Shedding light on the crisis of women behind bars

Stories from the Inside

More and more women mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters, and sisters are doing hard prison time all across the United States. Many of them are facing the prospect of years, decades, even lifetimes behind bars. Oddly, there's been little public discussion about the dramatic increase of women in the prison system. What exactly is happening here, and why?

For her book, Silja J.A. Talvi, investigative journalist and author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System, travelled across the country to interview prisoners, correctional officers, and administrators from all walks of life. As a result of these primary interviews and experiences, Talvi's book provides readers with an unprecedented, far-ranging look female experiences in what a highly chaotic and uncohesive U.S. jail and prison system.  With a combination of compassion and critical analysis, Talvi delivers a timely, in-depth analysis of a growing and extremely complicated issue.

The book has received the National Council on Crime and Delinquency's PASS literary award for 2007 for excellence in criminal justice-related reporting. The PASS Awards (Prevention for a Safer Society) is the only national recognition of print and broadcast journalists, TV news and feature reporters, producers, and writers, and those in film and literature who try to focus America's attention on our criminal justice system, juvenile justice system, and child welfare systems in a thoughtful and considerate manner.

Praise

"Beautifully written and meticulously argued, Women Behind Bars is a plea for a new understanding of justice. It is a book that deserves a place in any policy debate about incarceration, and about the increasing numbers of women prisoners in particular."
-Sasha Abramsky, author of American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment

 "A riveting, heartbreaking, and insightful account of a crisis hiding in plain sight--the explosion in the number of incarcerated women in the United States. In mournful and disturbing detail, Talvi documents how incarcerated women, many of whom are victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence, are abused time and again by the criminal justice system."
-Marie Gottschalk, author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America

"I've read few accounts of social injustice that have aroused in me such intense feelings of sadness, shame, and rage. As a cop for thirty-four years, I confess to having given only passing thought to what happened to women after they're arrested and ultimately sentenced to prison. I have been stripped of my ignorance by Women Behind Bars. The agonizing experiences of many of these women, described so eloquently by Talvi, will haunt me for the rest of my days."
-Norm Stamper, PhD, Seattle Chief of Police (Ret.), author of Breaking Rank

"After reading Women Behind Bars, one could recite a laundry list of shocking statistics and haunting anecdotes about female prisoners--but where to begin? Silja J.A. Talvi, an investigative journalist, tackles more than seems possible in one book, documenting the negligent medical care, abuse by guards, and contemptible meals that many female inmates endure, as well as smaller indignities like limited access to soap and tampons. Talvi interviewed hundreds of imprisoned girls and women, and she expertly combines their stories with the disturbing facts and figures that, on their own, don't inspire nearly enough outrage. The author's vivid descriptions of these women's lives, and her exasperation over their 'invisible struggle,' render Women Behind Bars a surprisingly readable treatise on a cumbersome topic."
-Danielle Maestretti, Utne

The Author

Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times, an investigative journalist and essayist with credits in many dozens of newspapers and magazines nationwide, including The Nation, Salon, Santa Fe Reporter, Utne, and the Christian Science Monitor. Her book, Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System was published in November 2007 (Seal Press, an imprint of Perseus).

Her articles on social issues with a particular emphasis on criminal justice, ethnicity and gender have garnered a dozen Society of Professional Journalists Western Washington regional awards. Talvi was honored in 2006 to receive a New American Media award for immigration-related reporting. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, she received four consecutive PASS award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency for a magazine feature on the impact of Three Strikes sentencing on African American men; the privatization incarceration trend; Taser weaponry; and the interstate transfer of prisoners. The latter three were all written for In These Times.

Born in Helsinki, Finland, and raised in Hollywood, California, Talvi earned her BA with Honors in Ethnic Studies in 1991 from Mills College in Oakland, California. She was then admitted into the first graduate program in Women Studies at San Francisco State University, completing her master's thesis in 1993 about Israeli and Palestinian women.

Since 1996, Talvi has been a full-time writer, reporting from areas as diverse as the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, New Mexico, Los Angeles, the Puget Sound, as well as Western and Eastern portions of Washington State. Internationally, she has also reported from Europe, the Caribbean, Canada and Mexico. She currently lives in Seattle.

Talvi's essays, investigations and articles have appeared in many book anthologies, including:

• Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration, co-edited by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright, The New Press (2008);
• The W Effect: Bush's War on Women, Edited by Laura Flanders, The Feminist Press (2004);
• Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, Routledge (2003);
• Economics Now, Oxford University Press (2003).
  

Photo: Talvi speaks at the International Drug Policy Reform Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana. December 2007. Photo by: Pawel.

To contact the Women Behind Bars Project, please send an email to womenbehindbars@gmail.com

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