All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence is a history of grassroots activism by, for, and about incarcerated domestic violence survivors, criminalized rape resisters, and dissident women prisoners in the 1970s and early 1980s. Across the country, in and outside of prisons, radical women participated in collective actions that insisted on the interconnections between interpersonal violence against women and the racial and gender violence of policing and imprisonment. These organizing efforts generated an anticarceral feminist politics that was defined by a criti ... More

All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence is a history of grassroots activism by, for, and about incarcerated domestic violence survivors, criminalized rape resisters, and dissident women prisoners in the 1970s and early 1980s. Across the country, in and outside of prisons, radical women participated in collective actions that insisted on the interconnections between interpersonal violence against women and the racial and gender violence of policing and imprisonment. These organizing efforts generated an anticarceral feminist politics that was defined by a critique of state violence; an understanding of race, gender, class, and sexuality as mutually constructed systems of power and meaning; and a practice of coalition-based organizing. Drawing on an array of archival sources as well as first-person narratives, the book traces the political activities, ideas, and influence of this activist current. All Our Trials demonstrates how it shaped broader debates about the root causes of and remedies for violence against women as well as played a decisive role in the making of a prison abolition movement.