Eric A. Stanley

GOD this collection was just so, so wildly good. So many incredibly thoughtful pieces, so much thoughtful, careful work from folks on the inside and out. The pieces I keep returning to in thinking, that really shifted my thought, were Erica R. Meiner's piece on sex offenders, and Lori Girshick's piece on masculine women and transmascs in prison, both of which raised a huge number of questions for me and which I will keep returning to again and again.

That's not to say they were the only two good pieces in the book; every single essay was full of so much to think about, and experience to hold and be grounded in. The stories that folks on the inside had were of course incredibly brutal, and all pieces hammered home that in fact reform--like housing trans people according to their gender--does not necessarily decrease the violence that incarcerated trans people face, especially if that means that more money gets poured into prisons.

Definitely recommend this for anyone thinking about prison abolition, and for queer folks in general to think about what we owe our queer and trans siblings who are incarcerated.… (more)