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Break the System: Criminalized Black Mothers and the Reproductive Politics of Abolition by Susila Gurusam
Past event
Featured Book
Break the System
Join us on Wednesday, June 10th at 6:30pm for a discussion with Susila Gurusami to celebrate the release of Break the System: Criminalized Black Mothers and the Reproductive Politics of Abolition. For this event, Susila will be joined in conversation by Dr. Nadine Naber and Dr. Beth Richie.
The United States has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, with Black Americans representing a disproportionate share of the imprisoned. Many view this statistic as evidence of a broken system. But sociologist Susila Gurusami argues that the carceral system that so disproportionately harms Black families is not broken at all. In fact, it works just as it was intended. Looking closely at the lives of formerly incarcerated Black mothers, Gurusami shows how state institutions—the criminal-legal, child welfare, and healthcare systems—keep Black mothers from their families, harming Black communities in the process. She also shows how Black women work towards conditions that seem impossible—and even utopian—as part of their everyday mothering labor, but find themselves criminalized for these same actions.
Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with formerly incarcerated Black women in South Los Angeles, Gurusami challenges dominant assumptions about mothering and criminal justice reform. Gurusami finds that criminalized Black women endure multigenerational political, social, and embodied assaults–what she calls “reproductive warfare”— and still, they build networks, practices, and theories of radical care that protect Black maternal life, legacies, and futures. With incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and system-impacted Black mothers at the forefront of the growing movement to abolish prisons and jails, Gurusami demonstrates how their everyday mothering work—what she calls “abolitionist motherwork”—is essential to imagining the end of incarceration and ultimately achieving it.
Written with a tender and honest voice, Break the System shares moving vignettes that underscore why we must break the system, rather than reform it, and why we must imagine a future that is radically different than the one we’re told we must accept or salvage.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
Break the System: Criminalized Black Mothers and the Reproductive Politics of Abolition by Susila Gurusam
Join us on Wednesday, June 10th at 6:30pm for a discussion with Susila Gurusami to celebrate the release of Break the System: Criminalized Black Mothers and the Reproductive Politics of Abolition. For this event, Susila will be joined in conversation by Dr. Nadine Naber and Dr. Beth Richie.
The United States has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, with Black Americans representing a disproportionate share of the imprisoned. Many view this statistic as evidence of a broken system. But sociologist Susila Gurusami argues that the carceral system that so disproportionately harms Black families is not broken at all. In fact, it works just as it was intended. Looking closely at the lives of formerly incarcerated Black mothers, Gurusami shows how state institutions—the criminal-legal, child welfare, and healthcare systems—keep Black mothers from their families, harming Black communities in the process. She also shows how Black women work towards conditions that seem impossible—and even utopian—as part of their everyday mothering labor, but find themselves criminalized for these same actions.
Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with formerly incarcerated Black women in South Los Angeles, Gurusami challenges dominant assumptions about mothering and criminal justice reform. Gurusami finds that criminalized Black women endure multigenerational political, social, and embodied assaults–what she calls “reproductive warfare”— and still, they build networks, practices, and theories of radical care that protect Black maternal life, legacies, and futures. With incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and system-impacted Black mothers at the forefront of the growing movement to abolish prisons and jails, Gurusami demonstrates how their everyday mothering work—what she calls “abolitionist motherwork”—is essential to imagining the end of incarceration and ultimately achieving it.
Written with a tender and honest voice, Break the System shares moving vignettes that underscore why we must break the system, rather than reform it, and why we must imagine a future that is radically different than the one we’re told we must accept or salvage.
Featured Author
Susila Gurusami
Susila Gurusami is assistant professor of criminology, law, and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Presenters
Dr. Nadine Naber
Dr. Nadine Naber is Professor and Department Chair of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, co-founder of Liberate Your Research Workshops, and co-founder of Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity. She is author/co-author of five books such as Radical Mothering: Caregiving and Resistance beyond Prison Walls forthcoming with Haymarket, Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism and Race and Arab Americans. She has received many awards for her research and is a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar (2024). She is an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies and the International Journal of Middle East Studies and a board member of the Arab American Action Network.
Dr. Beth E. Richie
Dr. Beth E. Richie is a Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice and Black Studies at The University of Illinois at Chicago. The emphasis of her scholarly and activist work has been on the ways that race/ethnicity and social position affect the experience of violence and criminalization, focusing on the experiences of Black women and gender non-conforming people. Dr. Richie is the co- author of Abolition. Feminism. Now. with Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent and Erica Meiners published earlier this year. She is also the author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation (2012) and one of the editors of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom (2018) with collaborating teachers from Stateville Prison. Her earlier book Compelled to Crime: the Gender Entrapment of Black Battered Women, was pivotal framing the current work to free criminalized survivors from carceral systems. Her work has been supported by grants from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and The National Institute for Justice and The National Institute of Corrections. She has been awarded the Audre Lorde Legacy Award from the Union Institute, The Advocacy Award from the US Department of Health and Human Services, and The Visionary Award from the Violence Intervention Project and the UIC Woman of the Year Award. Dr. Richie was a founding board member of The Institute on Domestic Violence in the African Community, The National Network for Women in Prison, and a founding member of INCITE!: Women of Color Against Violence. In 2013 she was awarded an Honorary Degree from the City University of New York Law School and in 2014 she was appointed as a Sr. Advisor to the NFL to work on their gender violence prevention program. She is a member of the 2022 cohort of the Annie E. Casey Foundation Freedom Scholars.
About the Venue
Women & Children First
Women & Children First believes in the transformative power of literature. As intersectional trans-inclusive feminists, we believe books are tools for liberation. Since 1979, we have celebrated and amplified underrepresented voices.
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