When Arrest Becomes a Badge: Reckoning with Privilege in Activism

Lately, I’ve found myself sitting in rooms, at events, or scrolling through feeds, where people speak lightly about being arrested at protests. Environmental and climate activists laugh about it, wear it like a badge of honour, tell stories of locking on and getting dragged away as if it’s a rite of passage for the cause.

And I sit there, grateful for their courage and commitment to protecting the earth - truly - but also deeply uncomfortable. Because as a criminalised woman who spent years in a cage, who works alongside women who are still inside, who walks with families who have lost loved ones behind bars, I can’t hear those stories without flinching.

There’s a world of difference between being arrested and being imprisoned. Between spending a night in a cell and spending years cut off from your family, your children, your life.

The Privilege of Surviving the System

When people joke about being arrested, I wonder if they know what they’re saying.Are they prepared to lose their home?

To have their kids taken and placed in foster care, maybe on an 18-year order?

To see their name splashed across the papers, to lose jobs, to be banned from whole industries, unable to get a Working With Children Check, labelled “a risk”?

Are they prepared to lose years of their life?

Because that’s what criminalisation does to people like us. Arrest isn’t a momentary inconvenience, it’s a lifelong sentence of stigma, surveillance, and exclusion.

And the only way you can speak about arrest without fear is if you know you’ll be okay.If you know the system will see you as “the good kind” of criminal, the protestor, the activist, the one whose cause is righteous, not the kind it cages, kills, or disappears.

The Good Crim / Bad Crim Binary

There’s something insidious in the way society celebrates certain arrests.You can stand in front of a crowd and tell stories about being arrested at a protest, and the room will cheer. You’ll be seen as brave, principled, heroic.

But if I stood up and said I’d been arrested, not for chaining myself to a bulldozer, but for surviving poverty, addiction, homelessness, abuse or violence, that same room would fall silent. Maybe shift uncomfortably. Maybe decide I’m not the right kind of activist.

That’s the “good criminal / bad criminal” binary in action, where those who break the law for the “right” reasons are applauded, and those who break it out of necessity, trauma, or survival are condemned.

It’s something our movements need to reckon with. Especially white environmental movements, which too often centre the experiences of people whose risk ends when the protest does.

For Some of Us, Arrest Isn’t Symbolic

For some of us, standing in front of a bulldozer would not mean a few hours in custody, it would mean years behind bars.

For some of us, arrest isn’t symbolic, it’s fatal.

When activists treat arrest as a performance, it erases the people who don’t survive the system - the people killed inside, the families still mourning, the lives permanently marked by state violence.

If we want real solidarity, it has to start with honesty. With recognising that not all arrests are equal, that not all bodies are treated the same, and that safety in resistance is a privilege not everyone has.

Closing

So when I hear activists speak proudly of being arrested, I don’t want them to stop resisting, I want them to start reflecting. To understand what it means to risk arrest when you’re Black, brown, poor, trans, or previously imprisoned. To use their privilege not just to protest, but to dismantle the systems that make criminalisation a death sentence for some and a badge of honour for others.

Because until we can hold both truths, the courage of those who resist and the violence of the system that crushes others for less, our movements will keep replicating the hierarchies we claim to fight.