Institutional Authority and Epistemic Violence

Sor Juana confronted institutional authorities—the Church, the Crown—that claimed monopoly over truth and used that power to silence her. Mass incarceration operates similarly through epistemic violence: the system defines prisoners as criminal, unreliable, and unworthy of belief, delegitimizing their accounts of injustice, abuse, and innocence. Courts privilege official narratives over lived experience; institutions rewrite histories of systemic racism as individual moral failure. Sor Juana's insistence on her own intellectual authority—refusing to accept the Church's judgment of what she could know and think—models resistance to epistemic suppression. This concept examines how mass incarceration maintains power through controlling narratives: defining who counts as victim, whose knowledge is credible, which harms matter legally. Recognizing epistemic violence reveals that criminal justice reform must include restoring incarcerated people's authority to interpret their own experiences and contribute to truth-making about the system itself.