The Web of Community-Based Carceral Power: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding How Probation and Child Protective Services Contact and Court-Orders to Antiviolence Intervention Entrap and Entangle Systems-Involved Women

This paper proposes a conceptual framework of entrapped carceral web entanglement to describe the complexity of systems-involved women’s community-based carceral contact. The framework is grounded in the author’s three-year in-depth inquiry into 33 cisgender women’s experiences with legal and child protective services (CPS) contact for being systems-identified as having used force in their relationships. Most women disclosed domestic and sexual violence survivorship histories. They were recruited from an antiviolence intervention (AVI) that received referrals from communities with mandatory and preferred arrest laws. The women described how their probation, CPS, and court-ordered AVI contact entrapped and entangled them for years.