Ted Lempert

Lora Bex Lempert - Eating the Life Sentence Elephant: One Bite at a Time

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• published: 29 Mar 2016
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"I explore the ways that women incarcerated for life in the state of Michigan, literally and metaphorically, construct meaningful lives inside prison walls through self actualization. Using their narrative voices, I discuss the ways that these women reflect on their carceral lives, particularly how they cope pragmatically and creatively with no exit sentences. I challenge the decidedly male oriented legislative, criminal justice, and popular cultural images of “prison” and “criminals” by offering a view of imprisoned women that is contemporarily invisible and attempt to fill the ethnographic gap in criminological theorizing about female lifers. I discuss my triangulated research methodology of focus groups, life course interviews, and solicited diaries where the biases of one method are cancelled out by the others." Author of Women Doing Life: Gender, Punishment and the Struggle for Identity, Lora Bex Lempert is a Professor Emerita in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan Dearborn. For twenty years, she was the cosponsor of the National Lifers of America chapter at a local women’s correctional facility and the lead instructor on a series of college level courses, a program that won the 2006 AAUW Progress in Equity Award. She was also the first instructor to offer an Inside Out Prison Exchange class in Michigan. In 2005, she received the Feminist Mentoring Award from the Sociologists for Women in Society.