Part 1: Carceral Violence and Official Responses.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Resisting Carceral Violence from the Inside Out.- 3. Official Responses to Carceral Violence and the Limits of Reform.- Part 2: Anti-Carceral Geographies of Resistance.- 4. Women Against Prison: Anti-Carceral Feminist Critiques of Prison.- 5. The Fairlea Wring Outs: Confronting the Prison Wall.- 6. The 'Save Fairlea' Vigil: Abolitionist Imaginings and Unexpected Outcomes.- Part 3: Consolidation and Expansion.- 7. The Privatisation Era.- 8. Conclusion. 

This book explores the dramatic evolution of a feminist movement that mobilised to challenge a women’s prison system in crisis. Through in-depth historical research conducted in the Australian state of Victoria that spans the 1980s and 1990s, the authors uncover how incarcerated women have worked productively with feminist activists and community coalitions to expose, critique and resist the conditions and harms of their confinement. Resisting Carceral Violence tells the story of how activists, through a combination of creative direct actions, reformist lobbying and legal challenges, forged an anti-carceral feminist movement that traversed the prison walls. This powerful history provides vital lessons for service providers, social justice advocates and campaigners, academics and students concerned with the violence of incarceration. It calls for a willingness to look beyond the prison and instead embrace creative solutions to broader structural inequalities and social harm.

“Resisting Carceral Violence provides a compelling and often moving account of the brutal reality of prison life for women. It graphically highlights the highly gendered dehumanization and desperate harms the prison generates. The book represents critical scholarship at its very best. It is theoretically sophisticated, methodologically innovative, forensically focused and radically interventionist. It should be read by academics and activists as well as by policy makers as it illustrates the abject failure of the liberal, prison reform industry and the endless, fruitless search for the ‘best’ penal policy for women. Bree Carlton and Emma K. Russell, through their lucid scholarship, demonstrate beyond any doubt that women’s prisons need to be removed forever from staining the social landscape. Their book makes a significant, uncompromising contribution to that utopian goal and to the literature on abolitionism more generally.” (Joe Sim, Professor of Criminology and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Crime, Criminalisation and Social Exclusion at Liverpool John Moores University, UK)“This is a key text for those invested in worlds without prisons, drawing from oral histories that document anti-carceral feminist mobilizations that have built solidarity with people incarcerated in Australia’s Fairlea Women’s Prison. Contextualized within a brilliant critique of the political economy of ‘progressive reform’ in the Australian women’s correctional system in the 1980s and 1990s, this ground-breaking text lays out important feminist abolitionist genealogies. The book critically engages with multiple ‘on the ground’ tensions that those working against the global prison industrial complex frequently confront, such as reforms that might strengthen the carceral system and the pervasive trap of ‘gender-responsive’ logics. But perhaps most importantly this work illuminates the imaginaries and labour of fierce grassroots organizations that knit together powerful and temporal coalitions. Resisting Carceral Violence  provides necessary and fertile terrain for our collective present and our future practice, and is a powerful ‘must read’ for all social movement scholars, organizers, and feminists.” (Erica R. Meiners, Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor, Northeastern Illinois University, USA)“By offering a unique historical vantage point on resistance both within and outside Australia’s women’s prisons, Resisting Carceral Violence shows how activists have responded to a changing landscape of state carceral control and strategies of penal expansion. Through a close examination of archives, diaries, and interview data, the research reveals both the potential and the limitations of organizing on the ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ and the deep connections of women across these boundaries. The authors’ reflections on these struggles convey acute respect for activists’ commitments to real change and profound recognition of the costs of violence imposed on incarcerated women’s lives. This book is a ‘must-read’ for scholars who seek to better understand the broader structural constraints that limit prison reform.” (Kristin Bumiller, George Daniel Olds Professor of Economic and Social Institutions, Amherst College, USA)

Explores the relationship between penal reform and abolition praxis Creates a radical framework for understanding how reform processes can assist the abolitionist project of dismantling penal systems and punishment Generates a theory and method of feminist abolitionism that can inform activist scholarship and practice