Break the System - by Susila Gurusami (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Upends the "broken systems" myth and reveals how the law deliberately criminalizes and punishes Black women, inflicting lasting harm on Black communities in the process.

The United States has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, and within our country, Black people are disproportionately imprisoned. Many view this statistic as evidence of a broken system. But sociologist Susila Gurusami argues that the carceral system that so disproportionately harms Black families is not broken at all. In fact, it works just as it was intended. Looking closely at the lives of formerly incarcerated Black mothers, Gurusami shows how state institutions like the criminal-legal, child welfare, and healthcare systems keep Black mothers from their families, harming Black communities in the process. She also reveals how Black women work towards conditions that seem impossible--and even utopian--as part of their everyday mothering labor, but find themselves criminalized for these same actions.

Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with formerly incarcerated Black women in South Los Angeles, Gurusami challenges dominant assumptions about mothering and criminal justice reform. Gurusami finds that, even under the assaults of reproductive warfare, criminalized Black women build networks, practices, and theories of radical care that protect Black maternal life, legacies, and futures. With incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and system-impacted Black mothers at the forefront of the growing movement to abolish prisons and jails, Gurusami demonstrates how their everyday mothering work--what she calls "abolitionist motherwork"--is essential to imagining the end of incarceration and ultimately achieving it.

Written with a tender and honest voice, Break the System shares moving vignettes that underscore why we must break the system, rather than reform it, and why we must imagine a future that is radically different than the one we're told we must accept or salvage.

Review Quotes

Break the System offers a vivid ethnography of formerly incarcerated Black women, revealing how prisons, child welfare, and health care operate as an integrated carceral regime that punishes Black mothers for the everyday labor of caring for children and kin. At the same time, Susila Gurusami centers these mothers' voices and creative resistance--their "abolitionist motherwork"--that sustains families amid state violence while forging paths toward dismantling the systems that ensnare them. Humane, incisive, and deeply inspiring, this book is an important contribution to abolition scholarship and essential reading for everyone committed to building a more caring and just world.

--Dorothy Roberts, author of 'Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty'

"Break the System offers a new way to understand the punishment of women, the centrality of black women to the work of mass incarceration, and the centrality of mothering to black life. The ethnographic vignettes are achingly beautiful, without falling into romanticism or stereotypes around the Black family and Black family life. It is among the most beautifully written ethnographies I've read in a decade."--Reuben Jonathan Miller, author of 'Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration'

About the Author

Susila Gurusami is assistant professor of criminology, law, and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.