In Reckoning with Restorative Justice, Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women who are incarcerated at the Women’s Community Correctional Center, the only women’s prison in the state of Hawai‘i. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses particularly on women’s participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program. Trapedo Sims argues that while the writing project served as a vital resource for the inside women, it also remained deeply embedded within carceral logics at the institutional, state, and federal levels. She foregrounds different aspects of these programs, such as the classroom spaces and the dynamics that emerged between performers and audiences in the Prison Monologues. Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai‘i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex.

Leanne Trapedo Sims is the Daniel J. Logan Assistant Professor of Peace and Justice at Knox College.

Abbreviations  ix
A Note on the Text  xi
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction: The American Gulag and Indigenous Incarceration in Hawai‘i  1
1. Pedagogy and Process  33
2. “Home”: Trauma and Desire  58
3. The Stage Away from the Page  79
4. Love Letters  112
5. Postrelease and Affective Writers  139
Epilogue: Palliative Praxis or Pathways to Transformation?  153
Appendix  165
Notes  167
Bibliography  197
Index  209