Carolyn Sufrin - "Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars"

Friday, November 3, 2017 - 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Event Presenter/Author: 
Carolyn Sufrin

Carolyn Sufrin discusses Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars.

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested, not required)

About the book: 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.

About the author: 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.

Event Location: 
The Seminary Co-op Bookstore
5751 S Woodlawn Ave
Chicago, IL 60637