When Words Change, Perspectives Change: A collective position on language, dignity, and changing the narratives about women who have experienced prison.

Ms Claudia Alejandra Cardona

Claudia Alejandra Cardona is a Colombian psychologist and human rights advocate. She is the founder and director of Corporación Mujeres Libres, through which she has worked to make human rights violations in Colombia’s prison system visible and to promote reforms that advance justice and dignity for women. Her key contributions include advancing the Public Utility Law as an alternative to imprisonment that takes into account women’s lived realities and responsibilities, and the Menstrual Health in Prison Law.

What we call ourselves is not a detail; it is a political act, a gesture of dignity and a form of freedom.

This opinion was born out of a necessary and urgent reflection on the power of words and how they can hurt, confine, or liberate. It arises from our voices, the voices and experiences of women who have experienced prison and who demand the right to be referred to with dignity. We seek to break the narratives that reduce us to punishment, and to construct a language that accompanies rather than excludes, that opens doors rather than builds walls.

Here we talk about how language can become an extension of confinement, but also a tool to rebuild ourselves, resist and transform. We focus on the labels imposed on us, propose more humane ways of telling our stories and remember that changing the word is changing our perspective and that of society.

This opinion is also an ethical and political call to recognize that the way women who have been in prison are labeled influences our opportunities, our relationships and our possible futures. Referring to ourselves with dignity is, for us, a form of freedom.  Hoy queremos comenzar por aquí, por el poder de la palabra. Porque desde ahí comienza también todo lo demás.

The power of words

Words are one of the most powerful tools we have as human beings. With them, we create bonds, give shape to our thoughts, name what surrounds us, and make ourselves known.

Words can accompany or destroy, bring us closer or isolate us. They are not just sounds or random letters; they carry meaning, memory, emotions and power. A single sentence can mark a life, open up an opportunity or leave a wound that is difficult to heal.

Using words is a huge responsibility. What we say, and how we say it, influences our relationships, the way society is organized, and how our own stories are woven together. With words, we can sow respect, tenderness, and justice, or we can repeat violence, impose silence, and reinforce inequality. Choosing them consciously is, ultimately, choosing the kind of world that we want to help build.

Every word we use carries its own weight; it can open a door or leave it closed forever. It can heal or hurt, open paths or close them. Words can be an embrace or a condemnation, a bridge or a barrier. With words, we can recognize someone's humanity or deny it. Words are never neutral; they carry stories, prejudices and emotions, and they have the power to transform the way we see and treat those around us.

Speaking is not simply making sounds. It is naming what exists, giving shape to the world. With words we construct realities, weave relationships, leave our mark. What is named exists; what is not named becomes invisible. And what is named badly is misrepresented. That is why defending words is also defending dignity. It is caring for language as one cares for sacred territory. Because once a word is spoken, it cannot be undone. And when that word is born of truth, respect and love, it can remain forever in the heart of the listener.

Words have the power to change lives. We know this. We have experienced it, we have felt it, when someone has truly listened to us. When they said to us, “I believe you,” “I am with you,” “you are important,” “your story matters.” That is why we believe in their power. We believe in their power to transform, but we also know the damage they can cause when used carelessly, without listening, without truth.

We also know this because we have often been called words we did not choose, labelled in ways that do not represent us, and described with harsh terms that attempt to reduce us to a mistake or a number. That is why we have decided to refer to ourselves from another place, with our own voices. We choose to use words to rebuild ourselves, to resist, to look at ourselves again with dignity.

Words take shape

And from there, from our words and our experiences, Corporación Mujeres Libres (the Free Women’s Corporation) was born - an organization made up of women who have directly experienced what it means to be deprived of liberty and also what it means to leave prison and face life afterwards. We did not come to this work from theory, but from our lived experiences. We have experienced confinement, stigma, the breakdown of family ties and the judgmental gaze of a society that neither listens nor forgives. But we have also found the strength to organize ourselves, to come together, and to transform pain into strength, into proposals and collective struggle.

