by Jorja Leap ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 26, 2022
Devastating revelations that humanize statistics while calling for reform.
Women caught up in California’s criminal justice system share their harrowing stories.
Over the last decade, Leap, executive director of the Social Justice Research Partnership at UCLA, interviewed 80 formerly incarcerated Californian women about their experiences. “I didn’t need reentry services,” one woman noted, “I need entry services—like how do you enter into a normal life?” Much of what the women recount is excruciating. Rosa, for instance, was not only molested as a child, but sex-trafficked by her own mother, who kept her prisoner. At 13, after giving birth to her first child, a gang helped her escape and took her in. “She became deeply involved in…criminal activity in exchange for her freedom.” When discharged from a juvenile detention center, a judge released her to her mother’s custody; this served as Rosa’s final breaking point, sparking years of cycling in and out of jail. In chapters such as “I Thought He Would Take Care of Me” and “Halfway Is Just That,” Leap highlights commonalities of incarcerated women, including childhood violence and crushing entanglements with the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, the latter of which Leap describes as more focused on punishment than rehabilitation. Substance abuse, she writes, was “always about medicating the trauma,” and the reason for relapses is often the fact that “their underlying trauma had never been addressed and treated.” Citing poverty as the primary factor of recidivism, Leap expertly demonstrates why having financial and emotional security is key to sustaining change. “Out of the more than twenty thousand individuals L.A. locks up on any given day, a little over two thousand are women,” and nearly half of the women “are in jail simply because they can’t afford to post bail.” The author closes with a strong case to end indiscriminate use of money bail, and she offers specific suggestions for funding and the extension of relevant programs, which includes community-based alternatives to incarceration.
Devastating revelations that humanize statistics while calling for reform.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2287-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
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