Interrupted Life ─ Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States

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.

Rickie Solinger is the author of Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America and Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Rose v. Wade, among other books. She is the editor of Abortion Wars (UC Press). Paula C. Johnson is Professor of Law at Syracuse University College of Law and the author of Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison. Attorney Martha L. Raimon has directed the Incarcerated Mothers Law Project at the Women's Prison Association and is now Senior Associate at Center for the Study of Social Policy. Tina Reynolds is Co-founder and Chair of Women on the Rise Telling Her Story (WORTH) and adjunct lecturer at York College/CUNY. Ruby C. Tapia is Associate Professor of Comparative Studies and Women's Studies at The Ohio State University and the author of Breeding Ghosts: Race, Death, and the Maternal in Visual Culture.