Caging Compassion: Recognizing and resisting carceral humanist narratives in criminal justice reform

As the public becomes more aware of the inhumane conditions of incarceration, the call to treat people with dignity grows ever louder. However, many proposed reforms offer the appearance of change, while making little progress towards improving peoples’ lives. Movements for ending mass incarceration need to go further and address root causes.

by Emmett Sanders
Last update: February 04, 2026

Sections
What is carceral humanism?
Examples of carceral humanism
Jail expansion
Halfway houses and prolonged supervision
Electronic monitoring
Strategies for cutting the carceral out of ‘carceral humanism’
Conclusion

One of the hardest decisions that criminal legal system advocates have to make is determining how to spend their limited time and resources when a myriad of possible reforms are proposed. One useful approach is sorting out which reforms are likely to be ineffective at actually reducing carceral control — reforms referred to by some academics as “carceral humanist” approaches. These approaches, which can sometimes come from advocates themselves as a form of “compromise,” try (and fail) to humanize the criminal legal system without shrinking its size or power, while redirecting funding away from the community. They may seem harmless, or even helpful, but they are superficial and can stagnate more robust advocacy efforts by giving the appearance that the “problem has been solved.” To make matters worse, they can increase the power and reach of the carceral system.

“Carceral Humanism” may feel like a clunky academic term. However, it helpfully describes a wide range of reforms that are problematic in similar ways and can be responded to with similar arguments. In this toolkit, we use real world examples to take a closer look at carceral humanism, help readers identify the difference between actual change and reforms that perpetuate injustice, and share useful strategies for those looking to create a system that reinforces humanity rather than making dehumanization more palatable.

What is Carceral Humanism?

A brief explanation of the roots of “carceral humanism” as a concept.

Carceral humanism is a framework advanced by activist scholar James Kilgore, which describes a repackaging of traditional incarceration as “incarceration lite.” It focuses on eliminating objections to the harm of incarceration rather than on reducing or eliminating the use of incarceration itself.

Carceral humanism falls into the category of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore, co-founder of Critical Resistance, calls “reformist reforms.” Essentially, these are changes that may improve the immediate conditions for individuals but do nothing to resolve (and often reify) the underlying structural issues that have created those negative conditions in the first place. Take “child-friendly” visiting rooms, for example. They may ease some of the trauma experienced by kids visiting their parents, but a new coat of paint won’t drive them to school or tuck them into bed at night, nor will it eliminate the stigma and the financial, emotional, and social instability that come with having a parent in prison. Decreasing the prison population by legalizing or decriminalizing substances, ending sentencing enhancements, increasing access to presumptive parole for all, and reuniting children with their parents permanently, will help ameliorate those structural issues. These latter examples are referred to as “non-reformist reforms”: changes that intervene in the fundamental harms of incarceration rather than those that ultimately preserve or even expand the reach and capacity of carceral harm.

Why not make prisons prettier?

It’s reasonable to ask, “‘What’s so bad about making things better for those behind bars?” Nothing, of course. Improving conditions and fighting for human rights for people in prisons is valid and honorable work, and some changes are welcomed by incarcerated people themselves. In fact, ignoring the conditions people in prisons are struggling to survive while working for systemic change is like a doctor ignoring a gunshot wound while trying to cure cancer. But not all efforts to make prisons less harmful actually make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, and some efforts can inadvertently cause harm. Some of the ways carceral humanist reforms can cause problems are when:

  • The changes they make are superficial rather than systemic and substantial. For instance, some states have adopted legislation to shift the language used to describe those they incarcerate, while leaving in place the terrible policies these newly minted “individuals in custody” are subjected to daily. The shift to person-first language can be a meaningful one, and is supported by many currently and formerly incarcerated advocates if it is accompanied by real changes in how people are treated. However, when advocates pursue meaningful shifts to draconian sentencing laws, the brutal use of solitary confinement, and the narrowing use of parole as a mechanism of release, and these calls for real change are ignored, simply substituting the word “individual in custody” for “offender” offers cold comfort.
  • They redirect funding and support away from community-based responses. Many sheriffs call their facilities the “largest mental health providers” in the area in a bid for more funding for mental health services. This false narrative that jails are mental health providers only expands jail budgets and their capacity to inflict harm. It also takes valuable investment away from community-based responses that are much more effective than the traumatization of incarceration.
  • They change the type of cage, but impose new harmful forms of control — and then cage more people anyway. While “alternatives to incarceration” are often held up as examples of reform, some are less alternatives to incarceration than they are alternative forms of incarceration. In other words, they recreate incarceration rather than creating freedom. One prime example of this is electronic monitoring (EM). Often depicted as a departure from incarceration, the conditions people are subjected to while on EM can be as onerous as (and in some cases even more restrictive than) those people face in traditional incarceration. It can also lead to more people being under carceral control.
  • They make future reforms harder. Carceral Humanist reforms can stagnate advocacy efforts by giving the appearance that progress has been made when in fact these superficial reforms benefit very few people. Carveouts, which we have developed a toolkit to combat, are exceptions in legislation or policy that exclude large groups of people from relief based on criteria like the nature of the offense or criminal history. While policies that contain carveouts, such as those that omit people with sexually-based convictions, can offer initial relief to some, they ultimately bring about more entrenched carceral harm because it becomes so difficult to revisit the issue.

