Leigh Goodmark, director of the Gender, Prison, and Trauma Clinic at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, speaks with host Rafa Kidvai about the intersections of intimate partner violence and abolition feminism. They discuss Leigh's journey from advocating for carceral solutions to embracing abolition, the impact of state violence on survivors, and the importance of envisioning a world without punitive systems. {Content warning: This episode contains descriptions of intimate partner violence.}
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Rafa Kidvai: This episode contains descriptions of intimate partner violence. If the subject is difficult or triggering for you, please listen with a friend, listen when you feel ready or skip to the next episode in our series. This is No Body Criminalized, how the state controls our bodies, families, and communities. I'm Rafa Kidvai, director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. On our podcast, we talk with experts, activists, and advocates whose daily work intersects with reproductive justice and the state's targeting of marginalized communities. The founding mothers of reproductive justice in the United States define the term as the human rights to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.
You'll hear us restate the shared commitment throughout our interviews because regardless of the issues guests focus on, that is ultimately the world we all intend to create. Our guest today is Leigh Goodmark. Leigh is the director of the Gender, Prison and Trauma Clinic at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law and the author of Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism. We started our conversation talking about how Leigh's work on intimate partner violence moved her towards abolition feminism.
Leigh Goodmark: I came out of law school in 1994, which was the same year that the Violence Against Women Act was enacted. And at that time we pretty firmly believed that the way to deal with intimate partner violence was through the use of the carceral state. That these guys, and at the time we were only talking about men as perpetrators were awful. They were incorrigible and they could not be reformed in any way and that the only way to stop the spread of intimate partner violence was through imprisonment. And very quickly my clients taught me that that was not what they wanted, and was not what they needed. So I had to start questioning my views about the use of the carceral system in the context of intimate partner violence almost immediately. What I learned as I studied and as I practiced was that my clients needed a lot of things, but incarceration really wasn't giving them the things that they needed.
And then I think like a lot of White people in 2020, the murder of George Floyd, changed the way that I saw the criminal legal system and I don't know why it was that murder by police and not any of the thousands that preceded it. That was the tipping point for so many of us. But that was the point at which I thought to myself, this system really can't be fixed. In addition to that, I had started to work with incarcerated survivors of violence and stealing from Bryan Stevenson, getting proximate to the problem. Being in a prison on a regular basis showed me that prisons can't be an answer to anything, least of all the problem of violence. And then the final step for me was really Mariame Kaba's work and Mariame Kaba saying, "We don't have to know what abolition looks like on the other side. We have to be willing to work towards it. We need to be doing the building that abolition requires."
But the fact that I can't say to someone, "This is what it's all going to look like in an abolition world," was for me the last little bit that I needed to be able to have the creative imagining to jump to full abolition. So by the time I published my book in 2023 Imperfect Victims, I was saying openly, "I am an abolition feminist." I am someone who believes that we should not be using the punitive power of the carceral state against people really for any reason.
Rafa Kidvai: Thank you for sharing that. I am really moved by your shifts across your work. I think that that's so much of how we come to intimate partner violence work, is that we think about this bifurcation between state violence and intimate partner violence of people on either side as like perpetrators and victims. And not realizing that actually at least at the RLDF, most of my clients are both survivors of state violence and intimate partner violence. And that these things are not as inextricable as we've all been taught they are or on opposite sides of sort of the conversation. And in your book you actually detail the stories of criminalized survivors. I'm wondering if there's a particular story you want to highlight here.
Leigh Goodmark: The book really takes on all of the ways that people come to be labeled criminalized survivors, and it happens in a variety of ways. Some people become criminalized survivors just by virtue of having been victimized by an intimate partner or someone else in some other form of gender-based violence. Some people become criminalized survivors because they have witnessed violence and then the state uses violence against them to get them to testify. Some of them are about people who've been coerced or acted under duress at the behest of an intimate partner. Some of them are about people who are self-medicating in response to violence. But I think the ones that people really don't understand as well, are people like Tanisha Williams and Tanisha was 20. She was unhoused and she was doing survival sex work when she met a man named Patrick Martin who offered her a place to stay.
