Carceral lock-in: How organizational conditions stymie the development of justice alternatives in a rape crisis center
| Author | Benjamin R Weiss |
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620971784 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620971784
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620971784
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Carceral lock-in: How
organizational conditions
stymie the development
of justice alternatives in
a rape crisis center
Benjamin R Weiss
Occidental College, USA
Abstract
Many perpetrators of sexual violence are themselves victims of similar crimes. Such
“complex victims” do not fit neatly into the dichotomous categories of victim and
perpetrator essential to the functioning of the adversarial criminal-legal system. How
anti-rape activists attempt to incorporate complex victims into their work illustrates
challenges they experience when wrestling with the carceral state more broadly. In this
article, I draw on 32 months of participant observation and 40 in-depth interviews to
show how organizational conditions—departmental silos and physical infrastructure—
prevent activists’ treatment of complex victims. Building on the concept of path
dependence from organization theory, I argue that carceral understandings of harm
become “locked-in” despite activists’ anti-carceral attitudes. This article identifies
barriers to the treatment of complex victims, further explains feminist activists’
simultaneously contentious and coalitional relationship with the carceral state, and
introduces the concept of carceral lock-in to help understand impediments to justice
alternatives.
Keywords
Carceral feminism, complex victims, path dependence, rape, restorative justice, sexual
violence
Corresponding author:
Benjamin R Weiss, Sociology, Occidental College, 1600 Campus Road, Swan 217, Los Angeles, CA 90041,
USA.
Email: weissb@oxy.edu
971784TCR0010.1177/1362480620971784Theoretical CriminologyWeiss
research-article2020
Article
2022, Vol. 26(1) 91–111
Despite constructions of victims and perpetrators as separate, many perpetrators of sex-
ual violence are themselves victims of similar crimes (R Roberts et al., 2004; AL Roberts
et al., 2010). These “complex victims”1—people who have both harmed and been
harmed—muddle dominant narratives of violence (Brewer, 2010; Jankowitz, 2018;
Moffett, 2016). Constructions of social problems, including sexual violence, rest on
clearly identifiable victims and perpetrators who are wholly innocent or wholly guilty
(Christie, 1986). This article explores how anti-rape activists think about complex vic-
tims of sexual violence, people who are both innocent and guilty.
Understanding how anti-rape activists treat complex victims of sexual violence
reveals much about activists’ anti-carceralism more broadly. The adversarial and puni-
tive orientation of the carceral state, which relies on police, jails, and surveillance to
manage social problems and problematized populations, requires distinct victim and per-
petrator categories to operate (DiBennardo, 2018; Pickett et al., 2013). Successful state
prosecutions rest on the testimony of innocent victims, and increasingly punitive sen-
tences require the state to understand perpetrators of crime as wholly bad (Carlsmith,
2006; Clear and Frost, 2014; Quinn et al., 2004; Spencer, 2009). Activists’ struggle to
make sense of complex victims, then, reflects also their wrestling with core assumptions
of the carceral state.
Feminists have an at-once collaborative and combative relationship with the carceral
state. While scholars and activists early in the feminist resurgence of the 1960s thought
of the state as necessarily patriarchal (Brownmiller, 1975; MacKinnon, 1989), more lib-
erally minded activists worked to inject a feminist agenda into the state (Bernstein, 2012;
Ferree and Hess, 2002). Much of this reformative action happened in the criminal-legal
sphere, where activists won changes to policing, prosecutorial, and sentencing practices
(Goodmark, 2018; Whittier, 2016). Over the past two decades, feminists, particularly
feminists of color, have increasingly pushed back against this agenda and identified car-
ceral responses to gender-based violence as counter to a feminist agenda (Bernstein,
2010; Kim, 2020a, 2020b; Richie, 2012). Criminal-legal responses poorly address vic-
tims’ needs, brutalize communities of color, and fail to achieve their rehabilitative goals
(Bumiller, 2010). Despite growing critiques, however, most rape crisis centers continue
funneling their victims toward carceral solutions and accepting extensive support, both
logistical and financial, from the criminal-legal system (Corrigan, 2013). This article
uses feminist activists’ treatment of complex victims, a population incompatible with the
carceral state, to understand the feminist relationship with the criminal-legal system
more broadly.
To explain activists’ continued participation in a justice system they disagree with, I
build on organization theory’s concept of “path dependence” (Sydow et al., 2009). This
term describes how decisions made early in organizations’ lifecycles influence the range
of decisions available to them later (Beckman and Burton, 2008). Over time, beliefs,
technologies, and practices get “locked-in” to organizations, precluding alternatives
even if one of those alternatives may produce more organizational efficacy or efficiency
(David, 1985). I argue that, in feminist organizations, carceral understandings of and
approaches to treating gender-based violence have become locked-in to organizational
structures. Despite activists’ critiques of the carceral state, they continue complying with
it because its approaches are baked into the feminist organizations themselves.
92 Theoretical Criminology 26(1)
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