Examples of carceral humanism

Carceral humanism manifests itself in many different ways. To help you fight back, we’re sharing some counternarratives and examples of areas where these approaches are the most common. It is vital to note, however, that the context of individual fights can vary widely and any response to carceral harm must weigh the unique conditions of the people, place, and power dynamics in which those harms are perpetrated.

Jail expansion

  • How: Jail expansion arguments often rely upon the narrative that treating people humanely means creating a more equitable, more “compassionate” cage.
  • Commonly used narratives: Sheriffs may claim their jails are the largest mental health care providers in the county. Similarly, carceral construction companies argue that new construction is needed in order to make the jail accessible for people with disabilities or to ensure compliance with federal civil rights laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act. Other common narratives have included calls for “feminist jails” and “gender responsive” prisons.
  • Counternarratives: Advocates can make the case that jail is fundamentally a place of harm rather than of healing, and people with mental healthcare needs are particularly vulnerable in these settings. Isolating those in need from community-based services, severing vital support systems, and further destabilizing their employment, housing, and family connections does not make people “better,” nor does it respond to actual need. Likewise, before spending millions to ensure that people with disabilities are caged “more ethically,” we should first ask why so many people with disabilities are being held in jail in the first place and what other services, aside from hi-tech, shiny cages, could be provided to address the challenges they face. Finally, as scholar-activists have pointed out, incarceration is not an effective response to gendered violence because it allows the state to continue that violence within the carceral system.
  • Examples: While the compassionate jail myth has gained traction in recent years, a number of community-based groups across the country have successfully challenged the narrative that caging is an act of compassion. For instance, a Bloomington, Indiana group, Care Not Cages, successfully argued that the push from civil rights groups to address the abhorrent conditions of the Monroe County Jail did not mean building a new $224 million jail and justice center the county couldn’t afford, but rather, “prioritizing things like mental health care, substance use care, and affordable housing.”

Halfway houses and prolonged parole/post-release supervision

  • How: Incarceration often involves a period of post-release supervision. Some carceral humanists have proposed leaning more heavily into community-based supervision, ignoring the fact that post-release supervision actually extends rather than reduces incarceration. Moreover, while the duration, conditions, and supervisory body vary by jurisdiction, violations of conditions of supervision often lead people right back into prison.
  • Commonly used narratives: There is a persistent notion that parole officers serve largely in the capacity of social workers, tasked with ensuring that people released from incarceration are following the law, connecting them with resources, and offering support through the transition process. Similarly, people who leave prison are often situated in halfway houses or group reentry homes which are routinely depicted as safe and ethical places of transition and transformation.
  • Counternarratives: In the U.S., parole supervision is not a pathway to success, and parole officers primarily enforce unjust release conditions rather than help people. People on supervision are subjected to obscure and often arbitrary rules that they must follow or risk being returned to prison, even if they didn't break any laws. Some of those release conditions are particularly counterproductive, such as association restrictions that undermine people’s ability to successfully navigate reentry. Post-release supervision may also include conditions like curfews or house arrest, or obstacles that prevent people from finding employment. Halfway houses are largely carceral facilities, focused less on transition than on surveillance and control. Some are also focused on profit, charging people rent or for food. Many are privately operated, often in the very same states that have otherwise banned prison privatization. Prison profiteer the GEO group, for instance, operates numerous halfway houses across the country, including in states like California, which has otherwise banned private prisons.
  • Examples: Advocates have pushed back against post-release supervision by striving to improve conditions people face while on parole. Eliminating supervision fees (which use poverty to prolong supervision or trigger violations), eliminating or capping returns to prison for technical violations, ending arbitrary drug testing for people on parole, or creating pathways for early discharge from parole can help mitigate some of the harm. Additionally, as we note in “What you should know about halfway houses,” oversight and transparency around halfway houses are crucial in preventing abuse and exploitation, as is moving away from a for-profit model of post-release housing.

Electronic monitoring and other alternatives to incarceration:

  • How: Alternatives to incarceration are reforms that ostensibly seek to replace incarceration in a jail or prison with “less restrictive” forms of supervision and control, such as electronic monitoring.
  • Commonly used narratives: Like other carceral humanist efforts, alternatives to incarceration co-opt both the compassion and language of advocates. Alternatives to incarceration offer a world in which jail populations (and associated jail budgets) can be reduced through electronic monitoring while allowing people the “comfort” of being incarcerated in their own homes.
  • Counternarratives: Alternatives to incarceration are not alternatives to criminalization. Indeed, the same societal biases, imbalances, and injustices that run amok in traditional carceral systems are often reflected in these alternatives. Additionally, electronic monitoring often expands rather than reduces the overall carceral footprint by creating mechanisms of control in the community itself, while actual jail populations stay the same or even increase. Finally, alternatives to incarceration invariably contain provisions that allow for a return to traditional incarceration, meaning any alternative is temporary and conditional at best.
  • Example: Scholars like Kate Weisburd have written extensively about the harms of electronic monitoring, particularly when used on children, and have collected a number of useful arguments against juvenile monitoring. The ACLU has published a guide on reducing the harms of electronic monitoring. Members of Congress have even raised concerns around electronic monitoring’s potential for harm and have sought greater transparency from electronic monitoring companies.

