Extract

On its surface, this book is a history of sterilization in the only juvenile girls' reformatory in Kansas. More deeply, it offers a disturbingly intimate study that illustrates how power and punishment in carceral settings reproduces larger societal apparatuses of knowledge. Here, Ry Marcattilio-McCracken issues sobering warnings about eugenics, forced sterilizations, and the perverted and corrupt microphysics of power wielded by the authorities of the carceral state. At the Kansas Industrial School for Girls (Kisg) at Beloit, superintendents enjoyed unchecked authority over girls incarcerated there, resulting in unusually cruel punishments that mirrored public perceptions and fears of deviant women. Kansas ordered the nation's first sterilizations in 1894, in total performing 3,025 by 1963. At Kisg, where state law never intended forced sterilization to go, 160 girls suffered the knife (p. 6). In the mid-1930s the superintendent manipulated her network of judges, physicians, and welfare authorities to unlawfully force sterilizations at a frenzied pace; in ten months the city sterilized inmates at a rate eleven times higher than in previous decades.

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