Break the System: Criminalized Black Mothers and the Reproductive Politics of Abolition

by Susila Gurusami

Upends the “broken systems” myth and reveals how the law deliberately criminalizes and punishes Black women, inflicting lasting harm on Black communities in the process.
 
The United States has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, with Black Americans representing a disproportionate share of theimprisoned. Many view this statistic as evidence of a broken system. But sociologist Susila Gurusami argues that the carceral system that so disproportionately harms Black families is not broken at all. In fact, it works just as it was intended. Looking closely at the lives of formerly incarcerated Black mothers, Gurusami shows how state institutions―the criminal-legal, child welfare, and healthcare systems―keep Black mothers from their families, harming Black communities in the process. She also shows how Black women work towards conditions that seem impossible―and even utopian―as part of their everyday mothering labor, but find themselves criminalized for these same actions.
 
Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with formerly incarcerated Black women in South Los Angeles, Gurusami challenges dominant assumptions about mothering and criminal justice reform. Gurusami finds that criminalized Black women endure multigenerational political, social, and embodied assaults–what she calls “reproductive warfare”― and still, they build networks, practices, and theories of radical care that protect Black maternal life, legacies, and futures. With incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and system-impacted Black mothers at the forefront of the growing movement to abolish prisons and jails, Gurusami demonstrates how their everyday mothering work―what she calls “abolitionist motherwork”―is essential to imagining the end of incarceration and ultimately achieving it.
 
Written with a tender and honest voice, Break the System shares moving vignettes that underscore why we must break the system, rather than reform it, and why we must imagine a future that is radically different than the one we’re told we must accept or salvage.
 
 

218 pages, Paperback

Published June 8, 2026

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

To break the cycle we must break the system.

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s hard to read about everything these women are made to go through, but then imagine how difficult it must be to live it, and fight to rise above it. Gurusami outlines clearly how government systems put black women in impossible situations, then punish them for the choices they had to make. The hurt spans generation, the effects are felt for lifetimes. Reading this book sometimes put an ache so deep in me to think of the daily atrocities that are so normalized. But despite this, the book maintains hope. These resilient women still carry so much love in them. Gurusami maintains each woman’s dignity and personhood as she tells their stories in a system that tries to strip that away. This book is written with such care and nuance, and you can feel each woman’s voice through the page. ‘Break the System’ was incredibly powerful and eye opening, and something i think everyone who wants to create a better and kinder world should read.

[Ranita Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must-read, and not only for those interested in prison abolitionism or reproductive politics. it is incisive in its analyses and heartfelt in its prose. An essential book for organizers, students of abolitionism, sociology-adjacent students across substantive fields and disciplines, as well as the general reader interested in understanding carceral politics in the US writ large.