Corrections_Today_September_October_2019_Vol.81_No.5

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advancing feminism, women’s rights and gender justice with the project, which was created to free battered female prisoners who did not receive fair trials. Her feminist activism has been the key to her work in decriminalizing incarcerated women and focusing on their lack of human rights. Through her strong voice, Jacobsen has maintained this focus in Michigan for nearly three decades. This has garnered her ability to provide installations, videos, photography, archival work, exhibitions and other political projects. Jacobsen has provided creative art information sharing with synergy in her region-based center in Michigan. She has liaised with female prisoners and developed an ongoing supportive format for them to have hope amidst the despairing environment. Stories of abuse within the criminal, legal and penal system have been the focal point of the gender-based violence that the majority of female prisoners have suffered. The abuse has encompassed one or more of the following: physical, sexual, verbal/ emotional, mental/psychological, financial/economic, cultural/identity, discriminatory, organization or institutional. Programmatic needs were not being addressed when Jacobsen began her pilot projects, which focused on female prisoners who

had survived trauma prior to and after incarceration. These include therapies to address mental illness and suicidal ideation, and academic programs to upgrade education, including computer skills, vocational skills, cognitive restructuring, self- esteem, stressing ways to cope with violence, parenting skills, financial planning, substance abuse sobriety, life mapping, reentry programs, relationship programs, spiritual programs, health/nutrition programs and leisure programs. Negative stereotypes and misrepresentations defile and condemn women who are placed in situations where they are forced to defend themselves. The Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project supports, with prioritization, the exposure of biases of systematic patterns of inequality that are prevalent throughout the criminal processing of women, especially women of color. This promotes a need to address criminal intake processing with reflection of the women’s responses to violence and acts of survival. Negative stereotypes

For Dear Life: Women’s Decriminalization and Human Rights in Focus Written by Carol Jacobsen, University of Michigan Press (2019), 198 pp. Reviewed by Alexis E. L.

Chase, Ph.D., retired warden with the Georgia Department of Corrections.

In her new book, “For Dear Life: Women’s Decriminalization and Human Rights in Focus,” Carol Jacobsen provides a truthful chronicle that is excruciating in detail about perpetrators who violated the human rights of female prisoners. This led to her grass roots establishment of The Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project. She is an experienced professional with a strong background in arts, creative activism and movement building. Jacobsen exhibits a strong political commitment to

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