It is often said that once you ‘do the crime and do the time,’ you are free to move on with your life. But for those of us who have been dragged through the cruel criminal punishment system, freedom is nothing but an illusion. The punishment simply does not end at the prison gates or at the end of your prison sentence; it continues indefinitely through a range of collateral consequences, social stigmas, systemic exclusions, and relentless public scrutiny. Society’s rhetoric of ‘second chances’; is just that, rhetoric, because the reality for criminalised people is far from redemptive. Instead, we face a lifetime of judgment and barriers, as if we are forever marked by our worst mistakes. A type of perpetual punishment that comes not just in the form of personal struggle—but also a systemic one, propped up and maintained by a culture that thrives on criminalisation and dehumanisation.
The Collusion of Imperial Media and State
The imperial media plays a pivotal role in maintaining this cycle of punishment and is deeply entangled in the prison industrial complex. Sensationalised crime reporting has become a staple of modern journalism, with criminalised people often portrayed as irredeemable villains. Headlines reduce complex lives to a single moment of wrongdoing, stripping people of their humanity and painting us as perpetual threats to society.
This narrative is particularly insidious when it intersects with state power. Governments and law enforcement agencies often leverage media coverage to justify punitive policies and actions, reinforcing the myth that criminalised people cannot change and are somehow rotten to the core, evil and unable to ever be “saved”. By perpetuating these stereotypes, the media and the state work hand in hand to sustain the prison industrial complex, ensuring that those who have served their time remain trapped in a cycle of exclusion and marginalisation.
Moreover, the media is complicit in the violence against women, particularly criminalised women, by amplifying narratives that dehumanise us and obscure the systemic factors driving our criminalisation. Rather than exposing the intersecting oppressions of colonialism, patriarchy, and racism that shape women’s lives, the media frequently sensationalises our circumstances to reinforce damaging stereotypes of deviance and unworthiness. This contributes to a broader societal desensitisation to the harm experienced by women, allowing violence—whether in prisons, detention centres, or through systemic neglect—to go unchallenged and unaccounted for.
In failing to hold the state accountable and instead reproducing its narratives, the media ensures that the public remains focused and supportive of punishment rather than systemic transformation, perpetuating cycles of harm and reinforcing the structures that oppress women and marginalised communities.
The Weight of Public Judgment
The way that people self-deputise as cops to monitor, judge, and surveil criminalised people is a pervasive form of social control. They decide whether we are worthy of inclusion back into society and, if they deem us unworthy, they punish us, exile us, and often run vigilante online campaigns designed to humiliate and harm us. These individuals (including those whose self proclaim to be sovereign people), claim to oppose imperial media, the carceral system, and other agents of the state, paradoxically weaponise those very systems to punish and control us. They will report us to authorities, exploit media narratives to amplify their attacks, and even collaborate with institutions they profess to hate when it serves their agenda of exclusion and domination.
For criminalised women, especially those from marginalised communities, this scrutiny is even more acute. We are not only judged for our past but also held to impossible standards in our present. We are expected to disclose our criminal records at every turn—as though transparency is a moral obligation and are criticised when we attempt to rebuild our lives without broadcasting our past to the world.
This demand for disclosure serves as a form of control, a way to ensure that criminalised people remain tethered to our mistakes. It denies us the right to privacy, the right to define ourselves on our own terms, and the opportunity to fully participate in society. For women from marginalised communities, particularly Aboriginal women, this control is compounded by the layers of racism, sexism, and colonialism that already seek to regulate our lives. In weaponising the demand for transparency, society reinforces the belief that criminalised women must perpetually justify their existence, placing the burden of proving our worth on us while offering little in the way of actual support or pathways to healing.
The result is a system in which criminalised women are not only monitored and judged by the state but also by a public emboldened to police our lives, often through cruel and dehumanising methods. This dual surveillance—by institutions and by self-appointed social gatekeepers ensures that we remain perpetually under scrutiny, our humanity reduced to a narrative of punishment and unworthiness.
Perpetual Punishment Beyond the Sentence
The stigma attached to a criminal record affects every aspect of life. Housing applications, job interviews, and even personal relationships are coloured by the shadow of a conviction. A simple Google search can resurrect the “worst thing” someone has done, weaponising it against us in perpetuity.
For many of us, this digital scarlet letter becomes an insurmountable barrier to rebuilding our lives. It locks us of opportunities, ensuring that poverty, exclusion, and marginalisation are not just possible outcomes but likely ones.
The Hypocrisy of the Carceral State
The insistence that criminalised people must continually prove our worth exposes a glaring contradiction in the logic of the carceral state. If the purpose of imprisonment is rehabilitation, then why are those of us who have served our time not celebrated for our efforts to rebuild our lives? Why is our success met with suspicion and our transformation dismissed as a façade?
The truth is that the carceral system is not designed to rehabilitate or redeem; it is designed to punish and control. The perpetual stigmatisation of criminalised people reveals the state’s true intentions: to maintain a system of social stratification where certain groups particularly Indigenous, racialised, disabled and economically disadvantaged people—are kept on the margins.
Moving Toward Liberation
The work of criminalised people who strive to rebuild their lives is often done in spite of these systemic barriers, not because of any support from the systems that punished us. Our resilience is a testament to our strength and the strength of our communities. Yet, the path to true liberation requires more than individual perseverance—it requires a collective effort to dismantle the systems that perpetuate this endless punishment.
Abolition offers a vision of a society that values transformation over retribution, where people are not defined by their worst moments but by our capacity to grow, contribute, and heal. It challenges us to imagine a world where accountability is not synonymous with exclusion, and where redemption is not just a possibility but a right.
The journey toward this vision begins with rejecting the narratives that dehumanise criminalised people and amplifying our voices instead. It requires standing shoulder to shoulder with those who have been most harmed by the carceral state, refusing to let our stories be co-opted by a system that thrives on our continued oppression.
For criminalised people, the fight for liberation is not just about escaping the shadow of our past—it’s about creating a world where everyone has the chance to move forward, free from the weight of perpetual punishment.
By Tabitha Lean
