Counter-carceral acoustemologies: Sound,permeability and feminist protest at the prison boundary

Introduction

This article responds to recent calls for criminologists and carceral geographers to study ‘soundscapes and acoustic spaces’ (Hayward, 2012: 458) and the ‘sonic materiality of carceral landscapes’ (Hemsworth, 2015: 17) in order to better understand the relationship between space, surveillance and social control—and the rhythms of political protest and social resistance. We experiment with acoustic methodologies developed within human geography and the transdisciplinary field of sound studies (Bennett et al., 2015; Gallagher et al., 2017; LaBelle, 2010) to provide an analysis of sonic protest strategies used by anti-carceral feminist coalitions in Melbourne, Australia. Through a detailed historical case study of a series of ‘Wring Out’ demonstrations waged at the site of Fairlea Women’s Prison during the period 1988–1996, which involved people surrounding the perimeter of the prison and making noise that would be audible to women inside, we explore how sound can be used as a tool of anti-carceral resistance.

Anti-carceral feminisms encompass political visions and practical strategies that are coalitional, oriented around gender/class/race analyses, and in contrast to what has been dubbed ‘carceral feminism’ (Bernstein, 2010; Davis, 2016), concerned to challenge prison- and policing-based solutions to social and political problems (Carlton, 2016; Thuma, 2015). As part of a broader movement working towards prison abolition (Davis, 2003), anti-carceral feminists seek to develop ‘inside/out’ organizing strategies (Faith, 2000) and critiques that situate and target the prison not in isolation but as part of a continuum of violence and control. Our research on one such local iteration of anti-carceral feminist activism aims to advance debates regarding abolitionist praxis and specifically the threshold points wherein decarcerative change may be achieved (or not) through critical interventions within and outside carceral systems. Elsewhere we have critically examined feminist engagements with institutional reform discourses and processes (Carlton and Russell, 2018; Russell and Carlton, 2013); whereas in this article we consider the potentials and limitations of grassroots and direct-action protest to build support for decarceration. Here, we view the prison not simply as a concrete structure, but as a social and cultural product, and object of emotional and psychic attachment (Agathangelou et al., 2008; Jackson and Meiners, 2011).

By closely listening to the unfolding of a series of protests occurring at the border of public and carceral space, our analysis demonstrates how the interface between inside/outside can be strategically negotiated and appropriated by anti-carceral feminist coalitions. We show how activists have used sound and electroacoustic technologies in multiple ways: to support women ‘speaking out’ about their experiences of confinement; to amplify protest demands; and to facilitate solidarity across prison walls. We find that these experimentations with sound can breach the carceral boundary and displace carceral-spatial control through forms of political dialogue and creative exchange between imprisoned and non-imprisoned actors. These effects and formations are in some ways fleeting; resistant ‘breaches’ are countered by various modes of boundary fortification over time (Balfour, 2018; Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001; Scraton, 2016). An historical trajectory of penal expansion and securitization shows how the prison can ramp up and re-enclose carceral space when challenged. Yet, when viewed from an alternative vantage point, the ‘Wring Outs’ were also generative and productive of ‘inside/out’ collaborations and connections that challenged ‘the ideological work that the prison performs’ (Davis, 2003: 16). In particular, they undermined the notion of the prison as ‘an abstract site where undesirables are deposited’ (Davis, 2003: 16), as sonic modes of resistance aided in humanizing imprisoned women and constructing an alternative space from which to imagine an abolitionist future.

The article proceeds as follows. First, we explore the permeable nature of the prison boundary and consider how social movements have experimented with carceral porosity. Second, we present a case for sonic methods in critical prisons/carceral research and note the complex relationship between sound and space. Third, we briefly outline the empirical research design and methodology that forms the basis of analysis, in particular, the use of an experimental approach to listening or ‘earwitnessing’ (Schafer, 1994, 2004) in our engagement with interview and archival recordings. This approach allows for a deeper and more situated consideration of the ways in which sound produces and patterns (counter-carceral) spaces. The case study of the Wring Out Fairlea demonstrations forms the fourth section of the article.

