Article: Emotionally charged play about women lifers

[qwerty]

CORONA: The California Institution for Women shows a production based on their interviews.

12:20 AM PST on Sunday, March 12, 2006

By PAIGE AUSTIN / The Press-Enteprise

Sharlotte Spahr knew she had been in a series of abusive relationships.

"I was eight months pregnant, and my husband beat me so bad, I lost my baby," said Spahr, an inmate at the California Institution for Women in Corona. Spahr said she was forced to fight her husband off with a baseball bat and flee the state.

She soon found herself in another abusive marriage and was using drugs to anesthetize the pain, she said. It was the drugs that landed her in prison. She's due out in May, but she faces the prospect of returning to her violent marriage.

Sitting in a prison auditorium packed with about 200 other women Saturday, Spahr said she felt, for the first time, the seriousness of her situation -- the cycle, the violence, the flirtation with death.

Spahr and the other women watched an emotionally charged performance of a play based on the lives of several of the women in the Corona prison serving life sentences for killing their abusers.

"It scares me," Spahr whispered through tears and deep, shaky breaths. "Because I could be in here for life for killing my husband. I didn't realize until now how far it could go or how close I was."

Warren Doody's play, "Life Without Parole," is based on the work of Vanguard University sociology professor Elizabeth Leonard, who interviewed and researched the lives of CIW inmates involved in Convicted Women Against Abuse.

Full story: http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/s...2.38ccdb4.html

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[YapYap]

It loaded fine for me (didn't need to register) and yes the article is definitely worth it! Thanks for sharing it I hope battered women will get more understanding - and appropriate sentences - and hopefully this play will help achieving this. It's heartbreaking to read these stories and I can't imagine what it must be like to go through such hell...

[Jckkamman]

Is sharlotte sphar out of prison she is my sister