Women Behind Bars


Book Description

An award-winning investigative journalist examines increasing rates of women imprisonment in today's America, in a report that draws on interviews with inmates, correctional officers, and administrators to offer insight into the societal impact of female incarceration. Original.




Resistance Behind Bars


Book Description

In 1974, women imprisoned at New York’s maximum-security prison at Bedford Hills staged what is known as the August Rebellion. Protesting the brutal beating of a fellow prisoner, the women fought off guards, holding seven of them hostage, and took over sections of the prison. While many have heard of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, the August Rebellion remains relatively unknown even in activist circles. Resistance Behind Bars is determined to challenge and change such oversights. As it examines daily struggles against appalling prison conditions and injustices, Resistance documents both collective organizing and individual resistance among women incarcerated in the U.S. Emphasizing women’s agency in resisting the conditions of their confinement through forming peer education groups, clandestinely arranging ways for children to visit mothers in distant prisons and raising public awareness about their lives, Resistance seeks to spark further discussion and research into the lives of incarcerated women and galvanize much-needed outside support for their struggles. This updated and revised edition of the 2009 PASS Award winning book includes a new chapter about transgender, transsexual, intersex, and gender-variant people in prison.




A World Apart


Book Description

“Life in a women’s prison is full of surprises,” writes Cristina Rathbone in her landmark account of life at MCI-Framingham. And so it is. After two intense court battles with prison officials, Rathbone gained unprecedented access to the otherwise invisible women of the oldest running women’s prison in America. The picture that emerges is both astounding and enraging. Women reveal the agonies of separation from family, and the prevalence of depression, and of sexual predation, and institutional malaise behind bars. But they also share their more personal hopes and concerns. There is horror in prison for sure, but Rathbone insists there is also humor and romance and downright bloody-mindedness. Getting beyond the political to the personal, A World Apart is both a triumph of empathy and a searing indictment of a system that has overlooked the plight of women in prison for far too long. At the center of the book is Denise, a mother serving five years for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense. Denise’s son is nine and obsessed with Beanie Babies when she first arrives in prison. He is fourteen and in prison himself by the time she is finally released. As Denise struggles to reconcile life in prison with the realities of her son’s excessive freedom on the outside, we meet women like Julie, who gets through her time by distracting herself with flirtatious, often salacious relationships with male correctional officers; Louise, who keeps herself going by selling makeup and personalized food packages on the prison black market; Chris, whose mental illness leads her to kill herself in prison; and Susan, who, after thirteen years of intermittent incarceration, has come to think of MCI-Framingham as home. Fearlessly truthful and revelatory, A World Apart is a major work of investigative journalism and social justice.




Jailcare


Book Description

Thousands of pregnant women pass through our nation’s jails every year. What happens to them as they gestate their pregnancies in a space of punishment? Using her ethnographic fieldwork and clinical work as an Ob/Gyn in a women’s jail, Carolyn Sufrin explores how, in this time when the public safety net is frayed and incarceration has become a central and racialized strategy for managing the poor, jail has, paradoxically, become a place where women can find care. Focusing on the experiences of pregnant, incarcerated women as well as on the practices of the jail guards and health providers who care for them, Jailcare describes the contradictory ways that care and maternal identity emerge within a punitive space presumed to be devoid of care. Sufrin argues that jail is not simply a disciplinary institution that serves to punish. Rather, when understood in the context of the poverty, addiction, violence, and racial oppression that characterize these women’s lives and their reproduction, jail can become a safety net for women on the margins of society.




