In 2022, prominent feminist activist Gloria Steinem wrote to New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams, asking the city to promote the “successful reentry” of incarcerated people into society by offering them a “therapeutic setting that fosters community, connections, family reunification and skills building,” through what she and a number of other feminists titled the “Women’s Center for Justice”.

While Steinem used flowery language to discuss the Women’s Center for Justice, it was essentially a prison for women and “gender-expansive people”. Once the news broke, it was immediately met with backlash, with abolitionist activists calling out Steinem for suggesting that prisons just need to be reformed when they, as academic Marc Lamont Hill argues, need to be “destroyed, not repaired”. When I first heard about Steinem’s letter, my immediate reaction was to proclaim that she is not a real feminist. How could she be when she’s advocating to reform and expand a system that continues to harm and kill not only women, but those of all genders?

“We tend to make attempts at rehistoricising feminism, where we look back and say, ‘Oh, this person wasn’t a feminist because they became a police officer.’ Or ‘Theresa May can’t be a feminist because she wants loads of women locked up in girlswood immigration removal centres’,” Leah Cowan, author of Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? explains to Dazed. “But I think it’s more useful to understand the capacious nature of feminism. We should include these right-wing and very oppressive positions into our understanding of feminism, so we can be frank and honest about the fact that the mainstream feminist movement in Britain, and in many other parts of the world, is carceral.”

From Steinem’s call for more gender-inclusive prisons and Dr Charlotte Proudman’s campaign to enshrine “affirmative consent into law”, to campaigns by feminists to make upskirting illegal, and the fact some of the first-ever women police officers in Britain were suffragettes – mainstream feminism has always relied on policing and prisons as a solution to patriarchal violence. But Cowan queries if “setting the dogs of the state on men from our communities is really going to solve that issue, or is it just bringing more violence to our door?”

Following the release of her book, we spoke to Cowan about how the police run a very successful PR exercise, the way carceral feminism operates in Britain, and how we can expand our feminist imagination to see a clear path towards police abolition.

What inspired you to write a book tracing the history of British feminism’s alliances and struggles with the police?

Leah Cowan: I have worked in the charity sector for 12 years now. I have worked in the domestic violence sector, which is sometimes referred to as the women’s sector or the gender-based violence sector, as well as in the migrant’s rights sector, which is where I work now. Through working in those spaces, I noticed some fascinating contradictions in that within the migrant’s rights work I was doing, there was a real emphasis on wanting less contact with the state, less criminalisation, and fewer interactions with state violence. People notice that when they come into contact with the state, for whatever reason, things end up going badly. However, when I was working in the women’s sector, or the domestic violence sector, there was this real lingering idea that more contact from the state was the thing that was going to reduce harm to women – whether that was more policing, longer prison sentences, or criminalising as many different types of violence as we can imagine. Through working in these two different spaces, I saw this contradiction between ideology, political position and strategy. I wanted to write the book to try and understand why the mainstream feminist movement in Britain is so carceral. Why has it become this space where all that can be imagined is that it would be better if we had more carceral activity rather than less?

I remember thinking the same thing after George Floyd was murdered. In the United States, Trump deployed riot police to brutalise protestors, and I saw feminists online decrying that this wouldn’t be happening if we just had more women in the police force. I was so confused that people were coming to that conclusion after the police killed a Black man. Why do you think, even in the face of police violence and murder, mainstream feminist thinking always returns to the same solution of needing more police or reforming them?

Leah Cowan: It’s not because we’re gullible or stupid. I think it’s because the police play a specific – and I’m going to use a phrase domestic violence expert Janey Starling, who I interviewed in the book, used – ‘psychological function’ in society. It is drilled into us that the police are essential to society. They provide safety and are this thin line between order and chaos. Even among communities, particularly racialised communities, where we know that the police are a site of violence, there is still this lingering idea that if we were to abolish the police, things would get worse. I think part of that is because the police, from their very inception, have been a very successful PR exercise.

