Prison Research: testimonial carceral labor and abolition feminist solidarity

Prison research seeking to expose carceral violence may reproduce harm, even when grounded in feminist and trauma-informed commitments. In this paper, I treat system-impacted people’s testimony as theory and consider how prioritizing their knowledge can inform politically accountable, solidarity-driven research. I bring qualitative interviews with formerly incarcerated people into conversation with scholarship by system-impacted people. I conceptualize testimonial carceral labor as the accumulated emotional and embodied work of narrating carceral harm across institutional and research structures shaped by confinement, surveillance, and extractive disciplinary logics. Research inherits a testimonial landscape produced by carceral institutions that demand disclosure while denying criminalized people’s credibility—and often their humanity. Disciplinary demands privileging crisis-centered narratives over participants’ autonomy and self-determination may make retraumatization structurally likely, although not inevitable. Participants’ analyses complicate assumptions that post-release interviews are necessarily safer and reveal how carceral power persists and reorganizes risk beyond prison walls through surveillance and the threat of punishment—especially through racialized and gendered social control and state violence. Prioritizing system-impacted people’s strategies and centering their leadership, I position material support and self-critique as abolition feminist solidarity methods that may serve as nonreformist interventions to address immediate harms, challenge carceral power, and support social justice movements more broadly.