Bonus #17: Unapologetic

Unapologetic. Charlene Carruthers. 2018.

I got interested in reading this book when one of my kids had to read it for work. I was hoping for something fresh and radical, something to convince me that smarter people who have thought more about dismantling the prison-industrial complex have a plan for what to do next.  In that respect, this book did not exactly live up. 

I didn't dislike this book, but I also did not love it. Although there were a couple of chapters, particularly the one about sexual assault and the balance between supporting survivors and advocating for the abolition of incarceration, that were worth reading and provided interesting fodder for thought, a lot of the material here has been pretty well covered in other, better written books.  There is a lot to like about the program she worked with in Chicago called BYP100 and while she talks briefly about what is problematic about dismantling and getting rid of prisons in order to funnel money and services to other programs, such a education, jobs, and direct aid, there continues to be a practical transition plan, even while she acknowledges the inherent problem of what to do about domestic and sexual violence in the interim.  She doesn't address child sex abuse at all, but I assume that the idea is that is there were funding for prevention services, we wouldn't need incarceration as a tool for incapacitation. 

​For the most part, this is an update of the same material Angela Davis has been writing about for 20 years. It is a melding of Are Prisons Obsolete? and Women, Race, & Class,with a little Queer Theory thrown in.  If you haven't read a lot about race in the context of feminist and Queer theory or if you haven't read anything since Davis' early works, then this is probably a pretty good read.  Otherwise, I'm not to go with Not Not Recommended.

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