The sex worker rights movement has long explored how the public—and too often, the courts—struggle to grasp the realities of exploitation, especially when it hides behind wealth, consent, or celebrity. We’ve written about coercion, manipulation, and the blurry gray lines that survivors are expected to define in black and white.

But there’s something else we need to talk about.

The Epstein “client list.”

Where is it? Who’s on it? When will it be released?

Spoiler: If your feminism relies on police and prisons, it’s not protecting us—it’s punishing us.

For a movement that claims to be rooted in liberation, carceral feminism sure loves a cage.

At its core, carceral feminism is the belief that the best—or only—way to address gender-based violence is through criminalization, policing, and punishment. It rose to prominence in the 1990s alongside tough-on-crime policies and second-wave calls for legal reform. And on the surface, it sounds reasonable: violence against women is bad, so let’s punish the people who commit it. Simple, right?

Except it’s not. Because when we scratch beneath the surface, we see that this approach doesn’t serve all women—just the ones who fit a very narrow idea of victimhood. And when it comes to understanding consent? Carceral feminism gets it wrong. Over and over and over again.

Mass layoffs are sweeping through sectors most folks never imagined would be touched: the National Park Service. The National Weather Service. The arts. The These aren’t just bureaucracies or background institutions—they’re pillars of our society. When they crumble, they don’t fall in isolation. They take whole communities with them.

Consent is often framed as a clean, binary decision: yes or no. Thumbs up or down. Red light, green light. But in sex work—and, honestly, in most parts of life—it’s never that simple. Consent is a spectrum, and anyone who’s ever worked in the industry can tell you: the messiest parts of our labor live in the in-between.

The prosecution didn’t rely on sensational imagery of kidnapping or armed threats. Instead, they introduced a more unsettling and nuanced concept: coercive control—a sustained pattern of emotional abuse, surveillance, and violence that distorts intimacy and erodes autonomy.

One of the most immediate and damaging barriers is the college admissions process itself. Many schools still include criminal history questions on their applications—known as “the box.” While “Ban the Box” efforts have succeeded in pushing back on this in employment and housing, college applications remain a site of unchecked bias. Applicants with records are often forced to write justification essays or go through special disciplinary review boards that operate with little transparency or appeal.

For most people, the idea of college brings to mind lecture halls, laptops, and late-night study sessions. But for incarcerated women—especially survivors of trafficking and violence—higher education looks very different. It’s not about campus tours or dorm life. It’s about handwritten essays, 37-page packets, weeks of waiting for feedback, and figuring out how to pay for a textbook with commissary wages. In this second post of our six-part series, we follow Cassandra’s journey through a prison-based paralegal course—one she tackled without internet, support, or even reliable mail service. What she endured wasn’t just a course load—it was a test of endurance. And like so many women behind bars, she turned that hustle into hope.

When a certain child rescue organization—you know, the one whose name sounds like a Christian indie band—published their recent reflection titled “Mistakes happen in anti-trafficking work. We must learn from them,” a strange thing happened across the sex worker rights community.

We collectively blinked. Really slowly.

Not in shock, but in that tired, long-suffering way you blink when someone finally repeats back something you’ve been saying for twenty years and calls it a revelation.

For years, prisons were called “crime schools” because people learned more about how to survive in the underground economy than how to build a stable life. But over the past two decades, peer educators, survivor-led programs, and small but mighty prison college initiatives have begun to shift that narrative. Inside, women are not just learning—they’re teaching. They’re guiding each other through case law, GED exams, and grief recovery. They’re mentoring each other, mapping out legal strategies, and explaining reproductive health when medical staff won’t.

Remember when tariffs were marketed as the golden ticket to economic salvation? They were supposed to protect American jobs, revive domestic industry, and punish “bad actors” overseas. Just slap a tax on imports, they said, and factories would roar back to life. Jobs would multiply. Wages would rise. The middle class would thrive.

Spoiler alert: they didn’t.