other social problems. Rather, it simply disposes of those individuals that experience these problems. We rejected criminalization as a “solution” to social problems.

We were meeting in Chicago to piggy-back off a convening at Depaul University titled “No Perfect Victims: At the Intersection of Gender Violence and Criminalization.” The event was co-organized by me, Love & Protect and Project NIA. It was co-sponsored by:

The Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women

Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network (CMBWN)

The UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy

UIC Women’s Leadership and Resource Center

UIC Campus Advocacy Network

The Women’s Center/DePaul University,

Women’s and Gender Studies Department/DePaul University.

I share all of the co-sponsors because I think it’s important to underscore how many different groups recognized that the criminalization of survival was wrong and needed to be addressed.

The convening engaged with participants on how to pro-actively support and advocate for survivors who live at the intersection of gender violence and criminalization. Participants explored what services, resources and strategies are necessary to support those who have been criminalized for survival (including self-defense). We stressed the importance of intersections of race, sexuality, disability and gender identification within the work of supporting victims/survivors of violence and the enduring damage caused when those intersections are ignored.

The meeting included a panel discussion, a viewing and discussion of the film “The Perfect Victim”, and a special keynote address by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. During our discussions, participants unpacked how traditional service providers rely on tropes such as “perfect victims” and “recognizable victims”. We also highlighted the experiences of grassroots organizations and defense committees in supporting those who don’t fall into the “perfect victim” narrative. The next year, in 2017, we brought dozens of people together in Detroit for another “No Perfect Victims” convening. We’ve been convening, gathering, and organizing ever since.

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The purpose of S&P

At S & P, we believe that creating participatory defense campaigns to support the people made most vulnerable to criminalization is essential for educating the public, including prison reformers and abolitionists, about the racial and gendered terror of criminalization and incarceration. We know that campaigns which uplift and defend Black women, gender nonconforming people, and others charged with violent acts are often the only means for securing their freedom.

These campaigns are also necessary for popular education to strengthen our movements. They inform and improve overall movement strategies by teaching us to challenge false and damaging binaries that we use to describe incarcerated people, such as violent/non-violent and innocent/guilty.

Defense campaigns can create new forms of learning and practice necessary for abolition. By organizing to put campaigns like those supporting people in immigrant detention, those criminalized for sex work, and those targeted by transphobic violence in conversation, we can better understand how anti-Black gendered violence and criminalization actually operate.

There are S & P affiliates in California, NYC, and Chicago. We also host a Survivor Defense Network composed of individuals and groups across the country. Since we began our work in 2016, dozens of incarcerated survivors have been released from jail and prison. Our network has played a role in getting our people out. These are small miracles because prisons and jails are death-making institutions. Many many people never get out alive.

As I was collecting names from people in our network of survivors who have been released from prison and jail, I found myself overcome with emotions. On the one hand, I felt so grateful to see how many people are out of prison. On the other, I am so furious and sad about the many survivors still inside.

For many years, when we were fighting for Marissa Alexander’s release from prison, we only had a few of her own words publicly available to us. She was quoted as saying:

“This is my life I’m fighting for. This is my life. And it’s my life, and it’s not entertainment. This is my life. If you do everything to get on the right side of the law, and it’s a law that does not apply to you, where do you go from there?”

Marissa’s words opened an exhibition that I co-curated in 2014 with my friend Love & Protect member, Rachel Caidor titled “No Selves to Defend.” I used the term “No Selves to Defend” to convey the indefensibility of certain groups in society. I was especially thinking here of Black women (cis and trans). Marissa in just a few words was saying what do you do when “the law” doesn’t apply to you? What then is your recourse?

Survived and Punished takes it as a given that of course Marissa has a self that was worth defending and so do all survivors. Yet the law and the courts see only a small subset of survivors as *perfect victims,* defining them as those who are usually white, who are affluent, and who don’t physically fight back. Those victims can receive sympathy and resources. Those who fall outside this box are severely punished for it, both in court and in the court of public opinion. [For more about self-defense and freedom, read my friend & co-founder of S & P Alisa Bierria’s excellent essay published last fall.]