Mujeres Libres was founded in Colombia in response to the lack of meaningful policies for women in prison and those who are released. Our work is based on support, training, advocacy and memory. We are women who defend the rights of other women. We walk alongside those who are still deprived of their liberty, those who have been released, and their families. We hold workshops, accompany women upon release from prison, create support networks, and raise our voices in places where there is only silence. Our strength lies in our stories, in our dignity, and in the certainty that we are not what others have said about us.

We know what it means to be labelled without being known. We know what it is like to be called words we did not choose, words imposed on us that diminish us, mark us, stigmatize us. That is why we have decided to confront those words, question them and deconstruct them. Because if they once served to condemn us, today they are also the tool we use to liberate ourselves.

Words that hurt

But it is not enough to recognize the power of words or to embody them. We also need to ask ourselves how they have been used against us. Because when language becomes habit, when words are repeated without thinking about what they provoke, they can become invisible chains and society repeats terms that single us out, belittle us and hurt us.

That is why we need to pause here, in that other place where words do not name, but hurt. Where language does not build bridges, but raises walls. We are talking about those words that are said without thinking, but which are felt and cause pain. Words that were imposed on us, that do not speak of who we are, but which are repeated over and over again until they become part of the landscape of punishment. Words that become normalized and hide the violence in the way they refer to us. Because discourse can also be a punishment, an extension of condemnation, yet another obstacle that stands in our way of moving forward.

Today we raise our voices against the use of these terms which, although often considered “technical” or specific to legal language, reinforce exclusion and dehumanization in everyday life. These are words that, when used to describe us, are stigmatizing, denigrating and offensive. Even when they appear in legal or institutional contexts - such as in court rulings, reports, the media or administrative records - they make it clear that language is never neutral; it always emerges from a particular place, from a particular perspective, and from a place of prejudice.

These words weigh heavily on us. They are imposed labels that reduce everything we are to a single moment in our lives. To a mistake. To a punishment.

• They are imposed because we do not choose them. It is an identity that comes from outside, from institutions, the media, judicial discourse or public opinion. It does not arise from our experiences or from the way we understand ourselves as people.

• They diminish us because they render all our other dimensions invisible. We are women with stories, emotions, dreams, knowledge, connections, and trajectories that are most often marked by poverty, exclusion, or violence.

  
  

These imposed labels reduce us to a mistake, a fault, a crime, a moment in our lives, and thereby denying everything else that we are. And we are so much more than a label or a court file. We are mothers fighting to rebuild our relationships with our children, to be part of their lives again. We are daughters and sisters seeking to rebuild family ties that were fractured during incarceration. We are friends who have learned to support one another. We are workers, most of us in informal or precarious jobs, who seek to provide for ourselves and our families with dignity.

We are also caregivers, leaders, artists, community builders, and defenders of rights and dignity. Our story does not begin or end in prison. Prison was a harsh, unjust experience that affected our lives, but it does not define us. We resisted inside, and now we continue to resist outside.

Words such as “prisoners,” “inmates,” “offenders,” “criminals,” “felons,” “convicts,” “ex-convicts,” “ex-inmates,” “ex-offenders,” and other similar terms pigeonhole us based on the fact that we were legally prosecuted, ignoring our histories, our contexts, and the processes we have undertaken to move forward. These terms carry a long history of stigmatization rooted in punitive, social, and communications media discourses. They label us solely on the basis of what we did or our punishment, thereby perpetuating dehumanization and denying our life trajectories, our situations of vulnerability, our resistance and our struggles to rebuild ourselves in freedom. In this way, they also prevent us from moving forward with our lives, affecting our ability to access our rights and rebuild our lives.

As our friend and colleague Kathy Boudin says in the video, Humanization of language, recorded for Mujeres Libres 

“We are not ex-convicts, we are women who resist [...] those words take away our name, our history, our face [...] I am not an ex-convict, I am a woman who fought to survive.”

