SCK and AMM were involved in data collection and provided substantive revisions to all parts of the paper. 13) Retrieved from. She was first arrested at age 12 for assaulting a government official a truancy officer and was incarcerated three times as a juvenile and five times as an adult for drug crimes, theft, and assault which she indicated stemmed from childhood abuse. The mean sentence length was 5.9years (SD=7.2years), with a range of 90days to 38years. Thompson, P. J., & Harm, N. J. 
Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 55(1), 120. She said, Never enough shelters for women. She drove her boyfriend and their infant child to a store; her boyfriend entered the store alone, then robbed and murdered the employees. Stark, E. (2007). Overall, 306 women were randomly selected for recruitment and 187 women joined the study, representing a 61% response rate. Bronson, J., & Carson, E. A. 115140). Race, Incarceration, and Motherhood. Mothers also discussed the lack of family services during custody and their distress at losing both the physical and emotional connections with their children due to family separation and the general lack of available comprehensive visitation programs. Role strain and incarcerated mothers. For example, participant 7, a White mother, was serving 13months for a probation violation on her original charge of possession of a controlled substance without a prescription. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. By using this website, you agree to our The current analysis was conducted by two of the primary study researchers; together these researchers conducted the majority of the 187 interviews. 
Women who face incarceration experience stigma and bias from a variety of criminal justice actors (e.g., law enforcement, judges, lawyers, and juries; e.g., