Book review: Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02697580231205631 |
| Author | Bronwyn Naylor |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
International Review of Victimology
2024, Vol. 30(2) 417 –422
© The Author(s) 2023
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Book Reviews
Leigh Goodmark
Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism
University of California Press: Oakland, CA, 2023; xv + 276 pp.: ISBN 9780520391109
Reviewed by: Bronwyn Naylor, Graduate School of Business and Law, RMIT University, Australia
DOI: 10.1177/02697580231205631
Professor Leigh Goodmark has written extensively on reform of legal responses to violence against
women, and to intimate partner violence in particular. In her latest book, she takes the challenging
next step of arguing for the abolition of prisons, and dismantling of the criminal justice system
itself, within the framework of abolition feminism.
Abolition can be seen as the logical conclusion to any long-term engagement with the criminal
justice system. Even with reforms to laws, punishment options and prison conditions, the funda-
mental inhumanity – and ineffectiveness – of the process persists.
Professor Goodmark highlights the irony here of the successes of feminist anti-violence advo-
cates, herself included. Mandatory arrest laws and increased sentences for perpetrators of violence
against women have led to women who are themselves victims, particularly women of colour and
gender non-conforming people, being arrested, convicted and incarcerated under these same laws.
These are the ‘imperfect victims’, the ‘criminalised survivors’ of her book.
The book explores in harrowing detail the failures of the criminal justice system leading to
criminalising survivors of gendered violence, such as
The prosecution of women committing violence to defend themselves against intimate part-
ner violence;
The sentencing of women who are victim/survivors to harsh mandatory minimum sen-
tences; and
Imprisoning criminalised survivors in the deeply dehumanising US prison system. This is
indeed its purpose: ‘That’s by design: [a] former Massachusetts governor . . . once said that
prison should be a “tour through the circles of hell”’ (p. 107).
Professor Goodmark’s book also demonstrates the many ways in which the US criminal justice
system can be seen as ‘exceptional’ in the world, imprisoning at rates not otherwise seen in equiva-
lent countries. Indeed it has the distinction of having the largest prison population in the world (just
ahead of China). The broader politics and history cannot be addressed here but are evident in the
stories presented in this book. Examples include severe mandatory minimum sentences (removing
judicial discretion), extraordinarily long sentences and the effect of the election of key decision-
makers, in a punitive environment, on decisions to prosecute and on decisions to press for long
sentences.
1205631IRV0010.1177/02697580231205631International Review of VictimologyBook Reviews
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Book Reviews
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