After providing a brief background to the conception of these protests and the goals of the emergent anti-carceral feminist movement driving them, we focus on the key, often creative, sonic ‘boundary-crossing’ techniques that demonstrators constructed for and during these events, which are organized into three short sections: radio broadcasting; rhythm and music; and excessive protest noise. We argue that no one strategy leads to the transformation of carceral space, but rather, the coordination of multiple disruptive sonic mediums produces ‘counter-carceral acoustemologies’ (see Feld, 1996), or ways of knowing and sharing knowledge about carceral existence and resistance, which challenge the dehumanization and normalization of the former. ¹ Lastly, we reflect on the impacts and outcomes of this protest movement, including the ways it highlights various carceral strategies of censure, isolation and boundary fortification. In sum, the article focuses on a particular social movement and its potential to advance the abolitionist goals of denaturalizing the prison and challenging its seeming permanence in our political and cultural landscapes.

Permeability and the prison boundary

Prison boundaries, much like national borders, are reified and permeable in multiple and uneven ways (Baumer et al., 2009; Moran, 2015; Moran et al., 2013; Wonders, 2006). Challenging Goffman’s (1961) classic notion of the ‘total institution’ and the presumption of a ‘closed off prison world’, Farrington (1992: 7) argues for an alternative conception of the ‘not-so-total institution’ that maintains, ‘at most, a selective and imperfect degree of separation between what exists inside of and what lies beyond prison walls’. Taking up this provocation, researchers have examined the many networked ‘transactions, exchanges and relationships which connect and bind [prisons] to their immediate host communities and to society more generally’ (Farrington, 1992: 7; Gilmore, 2007; Moran, 2015; Turner, 2016). These relationships problematize the conception of an inside/outside binary view of prisons (Baer and Ravneberg, 2008) and remind us that edges are also ‘interfaces’ (Gilmore, 2007: 11). The prison is not a discrete edifice, nor is it an inevitable ‘fact’, but rather the ‘ossification of a set of relations’ (Story, 2017: 464), which render carceral spaces somewhat open to negotiation, re-ordering and challenge. As geographer and prison abolitionist Ruthie Gilmore (2007: 11) argues, the common view that ‘prisons sit on the edge—at the margins of social spaces, economic regions, political territories, and fights for rights’ is ‘a trick of perspective’. Notwithstanding the particularities of its ‘carceral conditions’ (Moran et al., 2017), the prison maintains a co-constitutive relationship with society at large (Turner, 2016), as the flow of cultural, social and legal currents renders its boundary fundamentally ‘porous’ (Crewe, 2009: 5).

Of course, to note the messiness, semi-permeability and porosity of the prison boundary is not to deny the absence of the prison’s power. As Turner (2016: 229) cautions, ‘the boundaries may be permeable but they are certainly present—physically and metaphorically’ working to exclude and marginalize. Although the increasing reach of surveilling and criminalizing technologies might blur and extend its boundaries, the revival of the prison as a ‘spatial fix’ to neo-liberal insecurities and abandonment (Cunneen et al., 2013; Gilmore, 2007; Wacquant, 2009) suggests that it is in many ways lodged in our geographical, cultural and political horizons. At a micro-level, the power of the prison as a (not-so) total institution is elucidated through its ability to control the flow of (differentiated) bodies (Moran et al., 2012) and, to a lesser extent, the flow of information, ideas and material and emotional support (Balfour, 2018; Piché, 2011). In short, the prison has exclusive and silencing functions, but it is also ‘partially open, allowing the passage of certain elements while acting as a barrier to others’ (Schliehe, 2016: 32).

In various contexts, anti-carceral feminists and other social justice activists have experimented with the potentials of porosity to build networks of information exchange and political collaboration across prison walls (Berger, 2014; Carlton, 2016; Kunzel, 2008; Rodriguez, 2006; Schept, 2015). In Melbourne in the 1980s and early 1990s, anti-carceral feminist campaigns challenged the demarcated spatial (and social) boundaries dividing imprisoned women from the community through various means. For example, both overt and covert forms of information gathering and exchange were conducted by imprisoned and formerly imprisoned women, activist lawyers and women working inside the prison (in health, education and drama programmes) to aid public education efforts, formal legal challenges and protest coordination across prison walls (Carlton, 2016; Carlton and Russell, 2018). As one of our informants stated, ‘I know there was messages going in and out [of the prison] all the time’ (Maud Clark interview, 5 September 2016). These unauthorized flows suggest that, while powerful forces ‘can tabulate, build, and create spaces and places’, the ‘relatively powerless’ can also ‘manipulate and divert them’ (Cresswell, 1996: 164). Indeed, critical geographers have long known that space is not static or neutral, it is always ‘open to being re-read, re-constructed, re-thought’ (Massey, 2005; Olarte and Wall, 2012: 330). Among other strategies and tactics, anti-carceral feminists have harnessed the productive and destructive qualities of sound to critique, penetrate and reinscribe carceral space, which draws attention to the prison soundscape as highly contested terrain.