Women Behind Bars


Book Description

?The integration of race into the discussion of women and corrections is important, particularly in the classroom. This book, unlike most, does not address the issue of race as an afterthought, but instead shows its relevance by integrating it throughout.? ?Stephanie Bush-Baskette, Rutgers University?This comprehensive text is a strong contribution to the study of women and incarceration. Particularly effective in terms of its focus on race, gender, and imprisonment, it should be required reading in a wide range of courses.? ?Barbara Bloom, Sonoma State UniversityToday?s prisons are increasingly filled with poor, dark-skinned, single mothers locked up for low-level drug involvement?with serious ramifications for the corrections system. Women Behind Bars offers the first comprehensive exploration of the challenges faced by incarcerated women in the United States.Young and Reviere show conclusively that serving time in prisons designed by and for men not only does little to address what landed women, particularly women of color, there in the first place, but also undermines their prospects for an improved life on the outside. Using a multifaceted race/class/gender lens, the authors make a convincing argument that women in prison are punished twice: first by their sentences, and again because the policies that govern time behind bars were not designed to address women?s unique problems and responsibilities.Vernetta D. Young is associate professor of sociology at Howard University. She is coeditor of African American Classics in Criminology and Criminal Justice. Rebecca Reviere is associate professor of sociology at Howard University. Contents: Equal Rights or Lost Opportunities? Women in the Prison System. A Brief History of Women in Prison. The Changing Face of Female Prisoners. Women Prisoners: Special Issues. Drug Use and Drug Treatment. Mental and Physical Health Care. Women and Children First. Death and Dying. We Want You Back: The Return to Society. Conclusion. Still More Problems Than Solutions.




Women Behind Bars


Book Description

"In this hilarious satire on B-movies of the 1950's, Mary Eleanor, an innocent duped into crime, lands in the Greenwich Village Woman's House of Detention, presided over by a massive matron with a taste for sadism and female flesh as our heroine, now Caged in the Big House, learns about life The Hard Way." -- Publisher's description




Inside This Place, Not of It


Book Description

“Essential reading” on some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States (Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black) Here, in their own words, thirteen women recount their lives leading up to incarceration and their harrowing struggle for survival once insides. Among the narrators: Theresa, who spent years believing her health and life were in danger, being aggressively treated with a variety of medications for a disease she never had. Only on her release did she discover that an incompetent prison medical bureaucracy had misdiagnosed her with HIV. Anna, who repeatedly warned apathetic prison guards about a suicidal cellmate. When the woman killed herself, the guards punished Anna in an attempt to silence her and hide their own negligence. Teri, who was sentenced to up to fifty years for aiding and abetting a robbery when she was only seventeen. A prison guard raped Teri, who was still a teenager, and the assaults continued for years with the complicity of other staff.




Shakespeare Behind Bars


Book Description

A deeply stirring account of one woman's experience teaching drama to women in prison. I began to understand that female prisoners are not "damaged goods" and to recognize that most of these women had toughed it out in a society that favors others-- by gender, class, or race. They are Desdemonas suffering because of jealous men, Lady Macbeths craving the power of their spouses, Portias disguised as men in order to get ahead, and Shylocks who, being betrayed, take the law into their own hands. So writes Jean Trounstine in Shakespeare Behind Bars. In this gripping account, Trounstine, who spent ten years teaching at Framingham Women's Prison in Massachusetts, focuses on six inmates who, each in her own way, discover in the power of great drama a way to transcend the painful constraints of incarceration. We meet: * Dolly, a fiftyish grandmother who brings her knitting to classes and starts a battered-women's group in prison *Bertie, a Jamaican beauty estranged from her homeland, torn with guilt, and shunned for her crime * Kit, a tough, wisecracking con who stirs up trouble whenever she can-- until she's threatened with losing her kids * Rose, an outsider in the prison community who lives with HIV and eventually gains acceptance through drama * Rhonda, a college-educated leader whose life falls apart when her father dies and who struggles in prison to reestablish her roots * Mamie, a nurse in the free world, now the prison gardener who makes cards with poetry and dried flowers and battles her own illness behind bars Shakespeare Behind Bars is a uniquely powerful work that gives voice to forgotten women, sheds a compassionate light on a dark world, and proves the redemptive power of art and education.




Inside


Book Description

From a federal inmate with two decades of continuous confinement comes a controversial expose of the shocking details of life in American prisons




Stories Behind Bars


Book Description

Stories Behind Bars was inspired by the author's job as a Spanish interpreter in the US courts. It consists of four individually bound silkscreen printed booklets: in one, a young man is deported using video teleconferencing, another gives some brief history of immigration detention, and all tell stories of immigrants in U.S. prisons and jails. The stories give the reader an insight into the complex issues surrounding the immigration debate. The four separate pamphlets are housed in a slipcase with a barred window. Silkscreen printed.