Part SoapBox, Part Book Review, All Ladysquad!

A Note on the Text:

Once again: Long. Does it make up for it if it's extremely informative? Hm.

Ladies and jellyspoons! I just finished reading Wally Lamb's Couldn't Keep It To Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters, and OH MAN do I recommend it. It's a few years old now, published in 2003, but it certainly packs All Kinds Of Punch. Parts of it are funny, parts of it are gut-wrenchingly, sad, and it makes you feel--well, complicated. As you may have gathered from the title, it's a collection of stories from incarcerated women at the York Correctional Institution, compiled and edited by Wally Lamb during the Writing Class he (volunteer) teaches there.

It is an excellent introduction for people who aren't quite ready to dive into the Prison Reform movement the way I did, rather naively, when I jumped unprepared into that "Radical Theories of Punishment" class with Angela Davis. It's a deeply fraught issue, especially when I think of it in context of my sister--a lawyer in New Orleans. Last year, she worked for the DA's office in a parish just across the lake from the city, where she assisted with criminal court cases. She would frequently call me up to report her success-- "We just won our case! This rapist who beats his wife was found guilty! Next week we're going to push for either life in prison or the death penalty!" On the one hand, hella Hooray, Rapists & Beaters are definitely BadBadBad.

On the other hand, fuck! Destroying this man, either by taking away his civil body or his actual body, doesn't actually fix the patriarchal system which encourages this behaviour. It won't make the rape victim un-raped, or the wife un-beaten. It fixes the immediate, personal issue, but it doesn't change the social constructs at play. It might, arguably, even make it worse, because it tells the Individuals In Power that they have the right to judge who gets to die, who gets to be undead, and who gets to actually live.

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