Introduction

While scholarship on the education of youth behind bars has largely focused on boys, more than one in three youth arrests in the USA is female, and Girls Behind Bars sets out to address this imbalance.

The book offers autobiographies, life-stories, and counter-stories in order to challenge simplistic generalizations and empirical prescriptions. Girls Behind Bars provides the educational community with critical perspectives that examine empiricist epistemologies and positivist methodologies that label certain groups of girls as delinquent and mark them for punitive and corrective treatment behind bars. Sharma opens up the discussion on girls' gender, desire, and sexuality by offering a language for these issues absent in educational discourse. Finally, the book supports calls for educators and practitioners in their desire to envision and create transformative spaces that enable young girls behind bars to reclaim their education.

Including a foreword by William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, this important and powerful book gives voice to a neglected, silenced, and misrepresented population - young girls behind bars.