Golden, Renny. War on the Family: Mothers in Prison and the Families They Leave Behind. New York: Routledge, 2005. 215 pp.

by Alicia D. Bonaparte

Renny Golden, veteran activist and policy analyst, uses life narratives to illuminate the social plights and denied voices of "those [women] socially branded as crackheads, drunks, whores, and unfit parents" and the children they bore prior to and during confinement (xiii). These narratives dramatize the vilification of poor women of color while Golden's policy analysis elucidates why progressive social reform is necessary for female offenders and their children. Using fifteen interviews with former or currently incarcerated women of color in Chicago, Illinois and Las Lunas, New Mexico and eleven children of former or currently incarcerated mothers, and