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Description
Julia Sudbury (cal.), Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex. New York, London: Routledge, 2005; ISBN 0-415-95057-0.
THIS BOOK WRESTLES WITH HIGHLY COMPLEX, DIFFICULT, AND EMOTIONALLY CHARGED topics, but does so in a highly readable and accessible manner. It is a laudable contribution to prison writings, particularly since it promotes the voices of women prisoners themselves from around the world. Women are the fastest-growing segment of the prison population worldwide and most are imprisoned for economic and drug-related crime, behaviors that are often the way women cope with a life of violence, marginalization, and socioeconomic deprivation. Women's imprisonment is simultaneously shaped by local and global factors, such as the U.S.-led war on drugs, the worldwide movement of peoples across borders, legally or illegally, the push for neoliberal social policies and free trade, and increasingly punitive law-and-order agendas. Importantly, however, such influences are clearly structured along the lines of gender, race, and class, which often means that those most affected are the least able to cope. Statistics that look only at the gender breakdown of prisoners miss out on the important variables of race and class. Thus, they severely underestimate the impact of this global increase in punitiveness on women of color, indigenous women, and the economically disadvantaged.
In her "Introduction," Sudbury (2005: xix) notes that "this volume seeks to liberate women prisoners from the criminologists and learn what other academic disciplines as well as activists and former prisoners have to tell us about the prison boom and its impact on women of color." This approach makes the collection an immensely important contribution to research and writings on prisons and decidedly increases the scope of the reading audience to include the whole spectrum of the social sciences, as well as practitioners within the legal and criminal justice system. That prisoners own voices are promoted is noteworthy because prison cultures silence and disempower women. As the authors discuss throughout the book, it... |
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