The Road to Abolition

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Note: This article describes verbal abuse and harassment of incarcerated women.

As abolitionists across the United States push for decarceration, a backlash has emerged in the form of new prison construction, demonstrating the resiliency of mass incarceration. Several new women’s prisons are being built despite a growing chorus of voices arguing that prisons only inflict more harm on women who have already endured abuse and trauma.

Last year, a new prison to hold nearly 1,000 women was opened in Louisiana to replace the prison that flooded almost a decade earlier. What the news media described as a “campus” (a word used to conflate imprisonment with voluntary settings like colleges and corporate parks) includes a rehabilitation center, classrooms, and a delivery room for women forced to have their babies in prison. In Maine, a new “reentry center” for women was completed in 2017. “Ideally we’d like to say that we don’t need prisons,” then-Gov. Paul LePage said at the grand opening. “But if we’re going to have prisons, this is the type of prison that we need…”

Truthout spoke with activists fighting the construction of new women’s prisons in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Illinois, who said they recognized similar trends. In Vermont, a proposal by the legislature for a new prison for women in Essex was halted last year when activists convinced the local planning commission to rule against a zoning request. In Massachusetts, after calls for a prison moratorium failed, Gov. Maura Healey announced in 2025 a plan to “re-imagine” the women’s prison there. In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Corrections launched in 2024 what is dubbed “RISE IDOC” to build two new prisons, including a new women’s prison with a “gender-responsive” design.

Supporters of prison construction are billing these new facilities for women as “trauma-informed,” “gender-responsive,” and “rehabilitative.” They illustrate attempts to repackage mass incarceration as what author and activist James Kilgore coined “carceral humanism,” or what Angela Davis has described as “carceral feminism.”

“All of this stuff about trauma-informed prisons is a lie,” said Monica Cosby, who spent 20 years incarcerated in Illinois and is now working with the group No New Prisons Illinois to stop the building of a new women’s prison in her state. “It’s both absurd and obscene.”

Releases, Not Transfers, Must Be at the Center of Prison Closure Plans

In Vermont, the political momentum for reform at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility for women in South Burlington was redirected to a plan for new prison construction. A white paper released in 2012 detailed the “disturbing conditions” there that prompted the state legislature to intervene. Instead of sentencing reform or much-needed mental and medical services, legislators chose to build a new prison.

“Our knee-jerk reaction is still prison construction,” said Jayna Ahsaf, founder of Project Abolition and former campaign director of FreeHer Vermont.

The plan for a new prison to hold about 100 women initially costing between $50 and $60 million was........

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