In autumn 1977, Jack Lueders-Booth began teaching photography to inmates at MCI Framingham, a women's prison.
 
During his decade there, he made Polaroid images in collaboration with the women. This book presents 32 alongside oral histories he recorded at the time.
 
Founded in 1878, MCI Framingham originally housed women imprisoned for giving birth outside marriage—the offence associated with Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter. Later, women were incarcerated for theft, organised prostitution, drug use and trafficking, armed robbery, child abuse and murder. Many had been convicted of helping husbands or boyfriends commit crimes.
 
By the mid-1970s, the institution was part of an ongoing normalisation experiment aimed at reducing imprisonment's psychological consequences. In Lueders-Booth's photographs, neither prisoners nor guards wear uniforms. Cells resemble bedrooms and can be furnished and decorated within guidelines. Male inmates were introduced, comprising twenty per cent of the communal population. Many of the photographed women had dependent children cared for by relatives or court-appointed foster parents, who could visit accompanied by an adult.
 
"My time there was supposed to end in 1979, but by then I had begun photographing these women, and what started at their request had come to occupy me personally and completely. I wanted to continue, and did, remaining at MCI Framingham for another seven years, photographing while tutoring inmates with an ongoing interest in photography." —Jack Lueders-Booth
 
Anonymous spoken accounts and poems from the women accompany the images.