In this lively study of the development and transformation of voices of female offenders in nineteenth-century England, Anne Schwan analyzes a range of colorful sources, including crime broadsides, reform literature, prisoners' own writings about imprisonment and courtroom politics, and conventional literary texts, such as Adam Bede and The Moonstone. Not only does Schwan demonstrate strategies for interpreting ambivalent and often contradictory texts, she also provides a carefully historicized approach to the work of feminist recovery. Crossing class lines, genre boundaries, and gender roles in the effort to trace prisoners, authors, and female communities (imagined or real), Schwan brings new insight to what it means to locate feminist (or protofeminist) details, arguments, and politics. In this case, she tracks the emergence of a contested, and often contradictory, feminist consciousness, through the prism of nineteenth-century penal debates. The historical discussion is framed by reflections on contemporary debates about prisoner perspectives to illuminate continuities and differences. Convict Voices offers a sophisticated approach to interpretive questions of gender, genre, and discourse in the representation of female convicts and their voices and viewpoints.

In this lively study of the development and transformation of voices of female offenders in nineteenth-century England, Anne Schwan analyzes a range of colorful sources, including crime broadsides, reform literature, prisoners' own writings about imprisonment and courtroom politics, and conventional literary texts, such as Adam Bede and The Moonstone. Not only does Schwan demonstrate strategies for interpreting ambivalent and often contradictory texts, she also provides a carefully historicized approach to the work of feminist recovery. Crossing class lines, genre boundaries, and gender roles in the effort to trace prisoners, authors, and female communities (imagined or real), Schwan brings new insight to what it means to locate feminist (or protofeminist) details, arguments, and politics. In this case, she tracks the emergence of a contested, and often contradictory, feminist consciousness, through the prism of nineteenth-century penal debates. The historical discussion is framed by reflections on contemporary debates about prisoner perspectives to illuminate continuities and differences. Convict Voices offers a sophisticated approach to interpretive questions of gender, genre, and discourse in the representation of female convicts and their voices and viewpoints.

Death penalty has produced endless discourses not only in the context of prisons, prisoners and punishment but also in various legal aspects concerning the validity of death penalty, the right to life, and torture. Death penalty is embedded in Indian law, however very little is known about the people who are on death row barring a few media reports on them. The main objective of this book is to enquire whether the dignity of prisoners is upheld while they confront the criminal justice system and whilst surviving on death row. Additionally, it explores the lived-experiences and perceptions of prisoners on death row as they create meaning out of their world. With this rationale, 111 prisoners on death row in India and some of their family members were interviewed. The theoretical underpinnings of phenomenology and symbolic interactionism coupled with data analysis lead to an understanding of the prisoners on death row with special reference to their demographic profile and the impact of death sentence on their families. George’s research highlights three salient features, namely: poverty, social exclusion and marginalisation are antecedent to death penalty; death penalty is a constructed account by the state machinery; and prisoners on death row situate dignity higher in the juxtaposition of death and dignity.

Bringing together a variety of diverse international contributors from the Convict Criminology community, Convict Criminology for the Future surveys the historical roots of Convict Criminology, the current challenges experienced by formerly incarcerated people, and future directions for the field. Over the past two decades research has been conducted in the field of Convict Criminology, recognizing that the convict voice has long been ignored or marginalized in academia, criminal justice practice, and public policy debates. This edited volume provides a much-needed update on the state of the field and how it has evolved. Seven primary themes are examined. Historical underpinnings of Convict Criminology Adaptations to prison life Longstanding challenges for prisoners and formerly incarcerated people Post-secondary education behind bars The expansion of Convict Criminology beyond North America Conducting scholarly research in carceral settings Future directions in Convict Criminology A global line up of contributors, from the fields of Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law, Political Science, and Sociology, comprehensively tackle each topic, reviewing causes, reactions, and solutions to challenges. The volume also includes a chronology of significant events in the history of Convict Criminology. Integrating current events with research using a variety of methods in scholarly analysis, Convict Criminology for the Future is invaluable reading for students and scholars of corrections, criminology, criminal justice, law, and sociology.

Written by incarcerated women, these incredibly personal, surprisingly honest letters shed light on their lives, their crimes - and the mitigating circumstances. Author Jennifer Furio, a prison reform activist, subtly reveals the biases if the criminal ju