We all recognize ourselves in those words, because it is not just about the terminology itself, but about the symbolic place from which it comes, a place associated with fault, deviance, punishment.

When these words are used, the language does not simply describe a legal situation; rather, it constructs a narrative that reduces us to a crime, erasing our personal histories, our conditions of vulnerability, our resistance and our humanity. These are words that, when used without reflection, reinforce a punitive view that condemns us beyond the time of the sentence itself, extending the punishment to all aspects of life: access to work, education, health, and housing; social participation; and even our emotional and family relationships.

By repeating these ways of referring to us, the label continues to haunt us even after we have regained our freedom. This occurs, for example, in employment forms, judicial databases, or institutional discourse that refers to “ex-convicts” or “rehabilitated offenders.” Using these terms reinforces the idea that our identity is forever defined by an event in our past. This not only violates our right to our identity and privacy, but also perpetuates social exclusion.

Added to this is the repeated use of terms such as “rehabilitation” or “rehabilitated persons,” words that we also find problematic. Rehabilitation implies that there is something damaged, sick or defective that needs to be corrected - as if our bodies, minds, or lives needed to be “fixed.” But we are not sick. We are not an injured organ or a broken piece of the system. We don’t need tutorials to learn how to be people.

This language shifts the punishment to the medical and moral spheres, as if the problem were with us and not with the social, economic, political, and violent conditions that have shaped our lives. Talking about “rehabilitation” shifts responsibility away from the State and society, and reinforces the idea that we must constantly prove that we are worthy of rights, opportunities, and trust.

Something similar occurs with the use of the word “inmates.” Inmates of where? That term, taken from hospital or institutional language, once again strips us of our names, our histories, and our agency. It turns us into contained, administered, locked-up bodies, without our own identities. We are not “inmates” as if we inhabited a place outside of society. We are women deprived of our freedom as a result of judicial, political, and social decisions, not patients or passive subjects under permanent custody.

These words stem from a logic that infantilizes us, pathologizes us, or reduces us to objects of control. They are part of the same symbolic framework that seeks to normalize us, correct us, or adapt us, instead of recognizing our abilities, our decisions, our resistance, and our right to rebuild our lives in freedom, without labels that continue to mark us.

As various international human rights bodies, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), have pointed out, the language used by state institutions must be aligned with the principles of dignity, equality, and non-discrimination.  The IACHR has also affirmed that States must adopt specific measures to guarantee the social inclusion of people leaving the prison system, with a differential and gender-based approach, recognizing that women face particular obstacles in this process.

Furthermore, in its 2023 report, Women Deprived of Liberty in the Americas, the IACHR draws attention to the disproportionate impact of incarceration on women, especially those living in situations of poverty, who are heads of households or who bear the responsibility of caring for their children. This report emphasizes the need to adopt measures that guarantee non-repetition, and we are certain that one of these measures is to confront and dismantle the stigmas that continue to denigrate us after imprisonment. Language is a very important tool for advancing this change.

The United Nations (UN), through the Bangkok Rules (United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women “Offenders”), has indicated that all policies, actions or dealings with women deprived of their liberty must be based on respect for human dignity and non-discrimination. These rules, adopted in 2010, are based on the recognition that women have specific experiences and needs, and that the justice system must respond to us without reproducing inequalities or stigmas.

Although there is no article that literally refers to the use of non-stigmatizing language, the spirit and principles of these rules make it clear that the way a person is referred to is also a form of treatment. Referring to people with respect is recognizing the humanity and history behind each woman. In this sense, these rules inspire a call to States, institutions and society in general to speak and act from a place of recognition, dignity and rights, avoiding any form of language that diminishes, hurts or excludes. This is not a minor detail; what we are called has real and significant effects on our lives, our opportunities and our chances of rebuilding ourselves as subjects with full rights.

