From Lived Experience “Advocates” to Loyal Servants: The Co-option of Our Pain

There is a dangerous thing happening in the spaces we’ve fought to enter. The language of “lived experience” has become currency in rooms that were never built for us—and the cost of entry has become our collective integrity, community, and politics.

Those of us who have been inside, who have survived the violence of the prison system, of child removal, of policing and poverty, are now being asked to sit at tables that once turned their backs on us. But instead of dismantling those tables, some of us are being applauded for polishing them. We are handed scraps—consultation roles, advisory panels, speaking gigs—and told this is progress. That this is change. That this is liberation.

But what does it mean when our trauma becomes a tool for reform, instead of revolution? What does it mean when we start shaving off the edges of these sharp systems, trying to make them softer, kinder, more “trauma-informed”—instead of tearing them down? What does it mean when people with lived experience become the architects of incremental harm, co-signing policies that tinker with cages rather than abolishing them?

It means we’ve lost our way.

It means we’ve been seduced by the performance of inclusion, rather than standing in solidarity with our people still inside. It means we’ve traded community for platform. Movement for career. Justice for reform.

And it’s not enough to say, “Well, at least we’re at the table.” If the table is built on our people’s backs—still soaked in carceral logic—sitting there only props up the very system we should be tearing down. It is not solidarity to play a part in the system that is killing us. It is not community to collaborate with our oppressors. We must tell the truth: proximity to power is not power. Visibility is not liberation.

Liberation doesn’t come from being palatable. It doesn’t come from being the “reasonable” one in the room. It comes from refusing to participate in the violence of reform. From staying accountable to our people—not the institutions that harmed us. From building together, not building careers.

The lived prison network is growing. More people are becoming activated, and that is powerful and necessary. But we have to name the reality that this growth is happening alongside a growing interest in our oppression—and call me cynical, but the interest in our oppression is growing at the same rate as the funding made available to do work “about” us. There is now an industry being built on our backs. Research grants, service delivery contracts, advocacy organisations—it’s all part of a machine where there is money to be made in working in the incarceration space. We are the industry now. Our suffering, our survival, our stories are commodities in someone else’s career ladder.

As an abolition activist, I am deeply critical of the prison industrial complex and every agency that upholds it. I am critical of the police, of the courts, of the prisons, of the service providers who exist to manage us, and of the universities that study our lives without any intention of transforming them. And now, increasingly, I am finding myself becoming critical of many of the so-called “lived experience advocates” who have become part of the carceral system itself, because their advocacy is tightening the chains that bind us. Their advocacy is collusion. Their advocacy is not liberatory.

We need to be honest: when you sell your soul for a seat at the table, you are no longer outside the system—you are part of it. You are not dismantling the prison industrial complex; you are reinforcing it. You are not helping us get free; you are helping to build stronger cages. If your work strengthens the systems that disappeared us, if your work props up the institutions that profit from our pain, then you are complicit in our oppression. You are not in solidarity with us—you are standing on top of us.

And we must start naming this for what it is. When we speak of the actors that uphold the prison industrial complex, we must include those so-called “lived experience advocates” who have become loyal servants to the system. If we fail to name this, we fail to understand the full machinery of our oppression—and we cannot dismantle what we refuse to see.

We need a new kind of leadership—one that doesn’t seek validation from the systems we fight. One that centres collective liberation, not individual advancement. One that refuses to measure success by proximity to power or the approval of our oppressors. One that centres collective liberation, not individual advancement. One that understands that real change will never be handed to us from inside the walls of these violent institutions.

We don’t need their tables, their invitations, or their approval. We have always had our own. We have always built what we needed, from nothing, together. We don’t need their permission to imagine or create a world where our people are free. We don’t need to soften our demands or compromise our politics to be heard.

We only need each other—our histories, our courage, our unwavering commitment to freedom.

We are the architects of liberation. We always have been.