At S & P, we know that we are on a tightrope – trying to use THE LAW even as we also refuse it. We understand the contradictions and our goal remains to free survivors using every available means.

While we can and must organize around some short-term legal strategies, we know that these are by no means sufficient. Short term strategies can be a means to engage broader groups of people on systemic/structural injustice and to engage them in conversations they might otherwise not have. However, these short-term strategies need to be placed within a longer-term vision for actual justice rather than as a substitute for that vision. Thus, it is important first to be clear about the limitations and dangers of some of these strategies. Second, we remain focused on addressing the systemic nature of white supremacy and anti-Blackness because we do not want short term strategies to contradict our longer term vision.

We continue to organize

As the U.S. ramps up the building of concentration camps to incarcerate immigrants, I’ve been reflecting on how important it is to remain committed to freeing people from cages. Each release is a miracle. Decarceration is as urgent as ever, and we need new recruits to this cause.

Confronted by ongoing femicide across this country and the world, it remains clear that our approach needs to continue to address intra and inter-community violence simultaneously with the state violence directed at our people.

Confronted by unrelenting and eliminationist violence against our trans siblings, we are called to fight back. As Larry Little who helped organize Joanne Little’s defense campaign in the mid-70s says in a new film about her case: “We don’t always get what we fight for but we have to fight for all that we get.”

Over the past three and a half decades, I have volunteered and also been a worker in anti-domestic violence and anti-sexual violence organizations. I have co-founded a number of organizations and projects explicitly focused on addressing both interpersonal violence and state violence. I’ve facilitated transformative justice processes when called in by my communities. I have worked with youth and adults to address gender-based violence. I am a certified domestic violence professional in Illinois. I’ve worked both within the anti-violence field and outside of it. I’ve developed and written dozens of curricula and organized hundreds of workshops, convenings and conferences about gender-based violence.

Over these many years, I’ve seen the decidedly mixed results of our efforts. In spite of this or perhaps because of this, I remain committed to doing all I can to support survivors and to attend to the root causes of racialized gender violence. This will continue to be the work of my life. It’s the work that brought me to PIC abolition.

Years ago, I read these words by Rebecca Farr and they continue to be a North Star for me. So I will end with them:

“I am not proposing that sexual violence and domestic violence will no longer exist. I am proposing that we create a world where so many people are walking around with the skills and knowledge to support someone that there is no longer a need for anonymous hotlines. I am proposing that we break through the shame of survivors (a result of rape culture) and the victim-blaming ideology of all of us (also a result of rape culture) so that survivors can gain support from the people already in their lives. I am proposing that we create a society where community members care enough to hold an abuser accountable so that a survivor does not have to flee their home. I am proposing that all of the folks that have been disappointed by systems work together to create alternative systems. I am proposing that we organize.”

I am proposing that we organize too and that is what S & P has done for 10 years and what we propose to continue doing in the years ahead.

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A NEW RESOURCE:

“A new report documents the many unique challenges faced by women serving life or long-term sentences in Michigan prisons. The report, titled Women’s Clemency Initiative: A Report on Liberating Long-Serving Women documents the prevalence of trauma and abuse prior to incarceration, the inadequate or inappropriate care women experience in prison, and the failure of age-based sentencing reform to account for women’s experiences. Authored by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Michigan Criminal Justice Program, the report calls on Governor Gretchen Whitmer to implement a broad clemency initiative focused on women serving life and long sentences in Michigan prisons.

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The report argues that Michigan’s reliance on extreme punishment has disproportionately harmed women and urges the state to realign its power toward healing, accountability, rehabilitation, and release. While the report focuses on women incarcerated in Michigan, these same trends can be observed in many states across the U.S.”

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Police + Prisons Don’t Keep Us Safe–We Keep Each Other Safe