AHP Perspective is a magazine published bi-monthly for members of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. It includes interviews, articles, essays, updates on member activities, conference announcements, and book reviews. Members receive the complete AHP Perspective as part of their membership.

AHP PERSPECTIVE Februsry/March 2001 Table of Contents

WOMEN ON THE ROW: Revelations from Both Sides of the Bars
By Kathleen O’Shea

Firebrand Books, 2000, 150 pp., $12.95, ISBN: 1563411245

Reviewed by Karen Hawthorne

As more time passes since my original reading of Kathleen
O’Shea’s Women on the Row: Revelations From Both Sides of the Bars, my appreciation for O’Shea’s genius deepens. The reader’s experience paralleling the author’s, is different, and more than expected.

Kathleen O’Shea, a nun for 25 years, now a social worker and researcher, is said to be the only person to have contacted every woman currently on death row in U.S. prisons. Her project started out as sociological research, intended to produce a reference book, Women and the Death Penalty in the United States, 1990-1998, published last year. But Women on the Row recounts something "life-transforming" for the author.

Women on the Row begins in the cool voice of the objective researcher. O’Shea explains how she came to do these studies and then introduces us to the ten women on death row who are featured in the book. Based on their conversations with O’Shea, and from historical information, we come to know these women startlingly well. Their stories are delivered in small vignettes, juxtaposed with entries from the author’s own life "outside." The sequencing is so gradual and delicate that the reader may be surprised to realize the author’s own trauma has been exposed, that we join at the heart of her vulnerability, in her plausibility as victim, and with her accountability. Through sharing her own story, the writer brings us deeper into the lives of the condemned women on death row.

The publisher describes this book as a "sometimes radiant exploration of the places where doing heavy time and being free overlap." That line gave me pause. I asked: "How can any free person compare their experience, no matter how traumatic, with the experience of imprisonment?" I then thought of the patients who come to me with severe post-traumatic stress symptoms.

Kathleen O’Shea’s use of her own story, an act of personal courage and generosity, is also a brilliant writing technique. Through it we see how circumstances of poverty and lack of education, sexism, racism, and abuse interact with oppressive values in totalitarian systems to generate a whole population of traumatized individuals. Unresolved trauma condemns the victim to imprisonment in a body charged with unbearable arousal and grief.

In the Fall 2000 edition of Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, Christine Schoefer writes that more than 90% of women in prison report that they suffered from physical, sexual, or emotional abuse as children and/or adults ("Cry Out: Women Behind Bars"). Kathleen O’Shea never calls our attention to those statistics. She doesn’t make apologies for the female position, nor does she call for action against the death penalty. She simply tells the stories. But readers will ask deeper questions about prison issues, and may find that prison conditions, especially death row conditions, have become a front-line human rights issue.

Karen Hawthorne, Ph.D., works as a psychotherapist and family counselor in Santa Ysabel, CA. She is an adjunct Professor of Integrative Psychology at CSPP, San Diego.

AHP PERSPECTIVE Feb/Mar 2001 Table of Contents

AHP Perspective Editorial Guidelines Advertising Information