Community-Based Participatory Research: An Innovative Approach to Working with Women’s Prisons

This chapter, “Community Based-Participatory Research (CBPR)—An Innovative Approach to Working with Women’s Prisons,” introduces the book’s twin goals. First, the book provides readers with a guide to doing CBPR in women’s prisons through the example of WoW, demonstrating how researchers, incarcerated women, and prison staff and administrators can successfully work together. Second, the book provides readers with step-by-step guidance through our experiences of developing, designing, and implementing a peer mentoring initiative with the goal of inspirating other practitioners and academics to work within—rather than against—the criminal justice system. It reviews the project’s history and provides a concise chapter overview.