Emerging from a year that saw the hanging of Saddam Hussein, the continued detainment of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay, and journalists not only being killed in Iraq but also imprisoned in America, there's arguably no better occasion to revisit enduring questions of crime and punishment: Why do we harm? Why, how and whom do we punish?

In her mesmerizing sixth novel, "The Big Girls," Hawai'i-born Susanna Moore extends these queries specifically to the reasons women injure, and how we each go about castigating ourselves, both in and out of prison.

Sloatsburg Correctional Institution, a former sanitarium on the Hudson River's west bank in New York state, is the novel's first character and main setting, a dangerously underfinanced women's prison where everyone inside conceals skeletons. Among the medical staff is a doctor who was once suspended for selling human blood, another who left for Guantanamo to advise the government on torture, and another who entertains cruel fantasies upon hearing a patient's warped confessions. A dour story evolves through four first-person narratives, offering an indictment of our prison system while also investigating humanity's seemingly effortless capability for destruction.

While Moore's early novels, including her first, "My Old Sweetheart," and later "The Whiteness of Bones," drew heavily on her childhood in the Islands, she's better known for raw, urban stories such as "In the Cut," adapted into a film starring Meg Ryan. However, references to Moore's roots continue to echo through her work. Even here, Dr. Louise Forrest, the prison's chief psychiatrist and the novel's primary narrator, carries the subtle scars of island ancestors alongside an intriguing depiction of personal betrayals.

Louise's mother was "a sugar heiress from Honolulu ... who knew that my father had married her for her money," and repeating the pattern, Louise wed Rafael, who married her for money he imagined she had. Suffering after the birth of her first child and subsequent divorce, she curbed her pain by checking into a psychiatric clinic, a connection that aids and complicates work with her suicidal patient, Helen Nash.

Helen, the book's second narrator, not only suffers from what appears to be schizophrenia but also has been convicted of killing her children. Despite her condemnable actions, her narrative is captivating in its intimate revelations and tender actions, such as her denial of food as self-punishment in lieu of the death penalty. Moore continually reminds us that Helen is white, ostensibly to reveal assumptions about race, crime and prison, which begin with Louise's own stereotypical observation of the absence of guardhouses along the river upon her first visit to the prison: "Do they think that black women can't swim?"

Through Helen's perspective, it unfolds that on the inside what matters most is not race, but the nature of one's crime and the absence or presence of fellow inmates' protection.

Two more narrators are folded in at good pace, expanding the novel's panorama. Capt. Henry "Ike" Bradshaw, a corrections officer whose wife shot him and who falls in love with Louise, provides a vulnerable yet cynical male perspective. Angie Mills, a cough-syrup-numbed Hollywood actress who is dating Rafael, lends simplistic objectivity while also deepening the novel's exploration of the interior lives of those who must maintain exceptional external facades.

Each narrator occupies a unique position but each also is part of and witness to the cycle of violence, often stemming from abuse. As Louise says to Helen: "Everything that you've done has come from someplace."

Moore spins an impressive, well-realized collection of voices and experiences, allowing each to be considered and almost clinically analyzed. Yet it's Louise's compassion for the inmates that humanizes them, and thus so does the novel itself, asking us to imagine if we, too, are capable of doing what they've done, and then being locked up for life. Likewise, when Moore folds in facets of the history of imprisonment and women's crimes, such as women's incarceration "for the crime of lascivious carriage until the late sixties, when it was at last ruled unconstitutional," and the previous application of hospitalization and treatment for perpetrators of maternal filicide, she subtly prods us to question why "the public was more forgiving of these women than they are now."

Just as Louise is "in the curious position of attempting to restore (Helen) to her right mind so that the state can kill her with a clear conscience," the reader is nearly charged with ascertaining the mental health and judging the actions of every character. In the face of exploitation and subjugation, what comprises a woman's recourse? The women in prison, as Ike puts it, generally "do not have much to offer," and as Helen describes, "the people in my life who hurt me the most are the people who told me they loved me the most."

Within the pages of Moore's novel, imprisonment becomes a subconscious means of escaping lives fraught with violence, a chance outcome of everyone's attempt to do whatever we can just so we will no longer feel afraid.

Christine Thomas' reviews can be accessed at www.literarylotus.com.