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9780226849959

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Reviews

Break the System offers a vivid ethnography of formerly incarcerated Black women, revealing how prisons, child welfare, and health care operate as an integrated carceral regime that punishes Black mothers for the everyday labor of caring for children and kin. At the same time, Susila Gurusami centers these mothers’ voices and creative resistance—their “abolitionist motherwork”—that sustains families amid state violence while forging paths toward dismantling the systems that ensnare them. Humane, incisive, and deeply inspiring, this book is an important contribution to abolition scholarship and essential reading for everyone committed to building a more caring and just world.   -- Dorothy Roberts, author of 'Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty' ""Break the System offers a new way to understand the punishment of women, the centrality of black women to the work of mass incarceration, and the centrality of mothering to black life. The ethnographic vignettes are achingly beautiful, without falling into romanticism or stereotypes around the Black family and Black family life. It is among the most beautifully written ethnographies I’ve read in a decade."" -- Reuben Jonathan Miller, author of 'Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration'

Author Information

Susila Gurusami is assistant professor of criminology, law, and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.   

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