Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Zoe Blount Humanities

All My Life I Had To Fight: Exposing the Realities of Confinement through Black Women’s Prison Writings

Scholars Journal

During the 1960s to 90s, the United States carceral system underwent a transformation that led to an unprecedented growth in the national prison population. Black men were criminalized most significantly by means of the new legal doctrine; however, mainstream criminological discourse often overshadows and makes invisible the intersection of Black womanhood and punitive punishment. Therefore, Zoe aims to expose how Black women experienced racialized gender stereotypes through the prison industrial complex. By conducting a literary analysis and archival study of Black women’s prison writings and literary narratives from the late twentieth century that reveal the realities of confinement, Zoe’s project strives to develop a deeper understanding of how the prison industrial complex is both complicit in and responsible for maintaining racial domination and gender suppression.