Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes : Women Doing Time

MAGGOTS IN MY SWEET POTATOES: Women Doing Time is an in-depth and illuminating look at the lives of incarcerated women. Photojournalist Susan Madden Lankford thought-provokingly explores the kaleidoscope of alienation, personal despair, desperation, and fragile hopes of women caught up in the state's zeal for incarceration. Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time is the product of more than two years of photographing and interviewing inmates and correctional staff at a more-or-less typical women's jail in the United States. Her flesh- and-blood images of life behind the concrete and steel facilities that house these women present us with a cogent portrait of diffused lives, and a reflective glimpse of emotional and physical institutionalization. We hear not only the frank and graphic voices of both the jailed and the jailers, but also from rehabilitation counselors, attorneys, judges, medical professionals and psychiatrists. Their experiences and insights into the fastest growing segment of the U.S. prison population give new meaning to the slogan No Child Left Behind.

Susan Madden Lankford, photographer and author of MAGGOTS IN MY SWEET POTATOES: Women Doing Time, has attended Ansel Adams' prestigious workshops followed by studies under a number of photography legends. Her photojournalistic journey produced this first of three books, to be followed by DOWNTOWN U.S.A., probing the life of the homeless, and BORN, NOT RAISED: Kids at Risk, chronicling youngsters going through the juvenile justice system. Lankford grew up in the Midwest, holds a BS degree from the University of Nebraska, and lives in San Diego, California