And what she didn't know was that Mr. Martin planned to traffic her. When she found that out, she absolutely refused and they kind of had this uneasy detente where she was just staying there for long enough to get enough money together to get out to someplace safe. Because she knew that Patrick Martin was unsafe. He carried a gun regularly, he was violent towards her, he was violent towards others. And one night a man who Tanisha didn't know came to Mr. Martin's house and after an argument between the two men, Mr. Martin pistol-whipped this man, Kevin Amos and then ordered Tanisha to duct tape his mouth and his nose. When Tanisha started to scream, he picked her up and threw her against the wall so hard that he cracked the drywall. Then he cut off her air supply with his arm, dropped her to the floor and told her, "You're going to get down or you're going to lay down."
And what she knew that that meant was that, "You're going to do what I told you to do or I'm going to kill you too." And we know that that's accurate because Mr. Martin has signed an affidavit saying that is exactly what he intended to do. The case went cold for about seven years and Ms. Williams got on with her life, got sober, got out of Mr. Martin's house, was working, was taking care of her kids, but she needed some closure. She felt like Mr. Amos's family would need that closure.
So she went to police and she told them everything she knew about what had happened. What she didn't know was that even though she had acted under duress, duress is not a defense to homicide. So even though everyone understands that, she acted under duress and everyone understands that this crime would not have been solved but for her coming forward, Tanisha Williams was convicted of murder. And she's still serving time in a Michigan facility. We have asked the governor to commute her sentence. She's recently had a commutation hearing and after 13 and a half years we're waiting to hear whether she's going to have to serve out her 20 to 40 year sentence.
Rafa Kidvai: So I came to public defense work first doing intimate partner violence work, and I wasn't expecting that to be my trajectory at all, which is why I think I was so moved by your story in the beginning because it resonates. If you're actually listening to survivors and what they're saying about their own experiences, then you probably will get led down a similar path it feels like. But often I feel like my clients were telling me that they were being forced to choose between the violence of what the prosecutor was doing, and the violence that they were facing in their intimate relationships. That it was either death by state or death by their abusive partner.
And I think that's the predicament people are in, right? It's a minefield. All of abuse is a minefield. It's a bunch of traps. There's no way to get out is how it feels when you're in the relationship and now you turn to someone for a recourse, you turn to someone for support. And then you face another minefield except this time with the power of the state behind it. But what are some of the other mechanisms that the state uses when survivors reach out to the state for recourse?
Leigh Goodmark: So I've already mentioned material witness warrants, which is a huge one. So when people are victimized and choose not to participate in prosecution, the state revictimizes them by asking that they be jailed in the same facilities as anyone else. Including sometimes the people that they'll be testifying against without giving them any rights. There's a story out of Tennessee of a dozen women who were victims of intimate partner violence who were jailed under material witness warrants who were pepper sprayed or chemical sprayed, who were beaten, who had denied medication, denied assistance. It's unbelievable what the state does to people that it purports to protect. Prosecutors will you all the time, "I'm the voice of the victim." It's hard to believe that when you see prosecutors using their power to put victims in prison, then there are the people who fight back because their life is at issue in that moment, and prosecutors are just not able to see them as victims anymore.
So once someone becomes a criminal defendant, it's like a switch flips for prosecutors and the very same person who they might've been willing to see as a victim when that person was a witness in one of their cases, they can't see their victimization anymore. It goes back to something that you said Rafa, very few people come to violence for the first time as perpetrators. Most people come to violence for the first time as victims in some way. So this idea that there's this stark binary between victims and perpetrators is just ridiculous. [inaudible 00:09:44] just lots of people who've experienced trauma.
Rafa Kidvai: No, absolutely. I think Imperfect Victims, your recent book title is really, really helpful here. Because I think that switch that you talked about turning off, that's another thing that sort of triggers the switch for prosecutors. When I used to support survivors of intimate partner violence and then they had open, I don't know, abetted larceny case for sort of, I don't know, baby formula in their life. Immediately in the aftermath of leaving an abusive relationship where economics were absolutely at play. Suddenly that quote, unquote, "stealing of baby formula" from the bodega becomes a factor that undermines all the violence that they've ever experienced. As if this makes someone a "criminal" now, and I say criminal in quotes because obviously that's a false category.
