Abstract
Professor Angela Davis admonishes the reader near the start of this compendium by Carol Jacobsen, to creatively explore “new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor” (p. vii). Essential to that task—and a central challenge in anti-oppressive work—is identifying the ways in which rhizomic power translates across different conditions and struggles. In For Dear Life: Women’s Decriminalization and Human Rights in Focus, Jacobsen, an artist and human rights activist, creates a space that helps uncover how patriarchy operates through punishment in the United States by “provid[ing] a greater understanding of how and why women are forced to break the law yet are consistently denied equal protection, due process, and humane treatment by the state” (p. 7). For Dear Life is Jacobsen’s autobiography and genealogy of the Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project, which Jacobsen directs. The Clemency Project supports the advocacy of attorneys, Lynn D’Orio and Lore Rogers, and has worked since 1992 to obtain clemency for women incarcerated for defending themselves against violence and who did not receive a fair trial. The book follows the evolution of Jacobsen’s consciousness, her relationships with women prisoners, and the struggle to free them.
Jacobsen’s interdisciplinary role of artist as director of a legal organization offered a “range of research methods and public strategies to push boundaries” (p. 5). Similarly, For Dear Life was organized around “a body of visual, documentary and public dissent on behalf of incarcerated women’s freedom and human rights” (p. 7) featuring a mixture of comments from cultural and legal scholars, letters, photographs, material from legal case files, and narratives of the women prisoners themselves.
An art school graduate, Jacobsen escaped an abusive marriage, which exposed her to domestic violence at a young age. She first encountered feminist activism against the criminalization of women in Europe during the 1980s, then returned to the United States to join political art groups to contribute to “feminist and social justice conversations” (p. 1). Her early projects centered on the rights of sex workers in Detroit, the “revolving doors of their criminalization process,” (p. 1) and films on prostitute rights, like Street Sex (1989), which generated a censorious backlash. Jacobsen’s documentaries on sex workers drew the attention of a prisoner rights activist who invited her to visit Huron Valley Women’s Prison to make a film on the women and the children’s visitation program there. Once inside, she met survivors of violence whose physical and mental health was further damaged by their experience in prison. Women who were serving drug sentences for their boyfriends, women who killed their rapists and batterers in self-defense, women who were serving time for the most inane reasons but were not parolable because they had mental illness, and women whose physical as well as mental disabilities were compounded because of this disastrous system. (p. 2)
Jacobsen deployed compelling reframing projects like art installations that included “Conviction” (2004–2006), a series that presented rephotographed and digitally enlarged photos of women in the punishment system like Rosa Parks, Janis Joplin, and Angela Y. Davis, and “Mistrial” (2008–2011), “a series of digitally enlarged archival news photographs featuring women’s arrest or incarceration” (p. 150), and documentaries including “From One Prison” (1995), and “3 on a Life Sentence” (1998), a video installation narrated by three women serving life sentences together. Another documentary she created is “Segregation Unit” (2000), which focuses on the isolation and ongoing rape and torture of lesbian prisoner Jamie Whitcomb, a woman sentenced to 4 years in prison for a charge of destruction of property over US$100. Additionally, Jacobsen created “Sentenced,” (2001–2003), narrated by Connie Hanes, a prisoner who hanged herself in her cell after living in pain for nearly 30 years with inadequate medical care.
Although human rights are a stated focus of the book—even part of its title—there is little discussion of human rights other than an excerpt of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and occasional commentary about pursuing human rights. And while Jacobsen renounces prisons as a solution to individual or collective harm, it was disappointing to find little informing the reader on how a human rights framework might contribute to evolving the new system that Angela Davis alludes to—one not rooted in punishment. But if implicit in human rights is humane treatment, the book was particularly strong in highlighting the life experiences of women behind the walls—those who were beaten, raped, and held in solitary–and the glaring lack of humanity in prison. Less troublesome than distracting was the repetitive nature of some of the many written comments offered in support of the Clemency Project’s important work. That said, For Dear Life is a significant book for those open to traveling a layered path to understanding the experiences of imprisoned women and the arduous process of humanizing them within the legal system–and the community–when working to help them move beyond prison.
