There is a growing contradiction at the heart of justice reform, prison reform and even abolitionist spaces.
The people most affected by prisons, criminalisation, child removal, psychiatric detention and state violence are constantly told that their voices matter. We are told that our “lived experience” is important, and that nothing about us should happen without us.
Yet when opportunities arise, whether positions of leadership, international travel, media platforms, research grants, conference speaking roles, advisory appointments, the same pattern appears again and again.
The people most impacted remain the subjects of discussion, and other people become the experts.
For decades, criminalised people have fought to have our experiences recognised as expertise. We have organised from prison cells, written submissions from public housing kitchens, advocated while navigating parole conditions, criminal records, poverty and the ongoing consequences of state violence. We have built movements, organisations and networks despite barriers that many professionals will never encounter. Yet, there remains an assumption, often unspoken but deeply embedded, that lived experience alone is not enough.
The former prisoner must also acquire the qualifications.
The mother whose children were removed must also learn policy language.
The psychiatric survivor must also learn the frameworks.
The person who survived the system must first become acceptable to the system before they are considered capable of leading.
Meanwhile, people who have never experienced imprisonment often move seamlessly into positions of authority within prison reform work. They become researchers, managers, directors, consultants and conference delegates. Their expertise is assumed. Their legitimacy is rarely questioned. Their presence in leadership roles is treated as natural.
This is not a coincidence. It reflects the way power reproduces itself.
Professional spaces often congratulate themselves for including lived experience while carefully maintaining control over who makes decisions. Criminalised people are invited to advisory groups but not boards. We are invited onto panels but not executive teams. We are asked to tell our stories but not determine strategy. We are consulted but not trusted.
The language of participation has become so common that many organisations no longer notice the distinction between inclusion and power – and they are not the same thing.
A person can be included in a process while remaining completely excluded from decision-making, celebrated for their story while being denied authority, and a person can be recognised as having valuable insight while still being prevented from leading.
This dynamic becomes particularly uncomfortable when it appears within organisations that identify as abolitionist or justice oriented.
Abolition is often spoken about as though it is merely a position one holds. Support prison abolition. Support other solutions. Support decarceration. But abolition has always involved a deeper challenge. It asks us to confront the structures that determine who has authority and who does not. It requires us to examine how power is accumulated, protected and distributed.
That examination cannot stop at prisons, it must also reach our organisations, our movements and our institutions, because there is a significant difference between supporting criminalised people and being accountable to them. There is a significant difference between advocating for a community and creating conditions where that community can govern itself. And there is a significant difference between opening the door and refusing to leave the doorway.
Recently, we watched a classic example of this unfold.
An international prison reform conference was held in Amsterdam. Attendance represented a rare opportunity to influence conversations, build relationships and shape future work. Within Justice Reform Initiative, there are formerly incarcerated people employed, whose lived experience could have brought essential perspectives to those discussions, yet it was the non-criminalised Executive Director, Mindi Sotiri who travelled.
On one level, this may seem insignificant. After all, organisations make decisions about who attends conferences all the time. But viewed in context, it reflects something much larger.
Opportunities attached to criminalised communities are routinely absorbed by people who are not criminalised. Funding intended to support lived experience leadership often pays for professional positions. Projects focused on criminalised people are frequently managed by people who have never experienced criminalisation. Research about imprisonment continues to generate careers for people who have never spent a day in prison.
And in this case, a conference seat that could build the leadership of formerly incarcerated people ended up being occupied by those who already possess institutional access.
Now we should point out, that perhaps Mindi asked her formerly incarcerated staff if they would like to attend in her place, and they declined. However, in the absence of them being willing or able to attend, Mindi could have stepped aside and put forward a former prisoner from the criminalised community.
(Pic: Tabitha Lean/RAD Faction)
Sometimes this sort of thing happens as a result of individual people acting with bad intentions. In some cases, the opposite is true.
However, the problem is structural.
Professionalisation creates incentives to accumulate opportunities rather than redistribute them. Organisations become dependent upon staff whose expertise is recognised by governments, universities and funders. Career pathways emerge. Networks expand. Reputations grow. Before long, a person can spend an entire career working on prisons without ever confronting the question of whether some of the opportunities they receive should belong to someone else.
The uncomfortable reality is that many justice reform spaces have become remarkably effective at creating professional opportunities for non-criminalised people. They have been far less effective at transferring actual power to criminalised people.
This is why representation alone is not enough.
The presence of lived experience voices within a room tells us very little about who controls the agenda, who holds the budget, who determines priorities and who benefits from the outcomes.
Power is not measured by who is invited, nor is it measured by who decides.
For abolitionists, this should matter deeply, because abolition is not simply about ending prisons. It is about challenging the belief that some groups of people are naturally entitled to govern the lives of others.
That challenge applies whether the institution is a prison, a university, a government department or a non-profit organisation.
If we are serious about transformation, we must ask harder questions of ourselves.
- Who receives the opportunities created through this work?
- Who is paid?
- Who is promoted?
- Who travels?
- Who speaks?
- Who decides?
And perhaps most importantly: who remains waiting for their turn while others continue building careers from their experiences?
Until we are willing to confront those questions honestly, there is a risk that justice reform becomes less about shifting power and more about managing inequality in more sophisticated ways.
The language may change. The branding may improve. The politics may sound radical.
But if criminalised people remain on the margins of movements built around our lives, then the fundamental distribution of power remains largely untouched.
And no movement can call itself liberatory while treating the people most affected as permanent participants rather than leaders.