However, we also feel the need to say frankly that the Bangkok Rules themselves, despite their enormous value, also reproduce some of the stigma they seek to transform. Throughout the document, words such as “prisoners” or “offenders” are used to refer to women deprived of their liberty. Although we understand that this term is part of legal, technical and cultural language, each time it is repeated, it takes us back to the place of confinement, to a label that we did not choose and that, in many cases, continues to be imposed on us even after we have regained our freedom.

This situation is not unique to the Bangkok Rules. Other international human rights instruments, technical guides, reports, and recommendations produced by international organizations continue to repeatedly use terms such as “prisoners,” “inmates,” or “offenders” to refer to women deprived of liberty or those of us who have been released. Although these documents have enormous normative and political value and have been fundamental in raising awareness of our conditions and demanding respect for rights, the language used remains anchored in an institutional logic that refers to us from the perspective of confinement and control, and not from our humanity, insisting on defining us exclusively by the deprivation of liberty or by the crime, reinforcing an imposed identity that renders invisible our histories, our contexts, and our resistance.

When these terms are repeated in international documents, they become legitimized and reproduced at the national, institutional and social levels. They seep into laws, public policies, judgments, programs and official discourse, ultimately consolidating a perspective that normalizes stigmatization. That is why we consider it essential that the debate on language not be limited to the local or cultural sphere, but also extend to the international frameworks that guide prison and post-prison policies. A genuine human rights and gender approach must critically review not only the practice that it regulates, but also the words used to refer to those it claims to protect.

We know that changes in institutional language take time, but we also know, because we have experienced it, that words shape realities. When an international instrument refers to “inmates” or “offenders” without seeking a more humane way of referring to them, it reinforces the very view that reduces our existence to punishment. As noted above, we believe that a true rights-based and gender-based approach must transform not only practices, but also the words used to think about and design public policy. If language does not change, change remains incomplete.

Those words reinforce the idea that we are only the mistake. They separate us from our histories, our contexts, what we lived through before, what we survived during, and what we continue to struggle with after we leave. They make us feel as if the sentence is still ongoing, even though we are already out. Those words haunt us, appearing in databases, on forms, in speeches that continue to refer to us as “ex-convicts,” as if we have to prove ourselves all the time; as if we have to ask permission to exist; as if we have no right to rebuild our lives, to look for work, to study, to be with our families, to move forward.

Words that can liberate

Changing language is not just about changing words, it is about changing the way we are viewed. It is about affirming our humanity, regaining our voice and reclaiming the right to write new stories in freedom. We want to make it clear that this is not just a matter of looking for “pretty words.” Determining how we refer to ourselves has been part of the journey to heal, to recognize ourselves, to stop carrying words we never chose. We know that transforming language does not erase wounds, but it does open up possibilities, allowing us to imagine other futures, other forms of justice, and other possible connections between us and with society.

Changing language also means changing perspectives, opening paths, recognizing trajectories and healing the wounds left by stigmatization. That is why we insist: We are women. We are subjects of rights. We are survivors. We are free women.

From our experience and our collective work, we propose leaving those labels behind and moving towards a language that recognizes the dignity, humanity and processes that women experience before, during and after imprisonment. We are committed to language that speaks with us and not about us, and language that reflects the complexity of our trajectories. Because these are not just words; changing how we are referred to also transforms how we are seen and how we see ourselves.

When we say “women deprived of liberty,” we are reminding ourselves that, although that deprivation of liberty is not the only thing we experience, it is a more respectful way of naming a temporary situation, not an identity. We were not born to be called that, but if we must name that stage of our lives, let it be in a way that recognizes that it was a temporary condition, not something that defines us forever.

