Please see my new post at the Women Review of Books Blog: “Money, Justice, and Bail:”

“I met Zoe Giannousis on a wintry evening at the community college in Lowell, Massachusetts, where I facilitate my Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL) program. Along with Zoe, there were eight women, all struggling with court issues, family conflicts, and the dark well of abuse, addiction, and crime. In CLTL they gather with a judge, two probation officers, and me for a reading group—an alternative sentencing collaboration between academia and the courts that began almost 25 years ago, and that has now spread across the state and the country, and across the Atlantic to England. For the next fourteen weeks, as a condition of probation, they dive into animated discussions of books including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Ann Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

Unlike the majority of the women in CLTL, however, Zoe had served time. This was not because of an actual crime she had committed. She had been locked up in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution (MCI)-Framingham in the Awaiting Trial Unit, where, according to the Massachusetts Women’s Justice Network (MWJN), more than forty percent of the women being held have not been found guilty.”  MORE