Abuse and Incarceration are Linked

As Wally Lamb writes in the introduction of this book, out of the eleven women who contributed stories, eight have been physically abused and nine have been sexually abused. Abuse is a common history of women in prison.

Dale Griffith, a teacher at York School also offers a shocking statistic. She says that according to current research, girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen who are convicted of violent crimes were, in most cases, physically and/or sexually abused by age two.

These statistics are backed up in very real ways by the eleven short stories written by prisoners in this book. Many of them share horrifying stories of sexual abuse at a very young age from a family friend, a neighbor, an uncle, a father, a grandfather. The early abuse sets up a prison for these women long before they enter York...