« No Lady Prison didn’t improve me none ». Luttes anti-carcérales et luttes féministes après Attica

• Main Author: Jean Bérard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Criminocorpus 2019-12-01
• Series: Criminocorpus
• Subjects: prisons; inmates revolts; feminism; racism; sexual violence
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/criminocorpus/6791

In both the United States and France, the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s experienced contrasting relationships, between the empowerment of spaces of struggle, agreements on the refusal of state repression, and controversies on the relationship with state reforms. The article aims to sketch out the history of these relationships by taking prison revolts as a starting point and analysing how dissensions have occurred between activists who initially shared the denunciation of incarceration as a repressive tool. The politicization of sexual violence against women is the main framework for expressing disagreements. France and the United States have comparable trajectories in this respect - mobilizations against sexual violence acting as a factor of militant conflict, but also different, due to the weight of the legacy of racism and the violence of the punitive turn in American from the 1970s onward.