Brown Bag Talk - Women in the Age of Mass Incarceration: Gender, Rights, and Punishment in Michigan

Please join Bonnie Ernst, 2017 Fishman Grant recipient, in a discussion of the research leading to her dissertation, “Women in the Age of Mass Incarceration: Gender, Rights, and Punishment in Michigan," Thursday, July 13th, 12pm at the Reuther Library.

In the final third of the twentieth century, women were the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population, and women of color were disproportionately sent to prison. Nearly all scholarship on the history of the criminal justice system focuses on the imprisonment of men. Ernst's dissertation, “Women in the Age of Mass Incarceration: Gender, Rights, and Punishment in Michigan,” reframes historical narratives on imprisonment by focusing on women and gender. Ernst investigates how incarcerated women voiced complaints, articulated their experience of incarceration and ultimately deployed impact litigation, a strategy that civil rights lawyers refined in the 1960s, to argue for gender equality in prison. Women in Michigan launched the nation’s first class action lawsuit that successfully implemented access to the courts and equitable educational and vocational programs for female prisoners.

Focused on Michigan, this project is the first historical study of how women experienced mass incarceration and organized to protest its oppressive aspects. The dissertation illustrates how women agitated from inside the prison and traces how women formed coalitions with attorneys, law students, and each other. The 1970s were a decade of prison reform in states like Michigan, reform neglected in prison studies scholarship. By bringing litigation and liberation movements in women’s prisons into focus, this project challenges dominant narratives on mass incarceration by emphasizing women and gender in our framing of scholarship on criminality and punishment in American history.

Key chapters of Ernst's dissertation will situate Michigan’s prison movement within the expanding women’s liberation campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s that took place in workplaces, homes, universities, and prisons.

For more information, call 313.577.4024