“Dignity Bills”: The Politics of Ignorance and Expertise at the Intersection of Reproductive Justice and Incarceration

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Femininities

Abstract

This project is motivated by my seven-year long community-based research partnership with a Wisconsin-based statewide community organizing network of women impacted by incarceration. These organizers and a network of allies have been advocating policies that address reproductive justice for incarcerated women. Although the national-level “Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act of 2017” never made it out of the Senate Judiciary committee, versions of this bill have been introduced and/or passed in at least 17 states. Bills have been passed by legislatures at the opposite ends of the political spectrum; even the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council even designated it a “model” bill in 2018. Different versions include provisions ranging from prohibiting the shackling of pregnant women (legal in only 10 remaining states, including Wisconsin), the provision of hygiene products, living conditions, nutrition, family visitation policies, and access to doula care.
I examine the politics of the production of knowledge, expertise, and ignorance in health policymaking, focusing on the implications for marginalized groups. A criminal legal system reform movement and its intersection with women’s health provide a particularly useful case. Collective action by people who have been impacted by the criminal legal system is not a new phenomenon. However, advocates for criminal legal reform who have themselves been impacted by the system are a theoretically “extreme case” (Yin 2017) when it comes to these “credibility struggles” (Epstein 1998). Using mixed methods in a community-engaged Institutional Ethnography research framework, I ask: On what forms of data, evidence, and expertise do partisans draw? What strategies have advocates who are directly impacted used to secure bipartisan support for these initiatives? How does the advent of this legislation reflect historical changes in scientific narratives about health, gender, and criminal justice and the “civic epistemologies” (Jasanoff 2005) or public knowledge-ways that influence policy making?

Author

• Molly Clark-Barol, University of Wisconsin-Madison