Karlene Faith

Karlene Faith (born 1938) is a leading Canadian writer, feminist, scholar, and human rights activist. She is a professor emerita at the Simon Fraser University School of Criminology.

Karlene Faith was born in Aylsham, Saskatchewan in 1938. She is the oldest of six children and her father was a United Church Minister. After moving to a small town in Montana near a jail, Faith often witnessed police brutality. While working at a local radio station as a record librarian, she was given air play to read teletype news on the Korean War, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and other important events.

At 30 years old, Faith had worked in the United States, Germany, France, and Eritrea studying music, going to school, teaching, and working with the U.S. Peace Corps. In 1970 she earned her anthropology degree with Highest Honors at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She received a Danforth Fellowship to study for four more years at this same university, earning her PhD in 1981. She has co-hosted the radio show "Criminal Justice on Trial," taught with Dr. Rafael Guzman at Soledad men's prison, and completed groundbreaking research at the California Institution for Women. She also played a large role in developing the Santa Cruz Women's Prison Project in 1972.

Karlene Faith "views violence against women and children as a universal social problem... she contends that these problems are socially learned and that the extent and distribution of them vary across different social groups and locations." Faith plays a large role in both global and local pressing social issues, and as a teacher, she is "deeply committed to providing her students with an exciting and liberating pedagogical experience."

She has written many books on women and their incarceration. Her first book Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement and Resistance was first published in 1993 through Press Gang and has been called "path breaking" because of its historical overview of draconian social control practices. It went on to win the VanCity Book Prize in 1994. A new edition of this book will be available through Seven Stories Press in July 2011. In 1997, Faith wrote Madonna: Bawdy & Soul. Later, in 2001, Northeastern University Press published Faith's book The Long Prison Journey of Leslie van Houten: Life Beyond the Cult.

Faith was the recipient of the dean of arts medal for research, teaching, and service focus from Simon Fraser University in 2002. In 2000 she received the International Helen prize for Humanitarian Works, and in 2001 she received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society for Criminology.