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    Mean Lives, Mean Laws
    Oklahoma's Women Prisoners

    Susan F. Sharp (Author), Juanita Ortiz (Contributions by)

    9780813562766

    Hardback, published 20 September 2014

    210 pages, 2 figures
    22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.481 kg

    "Sharp is a leading expert on women in prison and she continues her record of outstanding scholarship with this work. Mean Lives, Mean Laws will make a much needed contribution to policy studies of criminology and criminal justice." 
    - Barbara Owen (author of In the Mix: Struggle and Survival in a Women's Prison)
    "No one is better poised to write a scholarly book on incarcerated women and no state is more appropriate to study than Oklahoma. Mean Lives, Mean Laws is historically, theoretically, and methodologically remarkable. But even more importantly, the self-reported rates and words of real incarcerated women about their harsh lives before, in, after, and sometimes upon re-entry to prison are powerful testimonies to how the U.S. system is fundamentally flawed in responding to women and girls as victims and offenders."
    - Joanne Belknap (author of The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice)
    "Sharp truly cares about incarcerated women and has devoted her life to convincing state bureaucrats to reform the ways they are treated in Oklahoma, possibly the most conservative state in the union and definitely the one with the highest rate of female incarceration."
    (Women's Review of Books)

     Oklahoma has long held the dubious honor of having the highest female incarceration rate in the country, nearly twice the national average. In this compelling new book, sociologist Susan Sharp sets out to discover just what has gone so wrong in the state of Oklahoma-and what that might tell us about trends in female incarceration nationwide.

    The culmination of over a decade of original research, Mean Lives, Mean Laws exposes a Kafkaesque criminal justice system, one that has no problem with treating women as collateral damage in the War on Drugs or with stripping female prisoners of their parental rights. Yet it also reveals the individual histories of women who were jailed in Oklahoma, providing intimate portraits of their lives before, during, and after their imprisonment. We witness the impoverished and abusive conditions in which many of these women were raised; we get a vivid portrait of their everyday lives behind bars; and we glimpse the struggles that lead many ex-convicts to fall back into the penal system.

    Through an innovative methodology that combines statistical rigor with extensive personal interviews, Sharp shows how female incarceration affects not only individuals, but also families and communities. Putting a human face on a growing social problem, Mean Lives, Mean Laws raises important questions about both the state of Oklahoma and the state of the nation.

    Contents
    List of Illustrations
    Preface
    Introduction
    1 Mean Lives: A Theoretical Framework
    2 Mean Laws: The Rise in Female Imprisonment
    3 Mean Women or Mean Lives? Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Abuse of Women Prisoners
    4 The Prison Experience
    5 Going Back Again by Juanita Ortiz
    6 Coming Home and Staying Out
    7 The Children and Their Caregivers
    8 Winds of Change
    9 Lessons Learned and Moving Forward
    Appendix A Research Methods
    Appendix B Oklahoma Children of Incarcerated Parents
    Notes
    References
    Index
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