Until the Cages Are Empty: Transgender Criminal Defense as a Necessary Tactic of Prison-Industrial Complex Abolition

Authors

• Lark Mulligan

Abstract

This article is a practical guide in the fight to abolish the prison-industrial complex as well as institutionalized transphobia and cissexism. Focusing specifically on the practice area of criminal defense, this article proposes a model that must be replicated across jurisdictions wherever transgender people are criminalized. By instituting an interdisciplinary team approach that is non-hierarchical, strengths-based, trauma-informed, community focused, holistic, harm-reductionist, and abolitionist, practitioners will find their role in this movement as one of consensus building, knowledge sharing, community empowerment, institutional navigation, and access distribution. As discrimination and violence against trans people continues to rise, practitioners must learn to not only defend this population in criminal court but also work toward the material abolition of the criminal and administrative legal systems that oppress them. Assuming this role entails an epistemological shift in how attorneys conceptualize winning, rights, justice, equality, visibility, inclusion, statecraft, knowledge, and power.

Recommended Citation

Lark Mulligan, Until the Cages Are Empty: Transgender Criminal Defense as a Necessary Tactic of Prison-Industrial Complex Abolition, 23 UC Law SF Race & Econ. Just. L.J. 125 (2026).
Available at: https://repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_race_poverty_law_journal/vol23/iss2/3