Jailcare: A Selected Bibliography

Thousands of pregnant women pass through our nation’s jails every year. What happens to them as they carry their pregnancies in a space of punishment? In this time when the public safety net is frayed, incarceration has become a central and racialized strategy for managing the poor. Using her ethnographic fieldwork and clinical work as an ob-gyn in a women’s jail, Carolyn Sufrin explores how jail has, paradoxically, become a place where women can find care. Focusing on the experiences of incarcerated pregnant women as well as on the practices of the jail guards and health providers who care for them, Jailcare describes the contradictory ways that care and maternal identity emerge within a punitive space presumed to be devoid of care. Sufrin argues that jail is not simply a disciplinary institution that serves to punish. Rather, when understood in the context of the poverty, addiction, violence, and racial oppression that characterize these women’s lives and their reproduction, jail has, tragically, become a safety net for women on the margins of society. Carolyn Sufrin discusses Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars on Friday 11/3, 6pm at the Co-op.

The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander (obviously)

Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, by Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger

addicted. pregnant. poor. by Kelly Ray Knight

Inside this Place not Of it: Narratives from Women’s Prisons, edited by Robin Levi and Ayelet Waldman

Killing the Black Body, by Dorothy Roberts

Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America, by Jeanne Flavin

About Carolyn Sufrin: Carolyn Sufrin is a medical anthropologist and an Ob/Gyn at Johns Hopkins University. She has worked extensively on reproductive health issues affecting incarcerated women, from providing clinical care in jail, to research, and advocacy. Her work is situated at the intersection of reproductive justice, health care, and mass incarceration, which she examines in her recent book, Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars.