Oklahoma has long held the dubious honour of having the highest female incarceration rate in the US. In this compelling new book, Susan Sharp sets out to discover just what has gone so wrong in the state - and what that might tell us about trends in female incarceration across the US. Mean Lives, Mean Laws exposes a Kafkaesque criminal justice system, one that has no problem with treating women as collateral damage in the War on Drugs or with stripping female prisoners of their parental rights.

Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1 Mean Lives: A Theoretical Framework
2 Mean Laws: The Rise in Female Imprisonment
3 Mean Women or Mean Lives? Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Abuse of Women Prisoners
4 The Prison Experience
5 Going Back Again by Juanita Ortiz
6 Coming Home and Staying Out
7 The Children and Their Caregivers
8 Winds of Change
9 Lessons Learned and Moving Forward
Appendix A Research Methods
Appendix B Oklahoma Children of Incarcerated Parents
Notes
References
Index

SUSAN F. SHARP is the David Ross Boyd Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. Co-Chair of the Oklahoma Legislative Task Force on Children of Incarcerated Parents, she has written over thirty articles, as well as the book Hidden Victims: Effects of the Death Penalty on Families of the Accused (Rutgers University Press, 2005).