Jeanne Flavin

Panicked teenagers are prosecuted for abandoning or killing their newborns, but are not guaranteed comprehensive sexuality education or reproductive health services. Poor women are pressured not to procreate and urged to undergo sterilization. Women who are addicted to illicit drugs risk arrest for carrying their pregnancies to term. And more than thirty years after Roe, women still face barriers to obtaining a safe and affordable abortion including clinic violence and attempts to criminalize medically necessary procedures. In Our Bodies, Our Crimes, Jeanne Flavin argues that, not only has the state's control of women's bodies become more intrusive and more pervasive, it has also become invisible and taken for granted. This important work is framed around several vivid case studies, each taking place at a different time in the reproductive cycle. Through these disturbing examples, Flavin describes how the criminal justice system regulates women and their reproductive behaviour from conception to childrearing. Flavin shows how by restricting some women's access to abortion as well as obstetric and gynaecologic care, for instance, or failing to support the efforts of incarcerated women and battered women to rear their children, the law and the criminal justice system establish what a good woman or a fit mother should look like and how conception, pregnancy, birth, child care, and socialization should take place. With a stirring conclusion that calls for broad-based measures that strengthen women's economic status, choice-making, autonomy, sexual power, and healthcare, Our Bodies, Our Crimes is a battle cry for all women in their fight to be fully recognized as human beings. At its heart, this book is about the freedom to be a healthy woman and a valued member of society independent of how or even whether she reproduces.

The Policing of Women's Reproduction in America

Our Bodies, Our Crimes

Mary Bosworth

Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin bring together twelve original essays by prominent scholars to examine not only the discrimination that is evident, but also the structural and cultural forces that have influenced and continue to perpetuate the current situation. Contributors point to four major factors that have impacted public sentiment and criminal justice policy : colonialism, slavery, immigration, and globalization. In doing so they reveal how practices of punishment not only need particular ideas about race to exist, but they also legitimate them. The essays unearth troubling evidence that testifies to America's brutally racist past, and to White America's continued fear of and suspicion about racial and ethnic minorities. The legacy of slavery on punishment is considered, but also subjects that have received far less attention such as how colonizers' notions of cultural superiority shaped penal practices, the criminalization of reproductive rights, the link between citizenship and punishment, and the global export of crime control strategies.

From Colonialism to the War on Terror

Race, Gender, and Punishment

Gregg Barak

Paul Leighton

A decade after its first publication, Class, Race, Gender, and Crime remains the only authored book to systematically address the impact of class, race, and gender on criminological theory and all phases of the criminal justice process. The new edition has been thoroughly revised, for easier use in courses, and updated throughout, including new examples ranging from Bernie Madoff and the recent financial crisis to the increasing impact of globalization.

Jeanne Flavin

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