Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920

Description: "A groundbreaking collective work of history by a group of incarcerated scholars that resurrects the lost truth about the first women's prison"--

Brief description:

The Indiana Women's Prison History Project was founded by a group of incarcerated scholars at the Indiana Women's Prison. The author of Who Would Believe a Prisoner? (The New Press), the group has garnered national acclaim in the media and among scholarly organizations and was awarded the Indiana History Outstanding Project for 2016 by the Indiana Historical Society.

Review Quotes:

Praise for Who Would Believe a Prisoner?:
"A remarkable collaborative history."
-The New York Review of Books

"Who Would Believe a Prisoner? provides new and relevant information from an important perspective."
--The Public Historian

"Who Would Believe a Prisoner? is a work of historical scholarship that operates like a telescope, extending into the past to get a closer look at how sex-segregated incarceration operated in its early days, and then retracting back to the present to analyze findings within a contemporary, anti-carceral framework."
--The New Yorker

"Incisive. . . . Impressive and meticulously documented."
--Public Books

"An ambitious and frequently disturbing history. . . . [Who Would Believe a Prisoner?] is a forceful critique of the roots of the carceral state."
--Publishers Weekly

"From inside the walls of a prison, the authors of Who Would Believe a Prisoner? created something authentic and revolutionary: the story of the very institution that was the root of their oppression. In the voices of these incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women, we can hear the truth of what incarceration does to human beings--and also the possibility for genuine reform."
--Susan Burton, founder of A New Way of Life and author of Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

"A must-read in the new era of gender rights, Who Would Believe a Prisoner? is a bold compilation of truth gestated by a combination of education, allyship, and tenacity. The authors, ten members of the Indiana Women's History Project, explore the past with an intense intellectual curiosity likely owed to their confinement and fear that it would erase their full humanity."
--Vivian Nixon, writer in residence, Square One Project, Columbia University