Domestic violence and the legal system
Category: Women and Prisons
Chigwada-Bailey, Ruth. Black Women?s Experiences of the Criminal Justice: A Discourse on Disadvantage. Waterside Press, 1997.
This book exposes the systematic disadvantages experienced by black women due to the intersecting forces of race, gender and class. The author?s research in based on life experience interviews with African-Caribbean women in Britain that explores their relationship with various factions of the criminal justice system including law enforcement, probation, mental health institutions, court and prisons.
Comack focuses on the life stories of twenty-four women prisoners in Canada to explain the connections between their histories of abuse and criminal behavior. She utilizes a theoretical framework which analyzes how structures such as capitalism, patriarchy, and racism constrict women and how these constrictions manifest and effect their everyday lives.
Faith, Karlene. The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten: Life Beyond the Cult (The Northeastern Series on Gender, Crime, and Law) . Northeastern University Press,
Faith argues on behalf of Leslie Van Houten, possibly the least culpable and most rehabilitated of three ?Manson girls?. The author has visited and corresponded with Van Houten since 1972, the yea in which the Manson girls? death sentences were commuted. Faith describes Van Houten?s descent from the middle class to Manson?s Family, finally suggesting that it is time for Van Houten to be paroled.
Faith, Karlene. Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement & Resistance. Press Gang Publishers, 1993.
From historical and internationalist perspective, critically examines such topics as: crimes and punishment of women from the witch hunts to the present; institutionalized violence against incarcerated women; women loving women in prison; Native women’s acts of resistance; Hollywood’s formulaic women-in-prison films; and the revolutionary Santa Cruz Women’s Project (1972-76), which Faith co-founded.