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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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