Sound and carceral space

While the field of ‘visual criminology’ has grown significantly in recent years (e.g. Brown and Carrabine, 2017), it is largely lacking a sonic counterpart. ² Yet, interest in the epistemic and methodological potentials of sound for social scientific research is building across disciplines (e.g. Bull and Back, 2003). In particular, geographers have emphasized the fundamental and complex relationship between sound and space. While space produces sound in all kinds of ways (Gallagher et al., 2017), space is also configured and territorialized through sound (Atkinson, 2007; Gallagher, 2015; Hayward, 2012; LaBelle, 2010). Yet critical prison researchers have only just begun exploring the analytic possibilities of sound. Hemsworth (2015) suggests that attention to acoustics and soundscapes aids in constructing, perceiving and making sense of carceral environments. ³ Indeed, recent studies of sounds inside prison (Cusick, 2013; Hemsworth, 2016; Kutzler, 2014; McKay, 2016; Rice, 2016) identify multiple ways in which sound demarcates, patterns and disrupts carceral space. Cusick (2013: 276), for example, elucidates the ‘acoustic dystopia’ of detention in the global ‘war on terror’, whereby the authoritative manipulation of the prison’s soundscape disrupts ‘ordinary relationality’ among prisoners and ‘produces the desired destruction of subjectivity’. Others, such as Kutzler (2014) and Rice (2016: 6), find that effective use of noise can serve as a method of prisoner resistance and form of ‘acoustic agency’, highlighting prisoners’ role in ‘shaping the sonic space they inhabit’.

Drawing on the idea that spatial boundaries and impressions are created, reinstated and broken apart by sound (Gallagher et al., 2017), we investigate the sonic and spatial dimensions of a series of protests waged at the constructed border between public and carceral space. We document how activists have harnessed the ‘spatially rich’ and ‘fluid’ nature of sound (Hemsworth, 2016)—its ability to ‘flood and intrude’ (Ihde, 1976: 232)—to interrupt and undermine carceral-spatial control and resist its dehumanizing effects. During the demonstrations we describe below, the protesters succeed in enhancing precisely the acoustic flows that are disrupted and disabled in the harsh carceral regimes analysed by Cusick (2013). The Wring Outs supported the ‘acoustic agency’ of imprisoned women, reduced the vacuum of public knowledge about their experiences and built ‘outside’ activists spatial and political awareness of the women’s prison in a local context.

Experimenting with sound in critical prisons research

The following empirical materials are drawn from an historical research project focused on a social movement that emerged at and through the productive interface between feminist campaigns and penal change in the women’s prison system in Victoria, Australia, during the 1980s and 1990s (Carlton, 2016; Carlton and Russell, 2015). In part enabled by our own local activist involvement in anti-carceral feminist and other intersecting movements, we have conducted 15 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups with activists and government officials involved in women’s prison policy and governance during the time period under examination (1980–2000). ⁴ The project has simultaneously involved extensive archival research, including the collection and collation of an unofficial ‘activist archive’ that spans a series of interconnected and overlapping individuals, collectives, organizations and coalitional campaigns (Carlton and Russell, 2018). While the activist archive is made up of a wide variety of documents and objects that have been closely examined (see Carlton and Russell, 2018), most notable for this analysis are the audio records of historical protests, activist conferences and campaign ‘talking points’, such as prison conditions detailed over telephone by imprisoned women. These records have been accessed and digitized using audiocassettes archived at 3CR community radio station in Melbourne. ⁵ We listened to around 220 minutes, or just over three and a half hours, of historical radio broadcast content, produced between 1988 and 1996. ⁶ We listened to some of these broadcasts several times, tuning variously into the content, tone and volume of commentary and recorded speeches, music and other background noises, while also taking notes and transcribing the most relevant parts for further analysis.

