Karlene Faith
A human rights activist for five decades, Karlene Faith is Canada's leading feminist sociologist on prisons. Her seminal book, Unruly Women, raised many crucial questions that define the prison reform movements of today. Co-founder of the revolutionary Santa Cruz Women’s Prison Project in 1972, and author of many books on criminology and women’s studies, Faith is currently professor emerita at Simon Fraser University’s School of Criminology.
“In my view, it is an error to think about 'alternatives to prison' if what we mean by that is 'electronic bracelets,' through which people are subject to computer-monitored house arrest, or granting fuller surveillance and disciplinary powers and technologies to other state agencies, such as welfare and mental health, through 'transcarceration' policies...We need to decrease, not increase, the means by which the state, in its multifarious networks of authority, controls human lives and selectively incapacitates people who, no less than others, have the potential to contribute to the improvement of hte human condition.”
Karlene Faith