LITERATURE REVIEW FOR PODCAST ON INFORMATION LITERACY STRATEGIES OF

INCARCERATED WOMEN
by Stacy Torian
SOURCE SELECTION
The topic of information literacy among incarcerated women relates to many disciplines,
including women’s studies, library science, African American studies, sociology, and education.
To maintain a research focus and to ensure that I chose my sources from the most relevant
ones available, I prioritized those that dealt directly with literacy and incarcerated women.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted to draw on more than just scholarly journal articles
and books. This decision was motivated by 1) the acknowledgement that those most qualified to
speak about life in jails and prisons – i.e., incarcerated people – are often not the ones taking
part in scholarly discourse, 2) the fact that several of the up-to-date resources on incarceration
and literacy fall beyond the realm of academic publishing, and 3) my reading of the 2013 article
“The Tyranny of Tradition: How Information Paradigms Limit Librarians’ Teaching and Student
Scholarship” by Carrie Donovan and Sara O’Donnell, in which they encourage librarians to
embrace alternative forms of scholarship. When preparing the project, I referenced not only
scholarly literature, but also think tank-generated fact sheets, podcasts, prison publication
websites, and interviews with people who have spent time in carceral settings.
LITERATURE BREAKDOWN
The literature I consulted fell into five categories: descriptions of literacy programs taking place
in carceral facilities; prison publications; individual and group case studies focusing on
prisoners’ life narratives; analyses of prison education efforts; and pedagogical theory. There
was much overlap within the first, second, and third categories, as it is impossible to understand
the literacy programs and prison publications without some knowledge of the people who took
part in the programs and produced the publications.
The first category of literature, descriptions of literacy programs, is well exemplified in Tobi
Jacobi’s 2009 piece, “Writing Workshops as Alternative Literacy Education for Incarcerated
Women.” In it, she highlighted the work of her SpeakOut! writing program based in Fort Collins,
Colorado, which provides a space for women and men in carceral facilities and halfway houses
to express themselves creatively through creative writing and visual art. Another influential
piece was Eleanor Novek’s essay “The Life Inside: Incarcerated Women Represent Themselves
through Journalism” featured in the 2011 anthology razor wire women: prisoners, activists,
scholars and artists [sic], edited by Jodi Lawston and Ashely Lucas. In this essay, Novek
recounted her experience teaching journalism to women in a prison in the northeastern United
States. She provided more detail about this experience in the 2005 article “The Devil’s Bargain:
Censorship, Identity, and the Promise of Empowerment in a Prison Newspaper.” Her remarks
about censorship in the prison environment were informative, and I was impressed by how she
used journalism classes to cultivate critical thinking and research skills among women
prisoners. Her writings opened my eyes to how powerful the prison publication can be as an
information literacy tool.
In reviewing the second category of literature, prison publications, I was repeatedly reminded of
Jodi Lawston’s quote in razor wire women: “[o]nly when imprisoned women speak for
themselves –rather than having criminal ‘justice’ experts, the media, and medical practitioners
speak for them –will it be possible to shatter stereotypical understandings of crime and
incarceration” (Lawston, 2011, p. 6). Charisse Shumate: Fighting for Our Lives is a video
account of the life of the late Charisse Shumate, an incarcerated woman and prison activist who
died in 2001. In the video, Shumate and other women prisoners spoke about their struggle to
receive adequate medical care while in prison. This film was absolutely essential to my
understanding of the health risks women face in the carceral environment. It was co-produced
by the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP). The coalition, whose membership
includes both incarcerated and un-incarcerated people, advocates for better prison conditions,
an elimination of life without parole sentencing, and other causes. CCWP also publishes the
long-running newsletter, The Fire Inside, in which I read first-person accounts of women’s health
crises in prison, reports on sentence commutations, and articles about prison-related legislative
developments. Another important publication I came across during my research was the
SpeakOut! writing program’s literary journal. The journal includes works by incarcerated people,
though it is impossible to determine the carceral status of the writers since the journal editors do
not list that information. Studying the Speak Out! Journal and speaking with the SpeakOut!
program director, Tobi Jacobi, gave me valuable insight into the emotional lives of the writing
program participants and showed me how some incarcerated writers practice subversiveness
by refusing to define themselves in print by their carceral status.