But now suddenly the same prosecutor who's there saying, "I need you as my witness for this prosecution against your abusive partner," which is often how I think they thought about our clients. "You are a witness for the case that I need to win, not you are a person that I need to support through their journey of navigating trauma." Now suddenly the fact of a criminal case undermines that witness and then you see that that person gets absolutely... Is rejected completely in terms of the kind of support the prosecutor is willing to offer to them. That was really, really painful I think for a lot of my clients.
Leigh Goodmark: Well, there's this very narrow path of victimization that people are allowed to walk, so long as you stay on that path, you can be considered a victim. But once you stray from that path in any way, that's where the title Imperfect Victims for me came from, and it's, "You have to be White and straight and middle class and cisgender, and you have to be meek and weak and passive. You can't have ever done anything wrong. You can't have mental health issues, you can't have substance abuse issues. You can't be angry, you can't fight back. You can't be physically strong, you can't use foul language." I could go on and on and on the various ways that prosecutors have found to say, "Well, this isn't a victim, this person is not a victim because she's too mouthy, she's too arrogant, she's too angry." It's just kind of crazy, the things that prosecutors will use and judges too will use to say, "Well, this person isn't the proper kind of victim and therefore we're not going to believe their claims even when we believed them before."
Rafa Kidvai: This is going back a little bit. So you talked about previously sort of leaning towards advocating for carceral solutions to intimate partner violence. I'm interested in knowing more about the unlearning you had to do to shift towards embracing abolition feminism.
Leigh Goodmark: I had to unlearn everything. I really truly believed in the power of the carceral state to end intimate partner violence, my Twitter, or whatever it's called now, handle is, "Recovering carceral feminist, ask me how." I am kind of the original carceral feminist, and I say that because I think it's important for people to know that you can unlearn and you can change. So I started doing the research and what I found was that arrest was not decreasing or deterring intimate partner violence necessarily. And that mandatory arrest really wasn't doing that work. And that mandatory arrest laws, which were enacted at the behest of the anti-violence movement in response to police inaction in cases of intimate partner violence were in fact driving the arrests of survivors of violence. That arrest rates went up for women by factors of two and three more than anyone else. And of course, particularly for women of color, especially Black and Brown women. I had to unlearn the idea that prosecutors were the voice of the victim and that prosecution was going to give my client what they needed.
I had to unlearn the idea that prison equals safety because people aren't necessarily safe even though their partners are incarcerated. And they're certainly not safer when their partners come out of incarceration at a point when they don't have economic support, when they can't find jobs, when they've experienced trauma, all things that are correlated with higher rates of intimate partner violence. I had to unlearn the idea that as an advocate, I had real power in making a difference in somebody's life. And I did. I mean, I don't think that I didn't make a difference in my client's lives, but it wasn't because I could pull the levers of the legal system necessarily. It was because of other things I think that I was doing.
I had to learn to listen to my clients better and to really hear what they were telling me about what the system was and wasn't doing for them. I had to unlearn everything. And then I had to unlearn the idea that we have to have some absolute replacement for the criminal legal system that I can describe to you in great detail right now. Because if I don't have that, then I can't possibly believe in abolition because then what do we do about the bad guys? So getting away from that question, which is something that Mariame Kaba has talked about a lot, was unbelievably helpful for me. So when I say I had to relearn everything, I mean everything.
Rafa Kidvai: Do you feel that our cultural views around incarceration as the sort of ultimate pathway to justice for survivors have curtailed our imagination?
Leigh Goodmark: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's so devastating because when you talk to survivors of violence, they'll tell you that they want punishment, but they'll tell you a hundred other things as well. And I've long believed that part of the reason that people want punishment is because it's the only thing that we have called justice. So if you want justice, which most people do, and you understand that justice equals punishment, then that's what you're going to ask for. But when you start to really probe with people about what their needs are, they want voice, they want the ability to be heard, they want validation, they want the community to vindicate them. And those are all things that are kind of hard to get within the legal system. Voice only comes to the extent that you're consistent with the rules of evidence and a judge is willing to hear you and the judge decides that it's relevant.
