This report from Survived & Punished CA highlights the systemic and disproportionate criminal punishment of queer, trans, and gender nonconforming survivors of domestic and/or sexual violence. It focuses on survivors of domestic and/or sexual violence to highlight the pipeline from surviving sexual and domestic violence to criminalization. (Link)

This community-based, survivor-centered research report identifies key patterns in the criminalization of self-defense and recommendations to transform the conditions of criminalized survival. Decades of research confirms that the legal system systemically fails to protect survivors from domestic and sexual violence, and then punishes them when they save their own lives. This report foregrounds the insights, analyses, and recommendations of survivors who were punished for defending their lives, as well as organizers and advocates who have collaborated with criminalized survivors to secure their freedom. (Link)

S&P New York’s analysis of criminal punishment system reforms passed in New York in 2019. We, like other abolitionists, are working to understand exactly what the pandemic’s immediate and long term effects are, and to continue our work under these new conditions. We hope that this abolitionist assessment of these recent reforms can serve as a durable resource for organizers considering progressive-seeming but carceral state-expanding legislation and policies that come about in their locales, both during this pandemic and beyond. (Link)

Survived & Punished NY, a grassroots, prison abolitionist organization dedicated to ending the criminalization of survivors of gender-based violence, presents an abolitionist critique of New York’s recent bail reform statute, and calls for a bolder vision of freedom and a broader scope of change. Legitimating pretrial incarceration and supervision, the bail reform statute is an example of a “reformist” reform that entrenches and will likely spawn new manifestations of the PIC. (Link)

Supporting Sex Workers & Survivors: Lessons for Defense Campaigns is an invaluable guide to grassroots defense campaigns in support of criminalized sex workers, survivors of violence and exploitation (sometimes called trafficking), people engaged in survival sex, and all those comrades in the sex trades facing violence from the carceral state. (Link)

This toolkit was created for those grappling with how to support survivors through intimate partner violence, with the intent of strengthening community-level responses to abuse by sharing practical skills and information for safety planning. Though it was written with prison abolitionist and activist communities in mind, it is also intended to be a useful resource for a broader range of people across varying experiences. (Link)

This research guide aims to equip more people with tools, resources, ideas, and models to pursue urgently needed community-based research projects. We hope this guide inspires more organizers, advocates, attorneys, scholars, and survivors — especially those who are currently and formerly incarcerated — to lead research projects that will contribute to a growing body of data and information to fight for the freedom and well-being of criminalized survivors, and of all people. (Link)

This toolkit is designed for anyone interested in organizing a letter writing gathering to support incarcerated survivors of violence. It will provide a concrete set of steps, lists of materials, and considerations when putting together an event, picking a date, selecting a venue, and planning for responses to your letters. (Link)

Criminalizing Survival includes curriculum units and activities that can be used for political education focused on the intersections between racialized gender-based violence and criminalization. Some of the activities also address the problems of carceral feminisms and crimmigration. This resource is intended to help activists, advocates, organizers and community members to learn more about the criminalization of domestic violence survivors. (Link)

Newsletters printed by prison abolitionists for, by and about incarcerated people have a long history. In the U.S., newsletters such as No More Cages and Through the Looking Glass published monthly newsletters to send to women inside prisons throughout the 1970’s and 80’s. These newsletters creatively forged a model for “inside/ outside” organizing that amplified stories and methods of connection by bridging the contact gaps between survivors inside, survivors outside, and their advocates and allies. Survived & Punished NY has joined these abolitionist formations in offering another platform of support to criminalized survivors and building a movement across the prison walls. (Link)