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The Ann Arbor District Library hosted author and historian Bonnie Ernst Wednesday to talk about her first book, “Challenging Confinement: Mass Incarceration and the Fight for Equality in Women’s Prisons.” The book tells the story of incarcerated women who fought for gender and racial equality in prisons and pushed against mass incarceration. About 30 people attended to hear Ashley Lucas, University of Michigan professor of theatre and drama, interview Ernst about the book and the research that went into it.
Lucas began the conversation by asking Ernst about what sparked her interest in the history of prisons, specifically women’s prisons, and Ernst said it came out of her early career experiences.
“My first job out of college was working at the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama,” Ernst said. “And I visited a lot of prisons around the South and the Midwest, working as a paralegal on some of those cases. Going there and meeting with incarcerated women made me curious just about the history of why there are separate women’s prisons and some of the issues that they were facing.”
Ernst said she found that many other texts focus on the experiences of men in prison, so she wanted to write about incarcerated women advocating for themselves.
“There’s a lot of literature that focuses on mass incarceration as intersecting causal factors, but one that creates a lot of victims,” Ernst said. “I wanted to think through how people resisted aspects of mass incarceration and fought back and tried to advocate for themselves, even from inside prison.”
In Ernst’s book, she tried to tell a different incarcerated woman’s story in each chapter, including what the women did following their release.
“In each chapter, I try to present a woman’s story as representative or symbolic of some of the major shifts in … women’s movements in the 20th century,” said Ernst. “(Since being released), some of the women I’ve talked to are still processing … A lot of people feel this obligation to keep working on social justice around mass incarceration.”
Ernst then touched on the Glover v. Johnson case, in which a group of incarcerated women filed a suit against the Michigan Department of Corrections. This case sparked a movement fighting to make prisons more equitable for all people.
“Women brought this case to the federal court in the Eastern District of Michigan, and they were arguing for gender equality,” Ernst said. “They wanted access to education, access to the courts, a better law library, vocational training, and it was pretty ambitious and also quite risky.”
Mary Heinen McPherson, U-M faculty and Prison Creative Arts Project coordinator, talked about her experience being incarcerated and said she has still not fully recovered from its impacts.
“I still have asbestos in my lungs. I still have kidney stones from the nitrates (and) I’m on penicillin now, ” Heinen McPherson said. “It wears in your soul. It’s embedded in your physical being, just being tortured like that.”
LSA senior Julia Frykman talked about one of her biggest takeaways from the event in an interview with The Michigan Daily.
“What stood out to me here is hearing (McPherson) speak about how many women were active politically and had to advocate for their own case(s),” Frykman said. “Because unfortunately, what happens to a lot of people that are incarcerated is that they’re often forgotten about.”
LSA freshman Lily Brown told The Daily that hearing about the stories of women in prison at the event made her want to get involved in reform with the local incarcerated community.
“I think hearing their stories and knowing that Michigan is a place that can provide that, I want to get more involved,” Brown said. “We have the voice that allows us to hopefully move these cases along in any way that we can.”
Daily News Reporter Paige Stallman can be reached at pstall@umich.edu.
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