Validation is not something that you necessarily are going to get, particularly if you don't get a verdict that conforms to what you wanted. Vindication, same thing. So these other kinds of justice needs that people articulate are not well met by the system. Then you get into things like, "What I really needed was economic support. What I really needed was not to be ostracized by my community, my religious group, my family. What I really needed was a sense of community around me to make me feel safer in those moments when I didn't feel safe." And we're not doing any of that for people because what we do by and large for people who come into formal systems is channel them through the criminal legal system. The criminal legal system is not going to meet any of those other needs.
Rafa Kidvai: And as you talked about before, how we're trained about police officers, it's always responsive. None of it is really about preventing violence in the first place. What are some examples of prevention initiatives or community-based initiatives that you think are promising in addressing intimate partner violence?
Leigh Goodmark: I think one of the ways that we failed as a movement is in not looking at what the correlates of intimate partner violence are and then thinking about how to address them. One of the correlates of intimate partner violence is exposure to adverse childhood experiences. So interesting prevention work is being done around things like Nurse-Family Partnerships, which send out nurses to couples with young children to try to help them understand parenting to decrease the stress in the home. Because stress is correlated with the perpetration of violence. Looking at economic solutions, for example, the evidence is really clear that economic distress is highly correlated with the perpetration of intimate partner violence. So what are we doing in terms of raising the minimum wage, which will have an impact on violence? One of the interesting things that happened during the COVID pandemic was that there was a huge spike in intimate partner violence early on in the pandemic, and then the rates dropped quite a bit. They dropped at the same time the stimulus checks went out, because people weren't experiencing that same level of economic distress as they had been previously.
So programs that are doing guaranteed living wage are absolutely doing work to lower violence. Working with adolescents before they're involved in intimate relationships through schools, through coaching, through other kinds of extracurricular activities. There's great evidence on all of those spaces and the work that people are doing to prevent violence there. We have traditionally relied on offender intervention counseling that has been marginal in terms of its success at best. But there's really interesting offender intervention counseling that is organized around the idea that people can both have been victims of trauma and also be perpetrating violence. So the Strength at Home Men's Program, which is through the Veterans Administration, was working with combat veterans who'd experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. So it understood these two complicated ideas at the same time that this is someone who's been harmed and it's someone who's doing harm.
For too long, the anti-violence movement has thought that if we concede that someone has experienced trauma or they've been harmed in some way, that's an excuse for what they've done. It's not an excuse, it's an explanation. And if we don't understand the reasons why people are acting the way that they're acting, we can't do anything to change that behavior. And none of this requires the work of the criminal legal system. It requires our putting money into prevention rather than into reaction. We put about 180 billion dollars conservatively every year into policing and into prisons. Think about all of the work that we could do with that kind of money.
Rafa Kidvai: I really, really hear that in terms of the definition of reproductive justice really being about safe and sustainable communities, and how all of our work is deeply connected. That if people are building safe and sustainable communities in other parts of their lives, not necessarily specifically in response to intimate partner violence, it still has an impact on the amount of trauma people experience in intimate relationships.
Leigh Goodmark: I think that's absolutely right. And I think one thing I didn't talk about but should have is the work that people have done in community to prevent violence and to respond to violence. So when you look at, again, during the pandemic, one of the things that people were using was something called pod mapping. And pod mapping is the idea that in your circle of friends, you have people who can do very specific things for you and you can do very specific things for them. So you might have a friend who always has $50 for you, no questions asked, and you might have a friend who has a couch and you know that you can crash on that couch anytime you need to. Your friend with the 50 bucks, they're already living over packed, right? They don't have anywhere for you to stay and your friend with the couch, they never have cash.
But I know in my network that if I got to run right away, I can go to that person with the couch. If I have an immediate financial need, I can go to that person with the money. That creates networks of support that people can turn to at times of crisis, in times of violence. And when you know that, when you have that knowledge, when it's concrete. So that's the kind of work that places like the Bay Area Transformative Justice Coalition and Creative Interventions in the Bay Area were doing.
And for more information on this Creative Interventions, which was a project that was started by Mimi Kim in the Bay Area to really serve as a one-stop shop for survivors who could come in and say, "This is what I need." Rather than having the organization say, "This is what we can give you." Mimi created a 600-page toolkit that is available free online, and it has unbelievable ideas about how we do work in community to keep people safe. Again, if half of people are never going to law enforcement in the first instance, we need to know as a community how we can be helpful. So having access to resources like that is invaluable.
