Researching Mass Incarceration and Prison Abolition

The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.

#SayHerName: Black Women's Stories of State Violence and Public Silence (ebook) by American African Policy Forum, Kimberlé Crenshaw, ed. Black women, girls, and femmes as young as seven and as old as ninety-three have been killed by the police, though we rarely hear their names or learn their stories. Breonna Taylor, Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson are among the many lives that should have been. #SayHerName provides an analytical framework for understanding Black women's susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, and it explains how—through black feminist storytelling and ritual—we can effectively mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice.

The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood by Grace E. Howard Drawing on detailed analyses of legislation, statements from prosecutors and law enforcement, and records from over a thousand arrest cases, Grace E. Howard traces the long history of state attempts to regulate and control people who have the capacity for pregnancy—from the early twentieth century's white supremacist eugenics to the end of Roe and the ever-increasing criminalization of abortion across the United States.

Gendered Perspectives of Restorative Justice, Violence and Resilience: An International Framework by Bev Orton, ed. Research on Restorative Justice to date tends to be gender blind. Gendered Perspectives of Restorative Justice, Violence and Resilience: An International Framework addresses this lack of gender awareness by sharing the personal journeys and experiences of women from across the Global South. Combining narratives of gendered Restorative Justice, gender-based violence, women’s resilience, activism and healing along with empirical and theoretical analyses, contributors raise awareness and educate readers about the benefits of framing Restorative Justice as an intervention for understanding the resilience of women facing violence, political challenges and sexual assault. Within a truly international framework, chapters highlight significant scholarship from researchers with diverse backgrounds, opening a sociological dialogue onto this critical issue. From discussion of criminal cases of sexual violence in India, to victims of Intimate Partner Violence in Singapore, to the experiences of sex workers in South Africa, Gendered Perspectives of Restorative Justice, Violence and Resilience: An International Framework shines crucial visibility on a diverse, gendered lens of intervention, empowerment and understanding of violence and resilience.

Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism by Leigh Goodmark Since the 1970s, anti-violence advocates have worked to make the legal system more responsive to gender-based violence. But greater state intervention in cases of intimate partner violence, rape, sexual assault, and trafficking has led to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of victims, particularly women of color and trans and gender-nonconforming people. Imperfect Victims argues that only dismantling the system will bring that punishment to an end.

America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice (ebook) by Treva B. Lindsey Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities. Combining history, theory, and memoir, America, Goddam renders visible the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence. Black women and girls occupy a unique status of vulnerability to harm and death, while the circumstances and traumas of this violence go underreported and understudied.

Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality by Tomiko Brown-Nagin Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hair dresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP’s Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Civil Rights Queen captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country.

Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment by Christina Greene Early on a summer morning in 1974, local officials found the jailer Clarence Alligood stabbed to death in a cell in the women’s section of a rural North Carolina jail. Fleeing the scene was Joan Little, twenty years old, poor, Black, and in trouble. After turning herself in, Little faced a possible death sentence in the state’s gas chamber. At her trial, which was followed around the world, Little claimed that she had killed Alligood in self-defense against sexual assault. Local and national figures took up Little’s cause, protesting her innocence. After a five-week trial, Little was acquitted. But the case stirred debate about a woman’s right to use deadly force to resist sexual violence. Through the prism of Little’s rape-murder trial and the Free Joan Little campaign, Christina Greene explores the intersecting histories of African American women, mass incarceration, sexual violence, and social movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Greene argues that Little’s circumstances prior to her arrest, assault, and trial were shaped by unprecedented increases in federal financing of local law enforcement and a decades-long criminalization of Blackness. She also reveals tensions among Little’s defenders and recovers Black women’s intersectional politics of the period, which linked women’s prison protest and antirape activism with broader struggles for economic and political justice.

All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence by Emily L. Thuma All Our Trials explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women’s movement’s strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence. Drawing on extensive archival research and first-person narratives, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, broad-based local coalitions, national gatherings, and radical print cultures that cut through prison walls. In the process, she illuminates a crucial chapter in an unfinished struggle––one that continues in today’s movements against mass incarceration and in support of transformative justice.

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea Ritchie & foreword by Angela Y. Davis Invisible No More is a timely examination of how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement. Placing stories of individual women—such as Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Dajerria Becton, Monica Jones, and Mya Hall—in the broader context of the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration, it documents the evolution of movements centering women’s experiences of policing and demands a radical rethinking of our visions of safety—and the means we devote to achieving it.

No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (ebook) by Sarah Haley In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Subjugated as convict laborers and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement. Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women’s brutalization in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners’ acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life.

Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (ebook) by Talitha L. LeFlouria In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia’s prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women’s presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women’s lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

Can't Catch a Break by Susan Starr Sered; Maureen Norton-Hawk Based on five years of fieldwork in Boston, Can’t Catch a Break documents the day-to-day lives of forty women as they struggle to survive sexual abuse, violent communities, ineffective social and therapeutic programs, discriminatory local and federal policies, criminalization, incarceration, and a broad cultural consensus that views suffering as a consequence of personal flaws and bad choices. Combining hard-hitting policy analysis with an intimate account of how marginalized women navigate an unforgiving world, Susan Sered and Maureen Norton-Hawk shine new light on the deep and complex connections between suffering and social inequality.

Colonial Discourse and Gender in U. S. Criminal Courts: Cultural Defenses and Prosecutions by Caroline Braunmühl The occurrence in some criminal cases of "cultural defenses" on behalf of "minority" defendants has stirred much debate. This book is the first to illuminate how "cultural evidence" — i.e., "evidence" regarding ethnicity — is actually negotiated by attorneys, expert/lay witnesses, and defendants in criminal trials. Caroline Braunmühl demonstrates that this has occurred, overwhelmingly, in ways shaped by colonialist and patriarchal discourses common in the Western world. She argues that the controversy regarding the legitimacy of a "cultural defense" has tended to obscure this fact, and has been biased against minorities as well as all women from its inception, in the very terms in which the question for debate has been framed.

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States by Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie & Kay Whitlock Drawing on years of research, activism, and legal advocacy, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes—from “gleeful gay killers” and “lethal lesbians” to “disease spreaders” and “deceptive gender benders”—to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities.

Doing Time on the Outside: Deconstructing the Benevolent Community by MaDonna R. Maidment Doing Time on the Outside fills a gap in the research by focusing on the experiences of women on conditional release, and attempting to understand how some criminalized women avoid going back into custody given the many challenges they face. Criminalized women are the focus of great interest in contemporary sociological research all over the world, however much of the growing body of work in this area has focused on the prison. Considerably less attention has been paid to women serving their sentences in the community.Doing Time on the Outside fills a gap in the research by focusing on the experiences of women on conditional release, and attempting to understand how some criminalized women avoid going back into custody given the many challenges they face.

Interrupted Life: by Rickie Solinger; Paula C. Johnson; Martha L. Raimon; Tina Reynolds; Ruby Tapia Interrupted Life is a gripping collection of writings by and about imprisoned women in the United States, a country that jails a larger percentage of its population than any other nation in the world. This eye-opening work brings together scores of voices from both inside and outside the prison system including incarcerated and previously incarcerated women, their advocates and allies, abolitionists, academics, and other analysts. In vivid, often highly personal essays, poems, stories, reports, and manifestos, they offer an unprecedented view of the realities of women's experiences as they try to sustain relations with children and family on the outside, struggle for healthcare, fight to define and achieve basic rights, deal with irrational sentencing systems, remake life after prison; and more. Together, these powerful writings are an intense and visceral examination of life behind bars for women, and, taken together, they underscore the failures of imagination and policy that have too often underwritten our current prison system.