Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women's Prisons - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1936365502 ISBN 13: 9781936365500

Publisher: McSweeney's, 2011

Synopsis

People in U.S. prisons are routinely subjected to physical, sexual, and mental abuse. While this has been documented in male prisons, women in prison often suffer in relative anonymity. Women Inside addresses this critical social justice issue, empowering incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women to share the stories that have previously been silenced. Among the narrators:

Irma Rodriguez, in prison on drug charges. While in prison in 1990, Irma was diagnosed HIV positive, but after a decade and a half of aggressive and toxic treatment, Irma learned that she never had HIV.

Sheri Dwight, a domestic violence survivor who was sent to prison for attempting to kill her batterer. While in prison, she underwent surgery for abdominal pain and learned more than four years later that she had been sterilized without her consent.

About this title

About the Author:

Robin Levi is the human rights director of the Oakland-based nonprofit Justice Now, a California-based human rights organization dedicated to building a movement among people in women’s prisons to challenge violence and imprisonment.

Ayelet Waldman, an attorney and former public defender, is the author of Red Hook Road and Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace.

Michelle Alexander is a longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, and holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Mortiz College of Law at Ohio State University. Alexander served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, and went on to direct the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor. She is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Review:

Winner of The National Council on Crime and Delinquency's PASS Award for Literature

"Incredibly compelling."
Meg Waite Clayton, Huffington Post

"A chilling glimpse of the human rights abuses suffered by women in U.S. prisons... a captivating read."
Ashley Lucas, Ms. Magazine Blog

"These stories are a gift. The women in this book compel us to imagine how their lives would be different how we would be different if we responded to their experience with genuine care, compassion, and concern.”
from the foreword by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

"Inside This Place, Not Of It is precisely the kind of book we need now. In reading these narratives so skillfully assembled, and with the accompanying statistics and data which let readers see how America and its states are complicit in taking away lives and dignity from so many women what stands out is the poignant sense of abandonment and sadness that changed their lives from childhood, and the astonishing strength and perseverance that let them survive in prison. I will never forget these women, or this book."
Susan Straight, author of Take One Candle Light A Room

I am passionately, ardently grateful for the existence of this book. How else would I have ever heard the voices of these women? Where would I gain insight or understanding of the lives they describe: harrowing, riveting, rife with misogyny, and utterly unacceptable in a country that values human rights.”
Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture

We may hear about prisons, but not much from prisoners, and certainly not from women prisoners, which makes Inside This Place, Not of It so unusual.”
Leonard Lopate

About this edition

• Publisher: McSweeney's
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1936365502
• ISBN 13: 9781936365500
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 300
• Editor: Waldman Ayelet, Levi Robin