Rafa Kidvai: Thank you for sharing that resource and telling us about it. You talked about how actually looking forward is quite exciting to you when you think about the anti-violence movement work because of some of these creative solutions. And I would love to hear more about your envisioning of the future of abolition feminism and the movement to create more responsive, thoughtful systems for survivors of abuse.
Leigh Goodmark: One of the things that to me has been most exciting in the last several years came absolutely out of tragedy, and I already said 2020 for White people, for some reason, the murder of George Floyd hit differently. And one of the things that came out of that was something called the Moment of Truth Letter that was signed by all of the domestic violence coalitions in the United States. And in that letter, the coalitions accepted responsibility for having helped to create a carceral state that was disproportionately affecting people of color. And said, "We recognize our part in the marginalization of people of color because of our investment in this idea." So it's a movement that is starting to shift, not a lot and not all at once. It reminds me of the barge that got caught in the Panama Canal and how painfully and slowly it got turned around.
We as an anti-violence movement, we're kind of like that barge, but you're starting to see organizations come at anti-violence work from a race equity perspective where they're centering the needs of people of color. And when they do that, it means that they have to look critically at their reliance on the carceral state. You see organizations like The Network in Chicago piloting a program where they are going out with violence interrupters, not state actors, not police officers, but violence interrupters who are responding to violence in community. We have to think differently about who our responders are going to be. The Network is actually testing that out.
So you see people starting to really engage with this idea that there is something beyond police and prisons. And trying to figure out what that's going to be. And I love the idea that we are in struggle together. People always ask me, "Well, what's it going to look like?" I don't know what it's going to look like. I am one person who has some ideas and some thoughts, but that's not the way that we should redesign a whole system. The way that we do that is in conversation with each other, working together. And to do that kind of work, you have to start from the premise that what we have done is not working.
Rafa Kidvai: The level of conversation, absolutely, moving beyond that is exciting. To end, this podcast is called No Body Criminalized, and I would love to hear what nobody criminalized means to you.
Leigh Goodmark: Nobody criminalized to me means that the prisons where my clients are being held don't exist, and we are not intervening in people's lives in punitive punishment, shame-based ways. And that starts from policing, but it includes things like the family policing system, which some people call the child welfare system. It includes mental health interventions that are punitive or that are restrictive. It means that we build a society where everyone has the things that they need to live and to thrive. Where they have access to food and shelter and physical health and mental health and meaningful work and green space, and all of the things that will keep rates of violence down. Will ensure that people don't need to resort to violence because they're experiencing other stressors in their life that are triggering that violence.
And will there still be violence at that point? Yeah, I think there probably will be, but we'll know better than what the scope of that problem really looks like. And we'll develop ways together as a community to respond to it. But for me, abolition means we don't cage people at its most fundamental level, and that means all of the things that go with that they go to.
Rafa Kidvai: I love that. Thank you. Thank you for creating that future in my mind right now. I really appreciate it. It's really been a joy to speak to you, Leigh.
Leigh Goodmark: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Rafa Kidvai: Here are some key takeaways from our conversation with Leigh Goodmark. Leigh's journey from advocating for carceral solutions to embracing abolition feminism, highlights the significant shifts needed within our movements to create a future free from violence. She emphasized that responding to intimate partner violence with incarceration often fails to meet the needs of survivors, and can in fact exacerbate violence. Leigh also shared powerful stories of criminalized survivors demonstrating the devastating impact of the criminal punishment system on those it purports to protect. Her insights underscore the importance of centering the holistic needs of survivors and exploring community-based non-punitive responses to violence.
Leigh Goodmark is the director of the Gender, Prison and Trauma Clinic at the University of Maryland, Carey School of Law. You can learn more about her work on her website, leighgoodmark.com. I'm Rafa Kidvai, the host of this podcast and director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. The Repro Legal Defense Fund funds bail and strong defenses for people being punished for abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and other pregnancy outcomes. Learn more at reprolegaledefensefund.org. If you have questions about your legal rights, go to reprolegalhelpline.org or call 844-868-2812. No Body Criminalized is produced by Phantom Center Media & Entertainment for the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. Pamela Kirkland is the show's producer. Kojin Tashiro is lead producer and mixed this episode. And remember, keep your community safe and don't talk to cops.