Saying “women in prison” is to recognize a reality, but not an identity. It is a way of talking about what we experience without hiding it, but also without getting trapped there. This expression allows us to make visible what happens within those walls - the violations, the resistance and the life that persists even in the midst of confinement. But we also know that “prison” does not define us. We were there, or some of us still are, but we are so much more than that. We are women with histories, names, personal connections and rights. And that is why when we say “women in prison,” we do so with dignity, not condemnation.

Talking about “women who have been in prison” allows us to talk about the past without getting stuck in it. It acknowledges that we have been through a difficult experience, but it does not reduce us to that experience. It helps to acknowledge history without being defined by it. It allows us to talk about what happened, what we learned or did not learn, and also how we move forward.

Many of us choose to say “ex-privadas de la libertad,” or “formerly deprived of liberty.” Yes, it sounds strange, but we say it with full intention. We do so because we want to distance ourselves from words that weigh like chains, such as “ex-convict,” “ex-prisoner” and “ex-criminal.” By saying formerly deprived of liberty, we affirm that this was a stage that has now passed, that yes, we were deprived of our liberty, but we did not lose our value, our dignity, or our rights. We are not “ex-women” or “ex-people.” We are ourselves, with a history that is still alive, with our own struggles, with a present and a future that belongs to us.

Calling ourselves “formerly incarcerated women” may sound formal, but it also opens up a space to recognize that there was an experience of imprisonment without being defined by it. It is a way of saying that there was a before, a during and an after, and that today we walk outside those bars. This expression allows us to talk about the consequences of imprisonment without remaining tied to the punishment, remembering that imprisonment was a stage, not the center of who we are.

Sometimes we prefer to say “women with lived experience in prison” because, yes, we went through that. It is part of our history, and we do not deny it. But we want to talk about it from a different place, not from guilt or punishment, but from what that experience left us, from the strength we had to survive.

Some people, institutions, or organizations call us “women in the process of reinsertion” or “reintegration” or say that “we are reintegrating into society,” and we understand where that comes from, since leaving prison does not mean that everything is resolved. Outside, barriers such as prejudice and lack of opportunities await us. However, talking about “social reinsertion” or “reintegration” implies that prison left us outside of society, and that is not true. We were never outside. Prison is a social construct, created by the State and sustained by political and cultural decisions. What is broken is not our bond with society, but the way society views us, isolates us, erases us, and stigmatizes us. That is why we do not talk about social reinsertion or reintegration. We do not have to return to a place we never left; we talk about rebuilding relationships, transforming the conditions that generate exclusion and demanding that society assumes its responsibility in that process.

And finally, many of us recognize ourselves as women who have survived the system. Because we have not only survived prison, but also poverty, abandonment, the pain of separation from our families, and social indifference. We have survived many forms of trying to break us, and yet we are still here, standing tall, referring to ourselves from perspectives of life, hope and dignity.

These expressions allow us to speak about ourselves from a broader, more respectful place that is more faithful to who we really are. Changing words is not a simple adjustment of form; it is a deeply political act. That is why we continue to speak, write, create and walk together.

Because every time a woman speaks out, the silence is broken. And every time one of us is heard without judgement, the world becomes, even if only a little, a freer place.

That is why our call is not only to apply the Bangkok Rules or other international, regional and national instruments, but to go beyond what is written, to read those documents from the perspective of the real lives of women who are or have been in prison. To recognize that respect and dignity begin with what we are called. Changing words is not a simple symbolic gesture; it is opening space for other stories to exist, for other futures to be possible.

Today we say clearly that we are women who think, feel, dream and transform. And as long as chains exist, whether they are made of steel or stigma, whether they are walls of concrete or prejudice, we will continue to seek ways to dismantle them, to confront them and overcome them in order to live in freedom. Because language can also continue to imprison us even when we are set free, when we are treated as eternally guilty, as if the sentence would never end.

But we are not.

Because we have names, histories, faces and futures.And we are not defined by a crime. We are defined by our strength.Because our word is also freedom.

Translated by Coletta Youngers from the original Spanish document.

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