Taking the Rap: Women Doing Time for Society's Crime

Ann Hansen

may 2018 · Between the Lines

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“Ann Hansen’s memoir combines a riveting story with a brilliant exposé of the inner workings of the prison industrial complex. Charged with empathy, courage, and an anarchist passion for justice, Taking the Rap is a must-read for scholars, activists, and troublemakers.”

–Allan Antliff, director of the Anarchist Archive, University of Victoria

When Ann Hansen was arrested in 1983 along with the four other members of the radical anarchist group known as the Squamish Five, her long-time commitment to prison abolition suddenly became much more personal. Now, she could see firsthand the brutal effects of imprisonment on real women’s lives.

During more than thirty years in prison and on parole, the bonds and experiences Hansen shared with other imprisoned women only strengthened her resolve to fight the prison industrial complex. In Taking the Rap, she shares gripping stories of women caught in a system that treats them as disposable-poor women, racialized women, and Indigenous women, whose stories are both heartbreaking and enraging. Often serving time for minor offences due to mental health issues, abuse, and poverty, women prisoners are offered up as scapegoats by a society keen to find someone to punish for the problems we all have created.

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Ann Hansen served seven years of a life sentence in federal prisons. She is a prison abolition activist and author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla.