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This article examines how staff members at a gender-responsive, outpatient reentry center construct women’s criminality and explain treatment outcomes. Staff members acknowledge the structural causes of women’s criminality, yet during the process of rehabilitation this recognition is paradoxically replaced by a discourse of personal responsibility. By employing participant-observation methods and in-depth interviews with staff, this study demonstrates how the center’s use of “alternative” practices and rehabilitative logics serve to disempower and pathologize women’s lives. This research adds to our knowledge of punishment and governance by revealing how neoliberal strategies of self-regulation may take form in gendered, alternative spaces.

This essay outlines the justice work done by the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) in the US, an organization that provides material and symbolic support to political and politicized prisoners. The history of this organization is briefly explored to contextualize its current composition, tactics, and goals in its mission to support political prisoners, as well as the way its driving philosophies distinguish the ABC from other organizations that are engaged in political prisoner-related issues. Unlike more well-known, mainstream organizations that use a human rights discourse, the ABC contributes to an overall 'infrastructure of resistance' to defy systematized exploitation. This essay situates this project within a broader anarchist strategy to creatively and actively construct justice alternatives that work to establish mutual aid and needs-based economies.The political prisoner has opposed unjust laws and exploitative, racist social conditions in general, with the ultimate aim of transforming these laws and this society into an order harmonious with the material and spiritual needs and interests of the vast majority of its members. -Angela Davis, 2003, letter from Marin County Jail.Anarchist utopianism places primacy and political energy on creating immediate and tangible social changes. Instead of relying on deterministic and temporally distant definitions of utopia, mutualist cooperative initiatives focus on creating alternative infrastructures that directly satisfy personal needs and the welfare of the larger collective. A mutual aid and needs-based economy enables people the ability to take control of their lives and to participate meaningfully in the decision-making processes that affect them and others. Unfortunately, as most observers of modern social life in the United States understand, there are complex structures of domination and oppression that severely undermine human relationships and the ability to fulfill personal and communal needs. Angela Davis, in the above quote, speaks to those politicized individuals who have defied hierarchical, unjust rules of law that usurp collective autonomy. Some of these individuals engaging in direct justice do *

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