The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writer—recently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholars—sheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America. “[A] harrowing [portrait] of life behind bars . . . part confession, part jeremiad, part lamentation, part picaresque novel (reminiscent, at times, of Dickens and Defoe).”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE In 2009, scholars at Yale University came across a startling manuscript: the memoir of Austin Reed, a free black man born in the 1820s who spent most of his early life ricocheting between forced labor in prison and forced labor as an indentured servant. Lost for more than one hundred and fifty years, the handwritten document is the first known prison memoir written by an African American. Corroborated by prison records and other documentary sources, Reed’s text gives a gripping first-person account of an antebellum Northern life lived outside slavery that nonetheless bore, in its day-to-day details, unsettling resemblances to that very institution. Now, for the first time, we can hear Austin Reed’s story as he meant to tell it. He was born to a middle-class black family in the boomtown of Rochester, New York, but when his father died, his mother struggled to make ends meet. Still a child, Reed was placed as an indentured servant to a nearby family of white farmers near Rochester. He was caught attempting to set fire to a building and sentenced to ten years at Manhattan’s brutal House of Refuge, an early juvenile reformatory that would soon become known for beatings and forced labor. Seven years later, Reed found himself at New York’s infamous Auburn State Prison. It was there that he finished writing this memoir, which explores America’s first reformatory and first industrial prison from an inmate’s point of view, recalling the great cruelties and kindnesses he experienced in those places and excavating patterns of racial segregation, exploitation, and bondage that extended beyond the boundaries of the slaveholding South, into free New York. Accompanied by fascinating historical documents (including a series of poignant letters written by Reed near the end of his life), The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a work of uncommon beauty that tells a story of nineteenth-century racism, violence, labor, and captivity in a proud, defiant voice. Reed’s memoir illuminates his own life and times—as well as ours today. Praise for The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict “One of the most fascinating and important memoirs ever produced in the United States.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, The Washington Post “Remarkable . . . triumphantly defiant . . . The book’s greatest value lies in the gap it fills.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Reed displays virtuosic gifts for narrative that, a century and a half later, earn and hold the reader’s ear.”—Thomas Chatterton Williams, San Francisco Chronicle “[The book’s] urgency and relevance remain undiminished. . . . This exemplary edition recovers history without permanently trapping it in one interpretation.”—The Guardian “A sensational, novelistic telling of an eventful life.”—The Paris Review “Vivid and painful.”—NPR “Lyrical and graceful in one sentence, burning with fury and hellfire in the next.”—Columbus Free Press

Based on original research and personal encounters, this book narrates the real-life-stories of women locked up in Indian prisons for alleged or actual violations of the state’s criminal laws. It contextualises women offenders’ experiences of the criminal justice system and of state custodial institutions within the larger narratives of their particular lives, thus interrogating the social as well as legal frameworks within which women face adversities in their lives and in custody. It argues that the sex and gender issues that affect women ‘outside’ are carried over ‘inside’, with extremely damaging consequences for the lives and mental health of women prisoners. The volume will be of interest to those in gender studies, legal studies, sociology, and human rights organisations, as well as to policy makers and the general reader.

When the British took control of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius soon after the abolition of the slave trade, they were faced with a labour-hungry and potentially hostile Franco-Mauritian plantocracy. This book explores the context in which Indian convicts were transported to the island and put to work building the infrastructure necessary to fuel the expansion of the sugar industry. Drawing on hitherto unexplored archival material, it is shown how convicts experienced transportation and integrated into the Mauritian social and economic fabric.

Between 1788 and 1868, approximately 25,000 women were transported to Australia. For nearly 200 years, there has been a chorus of outrage at their vulgarity, their depravity and their promiscuity. Babette Smith takes the reader beyond this traditional casting of convict women, looking for evidence of their humanity and individuality. Certainly some were desperate, overwhelmed by a relentless chain of criminal convictions, drunkenness and despair. But others were heroic, defiant. Smith offers fresh insights: the women's use of sound and voice to harass officials, for example; the extent of their deliberate resistance against authority. This resistance, she argues, has contributed significantly to broader Australian culture. The women's stories begin when their fates are decided by the British Crown. We are introduced to women who stole, set fires, rioted, committed insurance fraud, murdered; mothers of six and 12-year-old girls; women who refused to show deference to the Court, instead giving mock curtsies, 'jumping and capering about'. 'A sailor', wrote ship's surgeon Peter Cunningham, was 'more an object of pity than wrath. To see twenty wicked fingers beckoning to him, and twenty wicked eyes winking at him, at one and the same time, no wonder his virtue should sometimes experience a fall!'. Among the hysterical accounts of bad behaviour aboard female convict ships written by concerned reverends, surgeons and others are scenes that show female camaraderie, fun and intrepid spirit. Washing clothes became 'a grand water party'; caught in a storm, women came up on deck to help their fellow convicts haul water; women sang and danced before bed, putting on concerts for each other, 'dressed out in their gayest plumage'. This camaraderie continued in Australia. In Tasmania's overcrowded Cascades factory, the superintendent complained about women 'corrupting each other' in nightly conversation laced with 'obscenity'. Another interpretation is that women sought the comfort of sharing their woes with one another, telling 'war stories' of life on assignment and generally enjoying each other's company in language that was everyday for them. Defiant Voices tells the story of the Crown trying and failing to make its prisoners subservient to a harsh penal system. Convict women challenged the authorities by living in perpetual disobedience, which was often flagrant, sometimes sexual and always loud. They were not all 'the most abandoned prostitutes', but their sexual mores were certainly different from the observers who labelled them. From factory rioters to individuals like Ann Wilson, whose response-'That will not hurt me'-provoked a magistrate to pile punishment after punishment onto her, the women of Defiant Voices fought like tigers and drove men to breaking point with their collective voices, the lewd songs and 'disorderly shouting' resounding from the page.

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women's lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.