graph showing how electronic monitoring did not reduce jail populations in San Fransisco or Harris County, Texas

Strategies for cutting the carceral out of ‘carceral humanism’

Carceral humanism is, at its heart, a public relations strategy. Its approaches rely on compelling popular media narratives and “gut feelings” rather than on actual data, and position short-sighted responses to harm as long-term solutions. Here are a few strategies for pushing back against carceral humanist reforms to make way for real change:

Assess the proposed solution

When a policy is proposed that might be a carceral humanist approach, ask whether it will increase, reduce, or have no impact upon:

  • the number of people subjected to harm,
  • the presence of carceral harms in our everyday lives,
  • the power of police and carceral institutions,
  • the influence of oppressed communities,
  • the availability of community-based resources, supportive services, and overall community health and stability,
  • the availability of non-carceral responses to harm, and
  • the government’s reliance on carceral responses.

One vital resource for this work comes from Critical Resistance, which offers an extremely well-detailed rubric for assessing reforms as well as excellent examples of how these assessments are reflected in actual pretrial bail reform policies.

A chart providing tips on identifying reformist reforms. For a full text description go to criticalresistance.org Thanks to Critical Resistance for permission to share this guide for identifying reformist reforms. This is a section of a larger rubric you can find here. Visit criticalresistance.org to learn more about their work, including more resources from their Abolitionist Steps poster series.

Examine the data

Carceral humanist reforms often use data selectively to advance their positions rather than to accurately reflect the totality of the problem. Worse, because the central focus is public perception rather than actual solutions, there may be incentive to simply ignore data that don’t fit the narrative. It is vital that advocates not take data at face value, but rather ask questions, do their own research, and critique the data being presented.

Jail needs assessments tend to contain this kind of selective data presentation. New jail construction is often supported by a study intended to assess a county’s need for a new facility, including the conditions of the current jail, how the jail is being used, who is being held in it, and how well it is staffed. It will often also include a population forecast designed to predict the jail’s capacity needs for a number of years into the future. However, needs assessments are rarely conducted by disinterested parties, and are often produced by the very same construction companies that later bid for the right to build the inevitably “much needed” new jail. Additionally, these assessments will frequently downplay or outright omit data indicating a need for reduced jail capacity, or ignore potential avenues to reduce jail admissions instead of increasing jail space. A recent needs assessment for Shelby County, Tennessee’s jail at 201 Poplar, for instance, cherry-picked a population projection for the county that showed a population increase, even though multiple other population projections showed a continually declining population.

Some simple questions to ask when data are presented that seem to indicate a need for a carceral humanist reform include:

  • What data are being shared and how are they being presented?
  • How timely are the data?
  • How specific or accurate are the data?
  • What data are being downplayed or left out entirely?
  • Who is presenting the data, and why?
  • Was/is the community involved in collecting the data?
  • What do those who have the data of lived experience have to say about the issue and the suggested reforms?
  • Was there a way that impacted individuals could have played a bigger role in gathering and analyzing the data?

Offer real alternatives

When a problem is repeatedly highlighted and no solution is presented, people may lean into bad solutions rather than continue with none at all. Carceral humanist reforms are appealing because they offer a solution that allows people to feel as if they have resolved a problem rather than requiring them to continually work towards a solution. It is important, then, to not only push back against false solutions, but, when possible, to also offer actual alternatives like those we present in our annual Winnable Battles reports.

Leaning into non-carceral humanist responses means proposing solutions that:

  • Redirect funding and resources away from carceral responses to social problems and into community-based responses that address the root causes of harm.
  • Increase opportunities for new paradigms of justice focused on prevention, reconciliation, healing, and the actual addressing of harm rather than a paradigm built around retribution.
  • Increase meaningful opportunities for community engagement, including those which facilitate earlier release from incarceration and post-release supervision.
  • Support rather than criminalize marginalized populations, in particular those with mental health issues, substance use disorders, and those experiencing housing instability or poverty. This includes decriminalizing survival strategies.

Conclusion

Carceral humanist narratives are effective because people recognize a situation is bad and want something to be done about it. Making conditions less harmful for people experiencing incarceration is not in itself a bad thing, and we should not ignore immediate suffering or human rights violations as we strive for a just system that recognizes the right of all people to receive care and be free from carceral harm. However, offering an illusion of humanity can effectively preserve the system’s ability to perpetuate harm, and worst of all, can prevent us from finding real, lasting solutions. At the end of the day, responding to problems created by our carceral system by leaning further into incarceration solves nothing and can make matters far worse. There is nothing human about carceral humanism.



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