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Melanie D. Newport, Bonnie L. Ernst. Challenging Confinement: Mass Incarceration and the Fight for Equality in Women’s Prisons., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 501–502, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae636
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As a state-level exploration of the development of women’s prisoner rights movement in Michigan, Challenging Confinement: Mass Incarceration and the Fight for Equality in Women’s Prisons centers how incarcerated women gained access to the ideas, tools, and coalitions needed to resist their incarceration from the Progressive Era to the present. Questions about the causal factors of mass incarceration, particularly about the extent to which the federal government controlled and shaped the rise of mass incarceration, have been central to this burgeoning field. Ernst’s descriptive book builds on the contributions of others as it decenters problems of federalism and tells the untold story of women’s incarceration in the more recent past, an area largely dominated by stories of the men who were and still are the majority of incarcerated people. Whereas scholars such as Dan Berger, Heather Ann Thompson, Garrett Felber, and Robert Smith have debated the impact of social movements inside and outside of prisons, Ernst looks at the impact of the women’s movement on prisoner rights of incarcerated women specifically. Ernst takes the women on their own terms to evaluate the “expansive and interconnected fights for gender equality, racial justice, and decarceration” (9). While resonant with recent works by Emily Thuma and Christina Greene, Ernst’s approach is distinct for its deep historical framing and its emphasis on ordinary incarcerated women and the somewhat mundane violence of long-term incarceration.