Although the affective dimensions of sound and music are well recognized (Kanngieser, 2012; Revill, 2000), they are difficult to capture in social science research (Wood et al., 2007). However, the process of listening involved in research is often particularly emotive (Bennett et al., 2015). In our case, the auditory nature of the activist archive made encounters with it deeply affecting. For example, audio records of the Wring Outs feature collective chants, impassioned speeches and loud outbursts, applause, live music, young children’s voices, ‘vox pop’ surveys of the crowd and women imprisoned at Fairlea telephoning out messages of frustration, as well as support for protesters. We adopted an approach informed by Schafer’s (1994, 2004) notion of ‘earwitnessing’ as a form of listening that focuses on the specific social, cultural and political manifestations of sound, attempting to ‘hear [sound] within history, through an extended ear’ (LaBelle, 2010: 108).

While moving, listening to archival sound recordings as a researcher does not provide unmediated access to historical soundscapes, nor the way a society experienced and received such sounds (Birdsall, 2012; Hemsworth, 2015; Smith, 2004). We do not know, for example, who listened to the Wring Out broadcasts on 3CR radio, nor how they responded to them. However, insight into how particular resistance strategies (sonic and otherwise) come to give shape to social/carceral spaces, experiences and attitudes has been garnered through other mediums in the activist archive, such as hand-written diary entries and personal correspondence between imprisoned and non-imprisoned activists. Interviews with ‘outside’ campaigners provided further insight into the meanings that organizers and participants assigned to the Wring Outs, which were frequently recalled as powerful symbols of this movement’s success, and the significance of sound, space and the (permeability of the) prison boundary in their recollections. Indeed, as the analysis of the prison’s porosity as both produced and harnessed by anti-carceral feminist protest developed during the course of the research, it was tested and confirmed by subsequent interviewees, in line with feminist social science methods that view research participants as experts in the field (e.g. Roseneil, 1995).

Women Against Prison: Direct action at the prison boundary

‘Wring Out Fairlea’ demonstrations took place in Melbourne in 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1996. In early 1988, the Coalition Against Women’s Imprisonment formed to launch and promote a report on women and imprisonment that was compiled by activist lawyers, Amanda George and Jude McCulloch. The report highlighted that the number of women imprisoned in the Australian state of Victoria had increased by 450 per cent over a 10-year period (George and McCulloch, 1988). ⁷ The Wring Out was conceived as a way to ‘forge links’ with imprisoned women and thrust their grievances into the public spotlight. Inspired by direct actions undertaken at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp at Berkshire, England, such as the ‘Embrace the Base’ and ‘Human Chain’ protests in 1982 (Roseneil, 1995; Young, 1990), the Coalition designed a festive gathering and a photogenic ‘direct action’ stunt that would attract media coverage and allow large crowds to see the women’s prison in close proximity. Fairlea Women’s Prison was particularly suitable for such a protest, situated only six kilometres north of Melbourne’s central business district and accessible by public transport. Aesthetically, public parkland and sports fields surrounded it. Organizer Jude McCulloch (interview, 12 August 2016) suggested that the first Wring Out was:

A creative response to the idea that it’s hard to make the connection between inside and out. It followed the trajectory of the idea of ‘Jumping Walls’. ⁸ If you had a big enough crowd outside, the noise would travel inside… How to maintain a connection and a presence around prison, I think, is a difficult question, [and one that] requires a creative response.

Several women involved in the Coalition suggested to us that the Wring Outs materialized, at least in part, as an experiment in challenging and re-ordering the exclusionary and authoritative spatial structure of the prison through sound. The affective and relational nature of sound, its ability to be amplified and transmitted via telephone and radio, meant that it could be used as a vehicle to build solidarity between imprisoned and non-imprisoned women. The volume of the protest would enhance its impact and ability to transgress the prison boundary—if you had a big enough crowd outside, the noise would travel inside.

