In Reckoning with Restorative Justice, Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women who are incarcerated at the Women's Community Correctional Center, the only women's prison in the state of Hawai'i. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses particularly on women's participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program. Trapedo Sims argues that while the writing project served as a vital resource for the inside women, it also remained deeply embedded within carceral logics at the institutional, state, and federal levels. She foregrounds different aspects of these programs, such as the classroom spaces and the dynamics that emerged between performer and audiences in the Prison Monologues. Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai'i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex.
Leanne Trapedo Sims is the Daniel J. Logan Assistant Professor of Peace and Justice at Knox College.
Abbreviations ix A Note on the Text xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: The American Gulag and Indigenous Incarceration in Hawai'i 1 1. Pedagogy and Process 33 2. "Home": Trauma and Desire 58 3. The Stage Away from the Page 79 4. Love Letters 112 5. Postrelease and Affective Writers 139 Epilogue: Palliative Praxis or Pathways to Transformation? 153 Appendix 165 Notes 167 Bibliography 197 Index 209
"Well written and nicely theorized, Reckoning with Restorative Justice is an important project based on rigorous research, which adopts an intersectional lens in interrogating social justice failures in the contemporary carceral setting in Hawai'i. As an innovative exploration of Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander women's writing that has been neglected, this is original work that is much needed." - J. Kehaulani Kauanui, author of (Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism) "Reckoning with Restorative Justice is a complex and nuanced investigation of the tensions inherent in writing within a carceral setting and a reminder that even embedded within this complexity of challenges, the act of storytelling offers an intimate pathway to both personal insight and collective community witnessing as well as a significant step on a journey toward healing." - Lynden Harris, editor of (Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America's Death Row)
