Rainbow Captives illuminates the ways queer identities are policed, pathologized, and punished inside carceral systems and through state control. Queer people are disproportionately incarcerated and otherwise affected by the long reach of carceral systems. Often invisible, normalized state control stretches beyond prison walls and into health care, housing, immigration, legal processes, and social norms. Rainbow Captives does not simply catalogue the resulting harm. It investigates the conditions that produce and sustain cycles of confinement for 2SLGBTQ+ individuals. Contributors to this groundbreaking collection draw on criminology and law to advance the field of queer carceral studies, encompassing perspectives from across the Global North and Global South. Some address the specific challenges confronting queer and trans prisoners, such as communal showers in hypermasculine spaces or approaches to treatment and care for 2SLGBTQ+ inmates in women's prisons. Some critique systemic failures, such as the implications of transphobia in litigation or the treatment of lesbians on death row.

Others analyze the extension of carceral logic into social services and community spaces. Rainbow Captives exposes the relationship between queerness and carcerality, inviting readers to imagine what it means to transform systems regulating gender, sexuality, and social belonging through carceral mechanisms.