Born in 1938 in Aylsham, Saskatchewan, Karlene Faith co-founded the revolutionary Santa Cruz Women's Prison Project in 1972. She earned her Ph.D in the History of Consciousness at the University of California and came to B.C. in 1982. She died in 2017.

An advocacy worker with women in prison and an SFU criminologist, she gathered information firsthand for Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement and Resistance (Press Gang Publishers, 1993) which won the VanCity Women's Book Prize in 1994.

"Between the 15th and 18th centuries," she wrote, "untold numbers of women were executed for copulating with the Devil. Fear of undisciplined female sexuality has resulted in increasing social control, from the crime of prostitution, to the Victorian ideology of the nuclear family and the pre-menstrual syndrome of the 20th century." She concludes that most women criminals started out as victims of violence. When Press Gang Publishers went into limbo, so did the book, until it was republished in a new edition, with a new preface, by Seven Stories Press in New York, in 2011.

Karlene Faith's Madonna: Bawdy & Soul (University of Toronto Press, 1997) is a celebration and critical analysis of the pop culture icon, sex symbol and shrewd career woman from a feminist perspective. The study includes listings of songs, videos, tours, films, stage roles and internet sites. In The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten: Life Beyond the Cult (Northeastern University Press, 2001), Faith defends Leslie Van Houten, possibly the least guilty and most rehabilitated of the three girls involved in Charles Manson's two-day murder spree known as "Helter Skelter". Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel were sentenced to death for their roles in the seven killings. Faith met Van Houten in 1972, the year in which the Manson girls' death sentences were commuted. The warden at the California Institute for Women had asked Faith to expand her teaching duties to include the "Manson girls", who were being housed in a separate unit designed for those awaiting execution. Since the California Supreme Court had abolished the death penalty, the three young women faced life imprisonment. The warden thought they should have the opportunity to take classes like the rest of the prison population. Faith describes Van Houten's descent from the middle class to Manson's Family, finally suggesting that it is time for Van Houten to be paroled.

BOOKS:

Soledad: University of the Poor (Science & Behaviour Books, 1975)

Toward New Horizons for Women in Distance Education (Routledge, 1988)

Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement & Resistance (Press Gang, 1993 / reprinted by Seven Stories Press in New York, 2011)

Seeking Shelter: A State of Battered Women, co-written with Dawn Currie (Collective Press, 1993)

Madonna: Bawdy & Soul (University of Toronto Press, 1997)

The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten: Life Beyond the Cult (Northeastern University Press, 2001)

13 Women: Parables from Prison (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), with Anne Near

[BCBW 2017] "Women" "Law" "VanCity"