More broadly, the dynamic coalitions and groups that organized the Wring Outs sought to build opposition to a political trajectory of criminalization and carceral expansion targeted at women in their local context. They pursued this goal by diversifying their tactical base and turning the prison surrounds ‘into an acoustic register of political conflict’ (LaBelle, 2010: 113). Analysis of the available evidence suggests that their approach was relatively successful in ‘finding reception’. For instance, attendance at the demonstrations grew from roughly 700 or 800 participants at the first action to 2400 at the last Wring Out in 1996. They attracted significant media coverage of a topic that rarely draws attention; that is, women’s experiences of carceral violence (e.g. Canberra Times, 1988; Murphy, 1988). The Wring Outs also contributed to growing pressures to reform the women’s prison system in Victoria in the early 1990s (Carlton and Russell, 2015; George, 1993). The demonstrations literally amplified protest demands, which ranged from improved access to health care for women in prison and an end to strip searches, to the decriminalization of drug use and sex work (George and McCulloch, 1988). ⁹ The Wring Outs thereby simultaneously promoted ‘pragmatic’ prison reforms and a programme of ‘decarceration’ (the gradual reduction of prison numbers) as they progressively developed an abolitionist framework for their activism (Berger, 2013; Davis, 2003). By the fourth demonstration in May 1996, the first demand issued by Wring Out organizers was ‘that no women be in prison’ (Women and Imprisonment Group, 1996).

A micro-analysis of protest: Counter-carceral acoustemologies

Wring Out Fairlea demonstrators developed political strategies for ‘acoustic presence’ (Birdsall, 2012: 32) in the prison soundscape, using sound in multiple and cumulative ways to challenge the normative spatialization of carceral power and to ‘socially denaturalize and politically deneutralize’ women’s imprisonment (Mitchelson, 2014: 327). Through the use of radio broadcasting, rhythm and music, and excessive protest noise, the Wring Outs established collective spatial practices and sonic resonance that exceeded and temporarily remade the prison boundary to contest the legitimacy of exclusionary confinement. Demonstrations, LaBelle (2010: 109) suggests, are particularly ‘dynamic instances of conflict and debate’ that can ‘instigate new patterns, aiming to reconfigure set rhythms with other timing’.

Assessing the impacts of a protest movement

The closure of Fairlea in 1996 made way for a new privately constructed (and temporarily privately run) maximum-security women’s prison in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs that is far more isolated and ‘out of view’, including total inaccessibility via public transport. The establishment of the new prison, now named the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, was accompanied by a marked increase in securitization and surveillance, intensified departmental secrecy and a distinct acceleration of an expansionist trajectory in women’s imprisonment history in Victoria (George, 1999). The prison’s official capacity (which is often exceeded) has expanded from 125 to more than 500 ‘beds’—a quadrupling in just 20 years (Victorian Ombudsman, 2017: 4). While the new women’s prison was met with collective resistance in its first weeks of operation from both ‘outside’ activists, who staged a ‘blood money’ protest at the official opening, and imprisoned women, who held a successful ‘sit-in’ over the cancellation of visits with their children, it has not served as the site for mass demonstrations like the Wring Outs for a range of reasons. Amanda George (interview, 22 November 2016) described the new women’s prison as ‘intimidating’; because ‘you’re under so much more surveillance out there’. She noted that ‘strategically it was a lot harder’ to organize on-site protests when the immediate surrounds of the prison fall into a privatized ‘zone’ (whereas Fairlea was surrounded by public parklands). Effectively, the prison boundary has expanded and blurred. It has been erected even higher and constructed more densely. Its soundscape is more totalizing and less penetrable, further restricting activists’ ability to ‘make noise’ about women’s imprisonment and maintain a political dialogue with women inside.

Given that various forces weigh upon penal cultures, the success or otherwise of anti-carceral feminist movements cannot be assessed by institutional developments alone. Relying upon prison or sentencing reforms, for instance, as the only marks of ‘progress’ restricts our ability to appreciate the political, social and cultural possibilities borne out of collective action and shared historical experience. Evidently protesters did not succeed in physically dismantling the prison or even reducing the women’s prison population in this case. However, as Angela Davis (2016: 22) highlights, one of the most pressing tasks for abolitionists is to address the ideological and psychic scaffolding of the prison (including the internalization of the dehumanizing notion of ‘a place to put bad people’ (see also Jackson and Meiners, 2011)). The Wring Outs created hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of public (ear)witnesses to the women’s prison. Through the amplification of varying carceral experiences and perspectives, they elevated the prison in the public consciousness as a site of not only violent enclosure but also survival and resistance. As Trish Luker (interview, 20 January 2017) reflected, Wring Out organizers wanted to ‘forge links’ with imprisoned women, but also indicate to a wider audience (of feminists and community-based activists) that ‘at some level, anyone can end… up in prison—it could be anyone—to try and break down the barrier between “us” and “them” that so often attaches to prisoners’. The Wring Outs therefore involved a political project of humanization.

