HIDDEN HEALERS

Covington discusses the lives of female prisoners and the quiet ways in which they help one another survive the trauma of incarceration.

The author, an internationally recognized clinical social worker, psychologist, and specialist in the fields of addiction and trauma treatment, works as a consultant and advocate for reform in the prison system’s management of female inmates. In 1987, she arranged to have herself imprisoned in North Carolina’s Black Mountain facility for three days: “I was there,” she writes, “to confront the pervasive silence, the cultural void, which keeps most of us from knowing how incarcerated women lived.” She interviewed numerous former prisoners for this volume; the women’s personal tales expose the demeaning cruelty of the criminal system. (“The prison system is brutal and dehumanizing, and the ways women take care of each other while enduring it are through practical, material, and deliberate actions taken every day.”) In Covington’s telling, even providing a basic gesture of compassion toward an emotionally distressed inmate—such as by hugging a woman who’s just learned that her father has died—brings great personal risk, since hugs are not permitted by the prison system. The traumatic experiences that led many of these women to run afoul of the law, the author argues, are compounded by the trauma of incarceration. Divided into four sections (“Entering the System,” “Living Inside,” “The Journey Home,” and “What We Can Do”), this comprehensive exploration of the criminal justice system as it applies to women compellingly combines facts and figures with poignant and distressing firsthand narratives. The book is chock-full of fascinating, if often infuriating, factoids—if you’ve ever wondered why a prison would release a woman just after midnight and leave her at a bus stop when they know the next bus is not expected for five hours, the answer is that they get paid for the day without having to provide any food or service. Despite some repetition in the text, this book is a valuable reference tool for those advocating for prison reform.

A disturbing and highly illuminating analysis.