When “I Don’t Believe in Carceral Feminism” Still Means Criminalization
- Alex Andrews
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
This story really began in 2018, at the Florida NOW Conference, when I supported what I believed was a modest resolution.
It did not ask Florida NOW to endorse full decriminalization of adult consensual sex work. It did not ask the organization to adopt the sex worker rights movement’s entire policy platform. It asked something much simpler: that Florida NOW not support legislation affecting sex workers when sex workers themselves opposed that legislation. That was it. It was essentially a request that a feminist organization not advocate for laws governing a marginalized population over the objections of the people who would actually have to live under those laws.
A retired judge fought that resolution hard. Her opposition surprised me, not simply because of its intensity, but because I knew her to be someone who had devoted much of her life to women’s rights. She considered herself a feminist. She had spent decades in the legal system. She had seen violence against women up close. But prostitution was different for her. When she thought about prostitution, she did not think about sex workers organizing for labor rights or demanding a voice in legislation. She thought about the women who had passed through her courtroom. She remembered exploitation. She remembered poverty. She remembered violence. She remembered pimps and traffickers. And she believed, deeply, that prostitution was inseparable from those things.
I left that 2018 conference thinking a great deal about her. Eventually, I wrote a story imagining what the world looked like from her side of the bench. The story was never intended to make her a villain. Quite the opposite. I tried to imagine what happens when someone spends forty years seeing sex work almost exclusively through the criminal legal system.
The women who came before her were not a representative sample of people selling sex. They were the people policing had selected for her. They were people who had been arrested. Some were living in poverty. Some were struggling with substance use. Some were experiencing violence. Some had abusive partners. Some may indeed have been trafficked. And sometimes there were men sitting in the back of the courtroom whom she believed were exploiting them. Imagine seeing that year after year, decade after decade. Eventually, it would be understandable to conclude: This is what prostitution looks like.
What would have been much harder for her to see were all the people who never entered her courtroom at all. The independent worker who screened clients and then went home. The person who chose sex work because it paid substantially more than another available job. The person who did sex work intermittently. The person who disliked parts of the job but still preferred it to the other work available to them. The person who simply said, This is what I do. Those people were far less likely to appear before her because they had not been arrested. The courtroom had given her an extraordinarily powerful view of prostitution, but it had also given her a profoundly incomplete one.
Back in 2018, I mostly experienced her opposition as resistance. I knew what sex workers were telling policymakers. I knew how often people with lived experience were invited into rooms only to discover that decisions about us had already been made. And I knew how frustrating it was to ask for something as basic as, please don’t support laws affecting us, when we were telling you those laws would hurt us, and still encounter fierce opposition.
What I understood less well was what I was actually asking someone like her to reconsider. I was not merely asking her to reconsider a prostitution statute. I was potentially asking her to reconsider forty years of her professional life. If criminalization itself had harmed some of the women appearing before her, then the questions that followed had nothing to do with an abstract policy debate.
What happened to the women she sentenced? What happened to their families? What happened to their children? What if some of those women should never have been arrested in the first place?
Those are not easy questions. For someone who believed deeply in the justice system and had worked hard within it to make that system fairer for women, they could be devastating. Understanding that does not make the policy right. But over time, it helped me understand the person.
We met again at the Florida NOW Conference in 2026. Eight years had passed. She remained deeply skeptical of full decriminalization. I remained convinced that consensual adult sex work should not be governed through criminalization and that sex workers must have a meaningful voice in policies governing our lives. We could have simply repeated 2018. We didn’t.
Something between us had changed. Not the politics. The relationship.
We had both accumulated eight more years of life, advocacy, arguments, research, disappointments, and conversations. Perhaps we had also learned that disagreement did not require either of us to reduce the other to the worst possible interpretation of her beliefs. That mattered.
In the months leading up to the 2026 conference, a conversation continued on a group email thread. During that exchange, she wrote something that stopped me.
She said she did not believe in “carceral feminism.”
I believed her when she said it. And that is precisely why the statement interested me so much, because it exposes one of the unresolved contradictions at the center of the prostitution-policy debate. If we oppose carceral feminism, what exactly are we opposing? Are we opposing only the incarceration of women? Or are we questioning feminism’s reliance on police, surveillance, prosecution, criminal statutes, and punishment as tools for solving complicated social problems?
