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From Lesbian Vampires to Bad Moms: Myths about Women and Mass Incarceration
June 16, 2022 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm CDT
Free
One million women are incarcerated or surveilled by the U.S. criminal legal system. In some states the incarceration rates for women are growing even faster than for men. Myths about gender, and bias based on sexuality, promote these growing numbers. In this talk, authors Valena Beety and Victoria Law discuss their books Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights and “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration in order to explore the intersection of gender, resistance, and mass incarceration. These authors will expose the myths used to incarcerate women and the myths that perpetuate prison as an answer.
Presented in partnership with Arizona State University Academy for Justice.
Virtual event. JOIN HERE.
About Manifesting Justice: When Valena Beety first became a federal prosecutor, her goal was to protect victims, especially women, from cycles of violence. What she discovered was that not only did prosecutions often fail to help victims, they frequently relied on false information, forensic fraud, and police and prosecutor misconduct.
Seeking change, Beety began working in the Innocence Movement, helping to free factually innocent people through DNA testing and criminal justice reform. Manifesting Justice focuses on the shocking story of Beety’s client Leigh Stubbs–a young, queer woman in Mississippi, convicted of a horrific crime she did not commit because of her sexual orientation. Beety weaves Stubbs’s harrowing narrative through the broader story of a broken criminal justice system where defendants–including disproportionate numbers of women of color and queer individuals–are convicted due to racism, prejudice, coerced confessions, and false identifications.
Drawing on interviews with both innocence advocates and wrongfully convicted women, along with Beety’s own experiences as an expert litigator and a queer woman, Manifesting Justice provides a unique outsider/insider perspective. Beety expands our notion of justice to include not just people who are factually innocent, but those who are over-charged, pressured into bad plea deals, and over-sentenced. The result is a riveting and timely book that not only advocates for reforming the conviction process–it will transform our very ideas of crime and punishment, what innocence is, and who should be free.
About “Prisons Make us Safer:” The United States incarcerates more of its residents than any other nation. Though home to 5% of the global population, the United States has nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners–a total of over 2 million people. This number continues to steadily rise. Over the past 40 years, the number of people behind bars in the United States has increased by 500%.
Journalist Victoria Law explains how racism and social control were the catalysts for mass incarceration and have continued to be its driving force: from the post-Civil War laws that states passed to imprison former slaves, to the laws passed under the “War Against Drugs” campaign that disproportionately imprison Black people. She breaks down these complicated issues into four main parts:
1. The rise and cause of mass incarceration
2. Myths about prison
3. Misconceptions about incarcerated people
4. How to end mass incarceration
Through carefully conducted research and interviews with incarcerated people, Law identifies the 21 key myths that propel and maintain mass incarceration, including:
– The system is broken and we simply need some reforms to fix it
– Incarceration is necessary to keep our society safe
– Prison is an effective way to get people into drug treatment
– Private prison corporations drive mass incarceration
“Prisons Make Us Safer” is a necessary guide for all who are interested in learning about the cause and rise of mass incarceration and how we can dismantle it.
About the authors:
Valena Beety is a law professor, an innocence litigator, and a former federal prosecutor. She has exonerated wrongly convicted clients, founded the West Virginia Innocence Project, and obtained presidential grants of clemency for drug offenses. She co-edited a guide to causes of wrongful convictions called The Wrongful Convictions Reader; Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights is her first book. She proudly worked at the Seminary Co-Op in her early 20s!
Victoria Law is an author and freelance journalist whose work focuses on incarcerated women and the harm that prison causes. Her books include Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press 2009), Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reform (New Press 2020), and “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration (Beacon Press 2021). She is the co-founder of Books Through Bars–NYC, an all volunteer organization that sends free books to people incarcerated nationwide.