The third category of literature, life narratives, proved to be the most valuable of all the literature
I consulted, because it brought together details of life behind bars and incarcerated women’s
critical reflections on sociopolitical realities. The work of Megan Sweeney was particularly useful
for its rich representations of the intellectual lives and concerns of incarcerated women. After
reading her 2008 article, “Reading and Reckoning in a Women’s Prison,” the account of an
incarcerated woman with the pseudonym “Denise” who used reading to achieve self-education
and self-transformation, I read portions of Sweeney’s 2012 book, The Story Within Us: Women
Prisoners Reflect on Reading, which includes Denise’s narrative, as well as the narratives of
several other incarcerated women. One narrative which I found especially powerful from The
Story Within Us was that of a woman with the pseudonym “Mildred” who studied John Grisham
novels to improve her knowledge of the legal system. Also in the narrative vein is the 2001
piece “Women in Prison Tell It Like It Is.” In this news article-length compilation of narratives
published in the news journal off our backs [sic], women explained their diverse paths to
incarceration. This piece increased my knowledge of the complicated origins of women’s prison
trajectories and my awareness of the inhumane treatment women frequently endure in carceral
facilities. Nikki Nichols’ essay “Life After Incarceration: Exploring Identity in Reentry Programs
for Women” (in the 2013 Hartnett, Novek, & Wood compilation, Working for Justice: A
Handbook of Prison Education and Activism) is another piece that featured first-person
narratives of women. It deepened my understanding of the psychological, economic, and
information-access challenges women face when transitioning out of incarceration back into the
outside world. Finally, a book chapter in Candace Kruttschnitt and Catrien Bijleveld’s 2016 book
Lives of Incarcerated Women: An International Perspective called “ ‘It all has to do with men’:
How Abusive Romantic Relationships Impact Female Pathways to Prison” (by An Nuytiens and
Jenneke Christiaens) illustrated how central the abusive-relationship narrative is in the lives and
critical consciousness of so many incarcerated women throughout the world. That chapter made
me think more deeply about the reasons behind incarcerated women’s imprisonment and
heightened my emotional response to some of the other narratives I read and heard afterward.
The fourth category of literature, analyses of education efforts, addressed outcomes of different
prison education approaches. A common theme was that of education as a tool for managing
and socializing incarcerated people. The theme figures prominently in the 2016 article by Helen
Farley and Anne Pike titled “Engaging Prisoners in Education: Reducing Risk and Recidivism,”
in which they suggested that education could lead to a more secure environment for corrections
officers and inmates. In a 2018 article titled “Does Providing Inmates with Education Improve
Postrelease Outcomes? A Meta-analysis of Correctional Education Programs in the United
States,” authors Robert Bozick, Jennifer Steele, Lois Davis, and Susan Turner concluded that,
while education may lead to decreased recidivism, it seemed to have no impact on inmates’
post-incarceration job outcomes (p. 389). The idea that literacy programs alone are not enough
to transform someone’s life situation is one that came up in the 2015 article “What Words Might
Do: The Challenge of Representing Women in Prison and Their Writing,” in which Wendy
Wolters Hinshaw and Tobi Jacobi cautioned against overstating the “empowerment” potential of
writing work. An interesting counterpoint to this argument is that made by Patrick Berry in his
2018 book “Doing Time, Writing Lives: Refiguring Literacy and Higher Education in Prison.” He
cautioned against underestimating the impact of literacy programs for the long-term
incarcerated, who, as he notes, may benefit greatly from opportunities for intellectual growth or
just having “a way to pass the time” (Berry, 2018, p. 95). One article I read, “Computer-Assisted
Literacy Education Serves as Intervention for Incarcerated Women,” dealt with the impact of
education on both incarcerated women and their families. In this 2010 piece, Marcia Gannon
and Michele Lapham report on a sample of incarcerated women who participated in literacy
education programs. After successfully completing the programs, the women were motivated to
take additional classes and were in a better position to monitor their children’s educational
progress (Gannon and Lapham, 2010). All of these articles informed my thinking about the
potential and the limitations of literacy skills.
The fifth literature category, pedagogical theory, includes articles and books pertaining to
teaching methods. Early on in the research, I read Patrick Elliot Alexander’s 2017 article
“Education as Liberation: African American Literature and Abolition Pedagogy in the Sunbelt
Prison Classroom.” Citing a speech by philosopher Angela Davis called “The Prison-Industrial
Complex,” Alexander wrote about Davis’ work with incarcerated women at the San Francisco
County Jail, stressing that she had created a learning space in which the incarcerated students
did most of the teaching (2017, p. 11). This story inspired me and made me think about the
valuable perspectives incarcerated people bring to the teaching practice. Later, the idea of the
incarcerated woman as teacher became a major theme in my podcast. Another scholar who
emphasized the intellectual agency of incarcerated women was Irene Baird. In her 1999 article
“The Examined Life: Women’s Liberatory Learning Within a Locked-In Society,” she described a
“humanities-oriented rehabilitative approach to learning” (p. 105), and drawing comparisons with
the education-for-political-self-determination philosophy of Paulo Freire, wrote, “The humanities-
based model for marginalized women shares a similar philosophy about learning but focuses on
individual, personal liberation from the many layers of internal crises that serve as imprisonment
and oppression” (p. 105). Freire’s ideas also come through in the 2010 article “The Tyranny of
Tradition: How Information Paradigms Limit Librarians’ Teaching and Student Scholarship,” by
Carrie Donovan and Sara O’Donnell. The article, which calls on librarians to reject traditional
teaching approaches in favor of more progressive, empowering ones, had a tremendous
influence on my thinking about information literacy pedagogy and information literacy in general.
In one of the last books I read, Pedagogy of the Heart (2006), Paulo Freire advocates a “reading
of the world” as opposed to a “reading of the text” (p. 43). The act of “reading the world” is one
that incarcerated women engage in all the time, and the concept was central to my
understanding of what information gathering, evaluation, and transformation mean in a carceral
context.