Life & Wisdom Quote by Barbara Deming

Barbara Deming, a feminist, civil rights activist, and theorist of nonviolent revolution, sets the bar for social change by the lived experience of those with the least power. She envisions a future in which prisons would simply not exist, provided we define prisons as places that people inside inevitably experience as degradation, isolation, and coercion. The key move is to shift the definition from architecture and legal labels to felt reality. If any institution produces the same crushing experience that current prisons do, then changing its name or reforming its procedures would not be progress; it would be the old order in disguise.

Deming wrote as someone repeatedly jailed for her protests. From that vantage, she rejected the idea that a humane society can be built on punitive cages. The revolution she imagines is not merely a transfer of power but a transformation of relationships, so that systems of response to harm do not reproduce domination. Accountability would still matter, but it would be pursued through practices that repair harms and protect communities without stripping people of dignity. The insistence on ends consistent with means, central to her nonviolence, undergirds the claim: a revolution that retains institutions experienced as crushing cannot be called revolutionary.

Her sentence also functions as a warning against cosmetic reform. New buildings, new policies, and new rhetoric are worthless if the person confined still feels erased and disposable. By centering the experience of the incarcerated as the moral metric, Deming anticipates abolitionist arguments that safety grows from equity, care, and opportunity rather than cages. The measure of a just society, she suggests, is how freedom feels to those who could most easily be forgotten. If they still feel imprisoned, the work of revolution remains undone.