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Podcast: New Books in Public Policy
Episode: Michell D. Jones and Elisabeth A. Nelson, "Besides, Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920" (New Press, 2023)
Description: What if prisoners were to write the history of their own prison? What might that tell them--and all of us--about the roots of the system that incarcerates so many millions of Americans? In Besides, Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920 (New Press, 2023), a group of incarcerated women at the Indiana Women's Prison have assembled a chronicle of what was originally known as the Indiana Reformatory Institute for Women and Girls, founded in 1873 as the first totally separate prison for women in the United States. In an effort that has already made the national new...