I’m going to go on a light historical tangent: in 1816, there was a big working-class uprising in Manchester. There was a lot of poverty and widespread unemployment because of the Corn Laws and the high cost of grain. At this time, there wasn’t a nationalised police force, so the state just sent in the military, and they massacred loads of people. People were alarmed and upset by what happened. After this incident, the state thought, ‘OK, that didn’t look so good. We need to find a different way to do this. Let’s create a police force.’ The police force was the state’s way of beautifying state violence to make it look more acceptable. Now, those committing violence and brutality wear nice suits with funny hats and polished shoes. They’ll walk around swinging their truncheon, and state violence will look a little bit more orderly and a little bit more respectable than just sending the military into a crowd of people. Ten or 20 years later, the Metropolitan Police was formed with this idea of policing by consent. This draws on respectability politics and how we do things differently here in Britain. We’re civilised and well-behaved; we’re not like those people in the countries we’re colonising. Because of this, it’s tough for people to resist policing because they’re so solidly pitched to us as an acceptable form of violence.

“The police force was the state’s way of beautifying state violence to make it look more acceptable. Now, those committing violence and brutality wear nice suits with funny hats and polished shoes” – Leah Cowan

What does ‘carceral feminism’ mean?

Leah Cowan: Carceral feminism was coined by an academic called Elizabeth Bernstein in 2007. She wrote an article in a journal that mainly focused on the way that evangelical Christian groups, some NGO groups and some secular feminists coalesce together around this anti-sex work position. That’s the starting point of her research. She uses the term ‘carceral feminism’ to talk about a specifically neoliberal approach to feminism that seeks to redress harm through criminal legal interventions that involve locating harm within ‘deviant individuals’ in society rather than looking at institutions, social norms, attitudes and patterns of activity.

Do you think gender has a part to play in the way carceral feminism operates in Britain?

Leah Cowan: For me, one of the aims of the book was trying to understand why there is such a virulent strain of carceral feminism in this present moment that we’re living in and where it comes from. And why does it coalesce with transphobic attitudes, anti-sex work positions, racism, Islamophobia, etc? I think part of it has to do with – and this comes from a piece that I read by Linda Stupart in The White Pube – trauma and phobia, and how those two things are very interlinked because when someone is often working from the point of trauma, they can become very binary in the way that they see the world. This is not an excuse for transphobia, maybe an attempt to explain it, in that they begin to see the world in these very clear-cut and rigid categories – like victim, perpetrator; man, woman; religious and secular – with a particular hierarchy of good and bad placed in all of those categories.

When you begin to separate the world into these false categories, it then becomes very easy to move into a very transphobic or carceral position because you can draw circles around all of these perpetrators, and the solution is to just put them all in prison and solve all of our problems. There’s almost this kind of desperate clinging to an easy solution to violence in society, rather than thinking about what if we kind of radically dismantled all of these structures of harm and rebuilt what scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls ‘life-affirming institutions’, which feels like a much more intimidating project. Still, it’s something that we are all doing in small and big ways, here and now. So, yes, gender is essential to cultural feminism. I think a lot of feminists that have this more carceral approach potentially come from this very second and third-wave place, where there’s a very biologically essentialist grounding in feminism, which is a confusing contradiction because feminism, particularly in the way that someone like Judith Butler describes it, is about escaping categories, escaping labels and escaping rigidities. When you think of feminism and gender like this, they become this everlasting, open-ended question that we never really answer.

It’s challenging for people to envision a world without police, but how would you encourage people to expand their feminist imagination when thinking about a world without policing or prisons?

Leah Cowan: This is a question about staying hopeful, right? Abolitionist Maria Macabre talks about hope as a discipline, which we have to work on every day. We have to wake up, and we have to cultivate hope, and we have to keep it alive. I think I do this by reading the work of abolitionist feminists and organisers. It’s about being in a community with others with this shared vision. They have the same shared frustrations, and they have the same shared despondency sometimes, but to surround yourself with other people who also believe that what we’re doing right now is crucial, fundamental and important and that there is this bigger vision that we’re also struggling towards. I think it’s tough if you’re a lone voice and all of your friends around you are just like, ‘Abolishing the police is impossible, and here’s why.’ It’s very easy to get despondent; I think you need to find a community of people, whether in a grassroots organising group or within your union. Finding those voices and those points of solidarity is going to be the thing that keeps us going.

Why Would Feminists Trust the Police?: A tangled history of resistance and complicity is published Verso Books, and is out now.