Through the assembly of hundreds of noisy people, predominantly women and young children, to converge on Fairlea and encircle it by holding hands, organizers orchestrated a mass, embodied confrontation with the women’s prison that brought it sharply into focus. Geographically situating the women’s prison at the centre of political struggle, the Wring Outs challenged the generation of the prison’s ‘taken-for-granted’ marginality in the political landscape and demanded that women’s ‘carceral existence’ be addressed (Brown, 2014). Through creative strategies of resistance, demonstrators deviated from and reinscribed the prison’s ‘topography of power’ (Cresswell, 1996). Yet they also achieved more than this. Viewed as a series of historical political moments, the Wring Outs conjure the possibility of a new spatial ordering: that of decarceral public space. Participants developed modes of spatial and social organization premised on mutuality, collectivity, connection, resistance and pleasure. By harnessing the mobile qualities of sound, activists infiltrated the prison and the airwaves, created lively shared experiences and appropriated the concrete wall to magnify protest effects. In doing so, they established the auditory space as ‘a terrain through which acts of solidarity and resistance could be exercised’, collaboratively, across the prison boundary (Hemsworth, 2016: 95). Through the production of counter-carceral acoustemologies, demonstrators temporarily reconfigured the ‘set rhythms’ of the prison soundscape with new patterns and flows, thus revealing ‘the historical and mutable nature’ of that which is usually considered ‘the way things are’ (Cresswell, 1996: 26). The delineation of ‘carceral’ and ‘public’ space was rendered problematic and impermanent, and alternative spaces of resistance were momentarily made possible.

Conclusion

Counter-carceral acoustemologies highlight that the authoritative control of carceral space is not totalizing, nor is the prison natural or inevitable. Rather, it is a highly contested space, or perhaps more accurately, a set of social relations that are ultimately changeable. Carceral space must continually be remade, fortified and enhanced in order to shore up its inherent permeability, here exploited by activists as an institutional and architectural weakness. From this analysis, we propose that a more nuanced understanding of carceral space and soundscapes—as not entirely separate and static, but relational and in flux—provides greater opportunities for the political task of unmasking the prison as a social and historical product, not an immutable fact. Unfortunately, penal authorities are also quick to adapt to anti-carceral challenges: new and larger prisons can be privately contracted under secretive conditions, sited in increasingly remote and inaccessible locations, and more tightly controlled and surveilled for ‘good order and security’. In spite of the success of the Wring Outs in mobilizing large numbers of people to protest women’s imprisonment in a specific local and historical context, from the vantage point of the present, carceral expansion has been aggressive in its pace and consistency—especially for First Nations women and women of colour (Cunneen et al., 2013; Russell and Carlton, 2013)—and prison abolition maintains a marginal position in political and indeed criminological discourse (Brown and Schept, 2017). Evidently, more work is required in the fields of critical prison/carceral studies to elucidate and analyse abolitionist praxis in specific local contexts (e.g. McDowell, 2017). Building from the present analysis, future studies might examine the status of sound in contemporary practices of anti-carceral resistance, especially those enacted by incarcerated populations.

This article has explored some of the analytic and political opportunities opened up by attending more closely to the role of social movements and resistant sound in the production and disruption of carceral space. Our research illustrates that sound is a particularly powerful boundary-crosser that can challenge the exclusionary spatial ordering of the prison. Under certain political and geographical conditions, the carceral soundscape, which increasingly restricts ‘who gets to hear what’, can be temporarily breached, altered and re-made by protest noise, radio technology, rhythm and music. Counter-carceral acoustemologies signal the creation of alternative ‘soundtracks’ of resistance that both reveal and momentarily displace carceral-spatial control, re-patterning the aural environment of the prison. The Wring Outs enabled strategic and often spontaneous resistant dialogue made up of telephoning, broadcasting, shouting, chanting, singing, banging, drumming and applause across the walls of a women’s prison. Rather than simply a reaction to dominating and repressive architectures of power, anti-carceral feminist resistance is thus simultaneously productive, affirmative and creative (Kanngieser, 2016). Integral to the success of the Wring Outs was a political and ethical commitment to ‘inside/out’ organizing—a strong connection with those inside—which involved sustained practices of exchange and transfer (of information, ideas and material support) between imprisoned and non-imprisoned activists. Permeability is thus not merely a metaphor, but part of an anti-carceral feminist politic and strategy.