The distinction matters enormously when we talk about the Nordic Model. Its appeal is easy to understand. For someone horrified by the historical arrest and incarceration of people selling sex, it offers an apparently simple correction: We arrested the wrong person. Stop arresting sellers. Arrest buyers. Target exploiters. Punish traffickers. Protect women. That can feel like an obvious feminist evolution.
But sex workers do not live in a separate universe from the people purchasing sex. Enforcement against clients still occurs in the environments where sex workers live and work. Policing the transaction necessarily entails policing its participants, communications, workplaces, advertising, and surrounding networks.
Criminalizing one side of a consensual transaction does not magically insulate the other side from the consequences of enforcement.
That is why the question cannot end with Who gets arrested? We also have to ask: What does the enforcement strategy do to the people we say we are trying to protect? That is the question sex workers have been asking for years.
One thing changed for me between 2018 and 2026. I became much less interested in proving that people who disagree with me do not care about women. I know this particular woman does. I believe she has spent a lifetime caring about women. I believe police officers can sincerely believe they are rescuing people. I believe prosecutors can sincerely believe diversion is compassionate. I believe anti-trafficking advocates can sincerely believe criminalization of buyers will protect people selling sex. And I believe all of those interventions can still produce harm.
Those ideas can exist simultaneously. Intent matters when we are trying to understand people. Outcomes matter when we are evaluating policy. We lose something important when we confuse the two.
There is also something we do not discuss enough in movements for social change: changing your mind can have a cost. Sometimes new evidence does not merely challenge an opinion. It challenges a person’s understanding of their own life. Imagine spending decades believing that the criminal legal system, properly administered, could protect vulnerable women, and then being asked to consider that some of the women you watched enter that system was harmed by the intervention itself.
That is not an argument about legislation anymore. It is memory. It is identity. It is wondering about people whose names you no longer remember. It is wondering where their children are. It is wondering whether they are safe. And perhaps, in the darkest hours, it is wondering: Did I do the right thing? And if the answer might sometimes be no: How many times?
We should have compassion for the enormity of that reckoning. But compassion cannot require today’s sex workers to continue living under harmful policies so that yesterday’s institutions never have to reconsider themselves. We can understand why someone struggles to reconsider a lifetime of professional beliefs without making sex workers responsible for protecting that person from the discomfort of doing so.
The retired judge and I still disagree.
I do not want to pretend otherwise, because doing so would cheapen what actually happened between us. She did not arrive at the 2026 conference announcing her support for full decriminalization. I did not leave persuaded that the Nordic Model was the answer.
But somewhere between 2018 and 2026, we stopped needing the other person to be morally defective in order to explain the disagreement.
That is progress too. Perhaps not legislative progress. Perhaps not enough progress. But human progress. And movements need some of that if we are ever going to persuade anyone who does not already agree with us.
I keep returning to her words from that group email thread: I don’t believe in carceral feminism.
Neither do I.
Where we remain divided is over what follows from that belief. For me, rejecting carceral feminism means more than deciding that sex workers should not be arrested while preserving criminal law around the consensual transaction. It means questioning whether policing and punishment should remain our default response to consensual adult sexual commerce at all. It means distinguishing trafficking from sex work precisely enough that we can aggressively address force, fraud, coercion, violence, and exploitation without pretending that every adult exchanging sex for money is experiencing the same thing.
Above all, it means listening when the people most directly affected by a policy tell us what that policy does to their lives.
And that brings me back to the resolution we fought over in 2018. It was not asking Florida NOW to endorse full decriminalization. It was not demanding ideological agreement. It was asking a feminist organization to refrain from supporting legislation affecting sex workers when sex workers themselves were saying that legislation would harm them.
In other words, it was asking for something remarkably simple: Don’t make policy about us without listening to us.
Eight years later, the judge and I still do not agree about everything. Her worldview did not fundamentally change, and neither did mine.
But our relationship did.
We listen to each other differently now. We understand more about where the other person is coming from. Neither of us had to surrender everything we believed in order for that to happen.
Because changing someone’s politics may take evidence, research, experience, and years of argument. Sometimes it may never happen at all.
But changing the way we see one another can begin with something much smaller: staying in the conversation long enough to discover that disagreement need not make us enemies.
Support Sex Worker-Led Feminism
Support SWOP Behind Bars
