Held in Contempt

Taking readers into America’s oldest women’s prison, this deeply reported exposé shows how women have become the new face of mass incarceration.

When it opened 150 years ago, America’s first women’s prison was supposed to end an epidemic of prison abuse. Instead of being stuck in squalid men’s prisons, they now had a new kind of facility, run by women for women, and emphasizing rehabilitation over punishment.

But today, the Indiana Women’s Prison, and dozens more like it, are rife with precisely the horrors they were designed to prevent. Across the country, women’s prisons have become warehouses for victims of abuse, poverty, mental illness, and substance use. Even as the male prison population drops, women are being locked up in ever greater numbers, with devastating effects.

In Held in Contempt, investigative reporter and criminal justice expert Alisa Roth takes readers deep behind the walls of the Indiana Women’s Prison. Through the engrossing, gripping stories of eight women, she explores why so many are getting stuck in this system, and the dramatic repercussions for their families and communities. Roth asks what it means to be incarcerated as a woman—from being shackled while having a baby, to sexual assault by corrections officers—and how a once-progressive vision of female empowerment went dangerously awry.