Women Behind Bars

More and more women—mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters, and sisters—are doing hard prison time all across the United States. Many of them are facing the prospect of years, decades, even lifetimes behind bars. Oddly, there's been little public discussion about the dramatic increase of women in the prison system. What exactly is happening here, and why? The answers are in Women Behind Bars, in which investigative journalist Silja Talvi sheds light on why American girls and women are being locked up at such unprecedented rates. Talvi travels across the country to weave together interviews with inmates, correctional officers, and administrators, providing readers with a glance at the impact incarceration has on our society. With a combination of compassion and critical analysis, Talvi delivers a timely, in-depth analysis of a growing and extremely complicated issue.

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.

“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.

They were once sweet little girls--sugar and spice, and everything nice. Now they're cold blooded criminals, behind the bars of America's most dangerous prisons--hardened women doing their time. how and why did they cross to the dark side? What makes women kill husbands, lovers, family, and innocent strangers? Step aside and meet: Patty: the prison beauty slaughtered her mother, father, and little brother after falling in love with an evil Svengali twenty years her senior. Michelle: She lovingly tends the flowers on the prison grounds. Only those who know her best know how she kicked her husband to death. Cynthia: A typical St. Louis girl--until she met a jailbird and embarked on a murderous rampage worthy of Natural Born Killers. Author Wensley Clarkson has used his unique, unlimited access to some of America's toughest prisons to reveal the shocking world of female criminals--from their illicit love affairs to race relations, prostitution, protection rackets, drug smuggling, and more. Plus: what happened to notorious criminals Amy Fisher and Pam Smart? Now their tawdry lived behind bars are revealed.

?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.

"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

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.

More and more women—mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters, and sisters—are doing hard prison time all across the United States. Many of them are facing the prospect of years, decades, even lifetimes behind bars. Oddly, there’s been little public discussion about the dramatic increase of women in the prison system. What exactly is happening here, and why? The answers are in Women Behind Bars, in which investigative journalist Silja Talvi sheds light on why American girls and women are being locked up at such unprecedented rates. Talvi travels across the country to weave together interviews with inmates, correctional officers, and administrators, providing readers with a glance at the impact incarceration has on our society. With a combination of compassion and critical analysis, Talvi delivers a timely, in-depth analysis of a growing and extremely complicated issue.