Anti-torture and the politics of carceral fatalism

Anti-torture advocates have long confronted the realities of imprisonment and are acutely aware of its limits. Yet they remain caught between a commitment to punitive justice – demanding that perpetrators of torture face incarceration – and a sustained critique of the prison's systemic failures. Although they recognise that penitentiary institutions routinely violate the very human rights they are meant to uphold, advocates continue to rely on imprisonment as the primary mechanism of accountability for torture. This article argues that the way anti-torture advocates engage with the prison reflects and fosters a politics of ‘carceral fatalism’. Drawing on a survey and 18 semi-structured interviews with anti-torture practitioners in Europe, I show how carceral fatalism operates across three dimensions: cognitive (the inability to imagine a world without prisons), affective (an emotional attachment to criminal accountability), and practical (a pragmatic focus on managing the institution). I argue that this politics of carceral fatalism must be scrutinised for the penal-expansionist underside it generates beneath ostensibly liberal aims. Finally, I advance an alternative account inspired by penal abolitionism, reimagining anti-torture activism not as a mechanism for governing the prison, but as a struggle to resist and ultimately dismantle it.