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The purpose of this article is to describe the meaning of incarceration for African American women as depicted in the narratives of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated African American women. This article uses black feminist thought as the primary theoretical framework to provide the relevant context for understanding the race, sexual, and gender oppressions that contribute to African American women's experiences with imprisonment. I argue that black women's prison narratives offer a unique insight into interlocking patterns of oppression that contribute to their incarceration, and how discrimination based on race, gender, and sexuality extends into prison.
To imprison a woman is to remove her voice from the world, but many female inmates have been silenced by life long before the transport van carries them from the courthouse to the correctional facility. ... Their essays, then, are victories against voicelessness - miracles in print.
Wally Lamb, Couldn't Keep It To Myself 1
The increasing incarceration rates of African American women reflect the history of their social exclusion in US society. This growth alone suggests a need for a closer study of intervention and policy changes in the criminal justice and corrections systems, and as the black women's prison population continues to rise, it becomes especially important to hear their stories to increase our understanding of their prison experience. Previous research, including Donna Rowe's 2004 study on women's prison writing, has indicated that writing in prison helps all inmates heal from and cope with the emotional issues that brought them to prison and to re-imagine a new life.2 Although scholars have begun to address issues of literacy in women's prisons, there is room for more work analysing how African American women interpret the meaning of their prison experience through writing. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to describe the meaning of incarceration for African American women as depicted in the narratives of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated African American women. This article uses black feminist thought as the primary theoretical framework to provide the relevant context for understanding the race, sexual, and gender oppressions that contribute to African American women's experiences with imprisonment. I argue that black women's prison narratives offer a unique insight into interlocking patterns of oppression that contribute to their incarceration, and how...