Too Much Time is a groundbreaking documentary survey of the experience of women in prison by Jane Evelyn Atwood. Since 1980, the numbers of women in US prisons have increased tenfold. Similar statistics apply to the nine other countries around the world whose prison system Atwood has succeeded in penetrating by taking photographs, interviewing women prisoners and their guards, and gathering testimony.
In 1989, Atwood photographed women in prison for a ten-year-long photography study. She became inspired
to accomplish this project after French prisons first refused her access to the men's quarters because she
was a woman. She obtained access to more than 40 prisons, including the toughest prisons in Eastern and
Western Europe and in the United States, as well as death row. Too Much Time provides the readers with an exclusive insight on the treatment of inmates in a collection of 150 black and white photographs she took while meeting with prisoners who had agreed to be published in her book. Written between the pictures are the women's stories, presented in Tony Parker's lengthy interview style.
The momentous result is a raw and moving account in both words and pictures of society's attitude to women, crime and incarceration. The book raises provocative and important questions about the relative treatment of men and women in prison and about the links between women's crimes and male violence. Kathy Boudin, a teacher and writer imprisoned since 1981, explains that; As women in prison, we tell stories to each other - sitting in our cells, walking in the prison yard, in parenting groups - but we urgently need our stories to be heard beyond the walls and the razor wire. This book takes the reader into the lives of women in prison as they reflect on personal responsibility and social realities, guilt and reparation, change, loss and survival. It is precisely in the power of prisoners; voices that the complex truth emerges.