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In this book, Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin bring together twelve original essays by prominent scholars to examine not only the discrimination that is evident, but also the structural and cultural forces that have influenced and continue to perpetuate the current situation. Contributors point to four major factors that have impacted public sentiment and criminal justice policy: colonialism, slavery, immigration, and globalization. In doing so they reveal how practices of punishment not only need particular ideas about race to exist, but they also legitimate them.
"Striking, original, and stimulating. Even readers with extensive familiarity of the literature regarding women in prison will learn something new."--Mona Danner, PhD Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
This first comprehensive study of Chicanas encountering the U.S. criminal justice system is set within the context of the international war on drugs as witnessed at street level in Chicana/o barrios. Chicana Lives and Criminal Justice uses oral history to chronicle the lives of twenty-four Chicana pintas (prisoners/former prisoners) repeatedly arrested and incarcerated for non-violent, low-level economic and drug-related crimes. It also provides the first documentation of the thirty-four-year history of Sybil Brand Institute, Los Angeles' former women's jail. In a time and place where drug war policies target people of color and their communities, drug-addicted Chicanas are caught up in an e...
In this collection, political and public policy analysts explore the social concerns of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered--what has come to be known as "lgbt" or "queer" politics. Compared to the humanities and to other social sciences, political science has been slow to address this phenomenon. Issues ranging from housing to adoption to laws on sodomy, however, have increasingly raised important political questions about the rights and status of sexual minorities, particularly within liberal democracies such as the United States, and also on an international level. This anthology offers the first comprehensive overview of the study of lgbt politics in political science across...
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...
"From the outset, women experienced infection and death at the hands of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Yet when the health crisis of AIDS first emerged in the United States in the early 1980s, scientists, doctors, and public health officials overlooked women in the response to a disease first associated with men. As the acknowledgment that women could contract HIV and die from AIDS grew, women became vulnerable to hostile government policies which threatened their health and rights. But they did not passively accept mistreatment; rather, they mobilized to frame the fight against the disease. Emma Day moves the historical understanding of the impact of HIV/AIDS on women beyond their exclusion from the initial medical response and the role they played as the supporters of gay men. Focusing on the activism of women who protested the co-occurring state neglect of their health care needs and state intervention into their lives, In Her Hands opens a timely new avenue to explore the relationship between the state and women's status in modern America"--
"In Women Doing Life, Lora Bex Lempert examines the carceral experiences of women serving life sentences, presenting a typology of the ways that life-sentenced women grow and self-actualize, resist prison definitions, reflect on and own their criminal acts, and ultimately create meaningful lives behind prison walls. Looking beyond the explosive headlines that often characterize these women as monsters, Lempert offers rare insight into this vulnerable, little studied population. Her gendered analysis considers the ways that women do crime differently than men and how they have qualitatively different experiences of imprisonment than their male counterparts."--Provided by publisher.
Riots and demonstrations, the lifeblood of American social and political protest in the 1960s, are now largely a historical memory. But Mary Fainsod Katzenstein argues that protest has not disappeared--it has simply moved off the streets into the country's core institutions. As a result, conflicts over sexual harassment, affirmative action, and the rights of women, gays and lesbians, and people of color now touch us more than ever in our daily lives, whether we are among those seeking change or those threatened by its prospects. No one is more aware of this than women demanding change from within the United States military and the American Catholic church. Women in uniform are deeply patriot...
This volume features in-depth, oral interviews with eleven incarcerated women, each of whom offers a narrative of her life and her reading experiences within prison walls. The women share powerful stories about their complex and diverse efforts to negotiate difficult relationships, exercise agency in restrictive circumstances, and find meaning and beauty in the midst of pain. Their shared emphases on abuse, poverty, addiction, and mental illness illuminate the pathways that lead many women to prison and suggest possibilities for addressing the profound social problems that fuel crime. Framing the narratives within an analytic introduction and reflective afterword, Megan Sweeney highlights th...
In this groundbreaking study based on archival research about Chicana and Chicano prisoners—known as Pintas and Pintos—as well as fresh interpretations of works by renowned Pinta and Pinto authors and activists, B. V. Olguín provides crucial insights into the central roles that incarceration and the incarcerated have played in the evolution of Chicana/o history, cultural paradigms, and oppositional political praxis. This is the first text on prisoners in general, and Chicana/o and Latina/o prisoners in particular, that provides a range of case studies from the nineteenth century to the present. Olguín places multiple approaches in dialogue through the pairing of representational figure...