Resistance Behind Bars

Victoria Law

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.

Sujets

• Gendér
• Abolition

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604867886
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Resistance Behind Bars
"This insightful book calls attention to the power, spirit, and courage of women who find themselves behind bars in the era of mass incarceration. By raising up their voices and stories, and by honoring their struggles, this book makes an important contribution to the growing movement to end prisons as we know them."
Michelle Alexander, civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
"Too often we hear accounts of the atrocities that take place behind prison walls without also hearing about the acts of resistance that inevitably accompany them. Victoria Law’s important book illuminates these under reported stories of individual and collective organizing by women in prison and encourages all of us to work in solidarity across prison walls to create a world that no longer includes the prison industrial complex."
Angela Y. Davis, author of Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prison, Torture, and Empire and professor emerita of the History of Consciousness Department, UC Santa Cruz
"One of the ironies of the USA’s failed experiment in mass incarceration is the relative invisibility of the more than 2.4 million kept behind bars. We sometimes catch fleeting glimpses of the statistics, or of skewed and sordid details via news or ‘reality’ crime shows, but rarely are the stories of the incarcerated truly told. Nowhere is this truer than with women. Though they remain a relatively small fraction of the incarcerated, the women’s prison population has exploded in recent years, and the captured are like their male counterparts the young, the poor and people of color. And so too, further marginalized, hidden, and buried alive in the tombs that we call prisons.
Resistance Behind Bar s illuminates the stories of the struggles of these women at last of their efforts to not merely survive the violence and degradation of prison, but to organize at the intersections of race, class and gender, to build a community of resistance amidst the most alienating of circumstances. Victoria Law boldly shines the light and breaks the silence with her exhaustive research, her attention to both the personal and political, and yes, calls us with the imprisoned women whose stories she shares, always with so much passion and respect to ‘a world without cages.’"
Nancy A. Heitzeg, professor of sociology and critical studies of race and ethnicity at St. Catherine University and editor of Criminal Injustice at CriticalMassProgress…com
"A straightforward examination of the multiple harms that incarcerated women experience and the women’s dynamic resistance to everyday systemic indifference and control. Law challenges both prison and patriarchy, each of which would erase women’s agency. Resistance Behind Bars refuses to let women prisoners remain unseen and unheard. Instead, it encourages us to think deeply and critically about our own responsibility to redesign a social landscape on which coercion and confinement and especially punishment for profit will eventually fade away."
Patricia O’Brien, associate professor, University of Chicago, and book editor of Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work
"Organizing and community-building are not words one normally associates with women’s prisons. Resistance Behind Bars will change that. A thorough and compelling work, Resistance Behind Bars weaves statistics and personal stories to portray the grim realities of life inside women’s prisons. By providing examples of how incarcerated women work to change these conditions, it shatters myths of female passivity and preconceptions of what resistance looks like."
Ayelet Waldman, editor of Inside this Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons
"Victoria Law brings her characteristic and remarkable passion, personal experience, keen political analysis, courage, and great heart to this new edition of Resistance Behind Bars, an urgently needed and essential resource for all of us who want to learn more about and work to dismantle the structural evil of mass incarceration in the United States. Her intersectional approach, which clearly identifies the intersections of racism, gender violence, and heterosexism, informed by an unshakeable commitment to the human dignity and well-being of the prisoners who inspire her work, make this a unique and invaluable tool for crafting a politics rooted not only in resistance but relentlessly persistent visions of social and economic transformation. The focus on women and gender violence helps breathe new life into work and analysis around prisoner advocacy and prison abolition that too often has been framed through an exclusively male lens. We’re all in this struggle together but it is a struggle that demands close attention to the specificities of prisoner experience, rooted in those intersections of race, gender, gender identity/expression, sexuality, and class. Law’s book is a brilliant and highly accessible contribution to the burgeoning movement that challenges and proposes to dismantle not only processes of criminalization but the bleak, inhumane nature of the prison industrial complex in its entirety."
Kay Whitlock, coauthor of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States
"Resistance offers us a much-needed, much broader and nuanced definition of resistance a woman’s definition based on the real material conditions of women. I hope that when one reads about the experiences of women prisoners’ organizing and resistance, the reader, both woman and man, will begin to glimpse the possibilities and necessity of such forms as we continue to struggle for a more just and equal world free from all forms of oppression. If women worldwide are unable to liberate themselves, human liberation will not be possible."
Marilyn Buck, anti-imperialist political prisoner, activist, poet and artist
"Finally! A passionately and extensively researched book that recognizes the myriad ways in which women resist in prison, and the many particular obstacles that, at many points, hinder them from rebelling. Even after my own years inside, I learned from this book. Law breaks the AIDS barrier, recognizing and recording prisoner organizing on HIV as resistance against stigma and medical malpractice in the prison system."
Laura Whitehorn, former political prisoner
"Constituting 6% of the U.S. prison and jail population, but over 130,000 in number, and growing, women are an all but invisible segment of the prison population. The issues unique to women, and their behind-bars struggle for justice and equality, are even more ignored by mainstream media than that of their male counterparts. Resistance Behind Bars is a long-needed and much awaited look at the struggles, protest and resistance waged by women prisoners. Excellently researched and well documented, this incisive book brings to light aspects of imprisonment unique to women, how the gender-common issues of captivity impact women and the response, protest and resistance to captivity by women. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the modern American gulag."
Paul Wright, former prisoner, founder/editor of Prison Legal News, and coeditor of The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the US Prison Industry, Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor and Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration
"Repression tries not only to crush but to quiet. But as Vikki Law shows in this multifaceted book, all that is unseen is not absent. Guided by years of anti-prison organizing and a palpable feminist practice, Law documents the many ways women challenge the twin forces of prison and patriarchy, each trying to render women invisible. In the face of attempts at erasure, women prisoners resist to survive and survive to resist. We would do well to pay attention."
Dan Berger, author of Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity
"Written in regular English, rather than academese, yet full of fire, this is an impressive work of research and reportage. I hope you’re able to get this to a greater audience, and that it sparks awareness and resistance. Well done!"
Mumia Abu-Jamal, political prisoner and author of Live From Death Row and We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party
"By documenting the myriad rebellions of the most despised and abused, Law has fulfilled a task long deferred by prison activists. A meditation on the ‘weapons of the weak’ that challenges dominant conceptions of what constitutes resistance and liberation, Resistance Behind Bars deserves a wide readership not only among those disturbed by mass incarceration, but by all students of the human spirit in the face of adversity."
Daniel Burton-Rose, author, Guerrillas in Our Midst: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anti-capitalist Underground of the 1970s, coeditor, The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry
"Victoria Law’s eight years of research and writing, inspired by her unflinching commitment to listen to and support women prisoners, have resulted in an illuminating effort to document the dynamic resistance of incarcerated women in the United States. Her work focuses not only on renowned political prisoners, but on the lives of ordinary women of all colors and ages, many being mothers separated from their children. Law makes clear that besides their myriad means of struggle and mutual assistance, they have one thing in common: they are poor and working- class, without the resources needed to ac