Caging compassion: Recognizing and resisting carceral humanist narratives in criminal justice reform
by Emmett Sanders, January 30, 2026
Advocates for criminal justice reform are often caught between the immediate need to address the dehumanizing conditions people are subjected to and the need to make actual lasting reforms to the systems in which carceral harm is perpetuated. Sometimes, they are faced with reforms, often proposed by prison systems themselves, that fall under the label of “carceral humanism”. Carceral humanist reforms co-opt our compassion and use it to suggest minimal improvements to the carceral system without changing the dehumanization at the core of mass incarceration. Carceral humanist reforms are not genuine change, but rather a public relations strategy that seeks to remove the objection to harm rather than to remove the harm itself.
On February 25, the Prison Policy Initiative and guests James Kilgore and Mon Mohapatra discussed the new toolkit, Caging compassion: Recognizing and resisting carceral humanist narratives in criminal justice reform, offering useful tips for advocates seeking to avoid superficial carceral humanist reforms in their quest to make genuine, lasting systemic change.
This new guide:
- Explains how carceral humanism manifests in different areas such as jail expansion, halfway houses, and prolonged post-release supervision, as well as in electronic monitoring and other alternatives to incarceration.
- Helps identify some commonly used carceral humanist narratives, as well as offers useful counternarratives and examples of how people have successfully responded to these narratives.
- Offers advice for those seeking to determine whether the proposed reform offers real change or is a carceral humanist reform, and
- Offers advice on identifying non-carceral humanist responses to harm.
This guide is part of our ever-expanding Advocacy Toolkit, a series of resources for criminal legal reform advocates.
Watch the full webinar:
Webinar resources
The slides for the webinar are available here.
Some other useful resources related to carceral humanism include:
- Contending with Carveouts: How and Why to resist Charge-Based Exclusions in Reforms — a Prison Policy Initiative toolkit of arguments and strategies for resisting carveouts in criminal legal system reforms.
- Cautionary jails: Deconstructing the three “C”s of jail construction arguments — a 2024 Prison Policy Initiative briefing on the way jail expansion arguments have evolved to include carceral humanist arguments.
- If They Build It: Organizing Lessons & Strategies Against Carceral Infrastructure — a 2025 Community Justice Exchange publication on concrete lessons learned from jail expansion fights across the country.
