Interrupted Life: Incarcerated Mothers in the United States: A Traveling Public Art Exhibition

The anti-prison movement in the United States is a growing activist front, partly because the numbers are so shocking and getting worse. It's hard to avoid beginning with the numbers for just that reason. For example, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2001, there were 470 inmates for every 100,000 U.S. residents. Four years later, despite the surge of activism, in 2005, there were 488 inmates per 100,000 residents.

Nationally there are now more than eight times as many women incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails than there were in 1980. That means there are approximately 200,000 incarcerated women in the United States. But if you count all forms of correctional supervision—probation, parole, jail, and state and federal prison, more than one million women are now behind bars or under the control of the criminal justice system. Recently, the Real Cost of Prisons Project (RCPP) reported, "one out of every 109 women in America is incarcerated, on parole or probation."

RCPP provides more numbers, figures showing us that incarceration in America is about race. These numbers are stunning and determinative: While African Americans make up 13% of the population, and 13% of the drug users in the United States, 35% of people arrested for drug-related crimes are African Americans, 55% of people convicted for drug-related crimes are African Americans, and 74% of those sentenced to prison for drugs are African American. Indeed, this system is about race.

But who knows these facts?

How is it possible to lock up more than two million men and women in the United States but have almost no public discussion, almost no high-level, high-profile public notice of these matters?

How is it possible for our systems of incarceration to operate on such thoroughly racialized bases, and to have this aspect of our society so thoroughly eclipsed?

What do race and gender and poverty have to do with media boredom and public deafness and public blindness to the policies and politics and practices—and consequences—of locking up more and more people every year?

What does the prison system underscore about who is invisible—who is erased—in the United States, whose voices are inaudible?

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Strictly speaking, the subject of incarceration hasn't been at the center of my life's work as a scholar and activist, even while I have focused on questions about what racism looks like, how it functions, how it has been institutionalized today and in the past. Specifically, as a historian, I keep focusing on this question, "Who gets to be a legitimate mother in the United States—and who does not?" I am interested in how the answers to this question are decided and enforced. What does the state have to do with it? What do individual women have to do with it? And most fundamentally, what do race and class have to do with who gets to be a legitimate mother in this country—and who doesn't?

The books I write grapple with how, over time, female sexuality, fertility, and maternity have provided opportunities for governments and other power-brokers to institutionalize racism and white supremacy in the United States. It took me until 2004 to pay good attention to the fact that incarceration is crucial to the "how" of this project.

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Since 1992, I have been working with artists to make exhibitions associated with the themes of the books I write. At the time when my first book, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race in the U.S., was being published, I realized that the mostly academic, sort of turgid books I would spend my life writing would never be read by large numbers of people. I came to terms with the fact that writing books is my main way of being an activist, but also that I wanted to work in another non-classroom-based pedagogical form as well, a form that might reach more people.

Since I am a person who lives a sharply...