Book title: Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation
Author: Beth E. Richie
Publisher: New York University Press
Place of publication: New York and London
Year of publication: 2012
Number of pages: 244 p. (including index)
Cover price: $74.00 cloth, $22 paper
ISBN: 9780814776230
This book is an essential Black feminist complement and corrective to mainstream work on mass
incarceration, which problematically tends to portray women as only the partners of incarcerated men,
and to see Black women as better situated, less marginal, or less oppressed than Black men. Richie
begins with the experiences of marginalized Black women, asking how degrading abuse and assaults
from multiple kinds of actors can be so rampant and persistent that “Black women in the most
marginalized communities are not safe in their homes or in their neighborhoods, and the institutions
that should assist and protect them do not” (p. 66)? The book forcefully argues that multiple dangerous
phenomena have now converged: the intensification of a ‘prison nation’ that concentrates
disadvantages in low-income communities, the departure of radicalism from the women’s anti-violence
movement, and the use of the tools of mass incarceration by conservative politicians to address violence
against women.
Arrested Justice illuminates the extreme vulnerability and lack of community and state
protection of women whose cases are “not consistent with the hegemonic norms and expectations
about gender, sexuality, and family” (p. 158). One such case is Mrs. B, a Black woman who had resisted
Chicago’s public housing reforms. As housing project residents depopulated, and she stayed, undercover
police verbally, sexually and physically assaulted multiple her times and threatened her family.
Complaints to the housing authority and police did not stop the attacks, and two rape crisis centers
were unresponsive. Richie demonstrates through such cases how the official sanctioning of the
victimization of socially and economically marginalized Black women becomes possible, and how
coverage of cases like Mrs. B’s falls outside conventional ideas of a ‘worthy’ victim of gender violence.
Richie uses cases like Mrs. B to show that the buildup of a ‘prison nation’ (the subject of Chapter
4) does not only involve the criminal justice system, but also the penalization of non-normative practices
of economically marginalized people. When victims of violence and have criminal records or social
histories that lawmakers, police, frontline social service workers, or mainstream media view as nonnormative, a ‘prison nation’ creates barriers for women to find recourse through the law and
criminalizes victims, so contact with the justice system worsens the situations of women. The concept of
‘prison nation’ allows Richie to comment on the ways that government and society have chosen not to
address social problems. Arrested Justice contributes to a growing body of work (including that of Lynne
Haney, Jill McCorkel, and Loic Wacquant) on how investment in mass incarceration and divestment from
the social safety net in the US are conceptually intertwined policy moves that have harmed the poor,
especially poor women, in complex ways. Richie argues for reinvestment in community resources for
multiple reasons, including being a means of responding to violence against women beyond law
enforcement.
Arrested Justice is particularly strong as an insider critique of the women’s anti-violence
movement (the subject of her Introduction and Chapter 3). Richie argues that anti-violence activism has
succeeded in helping socially privileged women with the most visibility and power. Because anti-
violence activists construct male violence as a problem that any and every woman could face, the raceand class-neutral tone excludes discussion of violence against poor, Black women in particular. Richie
also exposes the destructive consequences of anti-violence activists’ choice to adopt strategies that
women of color oppose, including mandatory arrests, which have enmeshed Black women and men
further into the criminal justice system. She identifies another shortcoming in the anti-violence
movement’s hetero-normativity and lack of confrontation of lesbian battering. Richie emphasizes that
the anti-violence movement has sanctioned a response to violence exclusively through law enforcement
and legislation, and that this choice has precluded “critique of the state’s role in causing, complicating,
or being complicit with male violence against Black women” (p. 163).
Richie brings these institutional critiques into focus in her ‘violence matrix’ (the subject of
Chapter 5). This typology separates the types of actors involved in violence (intimate household,
community, and state level) and the types of violence they perpetrate (physical assault, sexual assault,
and emotional manipulation). The naming of institutional injuries makes this matrix an expansion on her
earlier theory of ‘gender entrapment’ (Richie 1996). Her matrix is a crucial step toward disassembling
such a complex problem, illustrating that the destructive, ongoing violence against Black women is not
‘merely’ a domestic issue that can be resolved by locking up women and/or their romantic partners.
Richie invites others to apply the matrix to other communities. The book leaves open the important
question of how to bring the particular and systemic victimization of Black men into discussion of the
victimization of Black women.
Arrested Justice describes women with extremely limited agency. Richie mainly relies on
secondary sources and bolsters her argument with victimization statistics. Although she notes in the
Acknowledgements that she has had personal contact with women on whose cases she focuses, she
does not present direct accounts of people like Mrs. B as research respondents. However, because her
contribution lies in identifying the consequences of the narrow mainstream idea of a victim of violence,
her heavy use of secondary sources does not subtract from the argument. The book is a call for alarm
and intervention on behalf of people who largely cannot self-advocate, but Richie cautions that—if we
have learned nothing else from the consequences of anti-violence work— responses must be culturally
appropriate.
This book contributes to a growing body of research about the negative consequences of the
cooptation of women’s movements by the state (other recent works have been published by Kristin
Bumiller and Hester Eistenstein). While this kind of argument is not entirely new (Richie 2000), together
this body of work demands the reshaping of systems to respond to women who face victimization.
Richie’s challenge to readers is to create better and more just interventions: ones that work to
deconstruct the ‘prison nation’ while simultaneously addressing the conditions of women and the
constructions of women that allow violence against marginalized Black women to continue.
Nicole Kaufman
Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin—Madison
PhD Student in Sociology
Mail: Department of Sociology
8128 Sewell Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
Email: nkaufman@ssc.wisc.edu
REFERENCES
Richie, Beth. 1996. Compelled to crime : the gender entrapment of battered Black women. New York:
Routledge.
—. 2000. "A Black Feminist Reflection on the Antiviolence Movement." Signs 25(4):1133–37.