Why read All Our Trials?

Book cover of All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence

Book description

During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners' and psychiatric patients' rights, and gender and sexual liberation.
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Why read it?

1 author picked All Our Trials as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Leigh Goodmark

Author

Until I read this book, I didn’t realize that my work with criminalized survivors had a rich historical context. One example: I didn’t know about Joan Little, who stabbed the correctional officer who sexually assaulted her with an ice pick, or about the grassroots survivor defense campaign that sprang up around her.

I could not have situated that specific campaign in the broader context of a non-carceral anti-violence movement that opposed the build-up of the criminal response to intimate partner violence (a battle they ultimately lost). Emily Thuma gave me that historical context—and a lot more to be angry…

From Leigh's list on The best anger-inducing non-fiction books on women and the criminal legal system.