Free Them All: A Feminist Call to Abolish the Prison System - Softcover

Gwenola Ricordeau

Softcover

ISBN 10: 183976273X ISBN 13: 9781839762734

Publisher: Verso Books, 2023

Synopsis

How does the criminal justice system affect women’s lives? Do prisons keep women safe? Should feminists rely on policing and the law to achieve women’s liberation?

The mainstream feminist movement has proposed "locking up the bad men," and called on prisons, the legal system, and the state to protect women from misogynist violence. This carceral approach to feminism, activist and scholar Gwenola Ricordeau argues, does not make women safer: it harms women, including victims of violence, and in particular people of color, poor people, and LGBTQ people.

In this scintillating, comprehensive study, Ricordeau draws from two decades as an abolitionist activist and scholar of the penal justice system to describe how the criminal justice system hurts women. Considering the position of survivors of violence, criminalized women, and women with criminalized relatives, Ricordeau charts a new path to emancipation without incarceration.

With a new preface by Silvia Federici. Translated from the French by Tom Roberge and Emma Ramadan.

About this title

About the Author

Gwenola Ricordeau is an associate professor of Criminal Justice at California State University, Chico. She previously taught in higher education for more than a decade in her native France. As a feminist and a penal abolitionist for more than two decades, Gwenola tries to make her scholarship resonates with her activism and personal experience as a relative of prisoners.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 183976273X
• ISBN 13: 9781839762734
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192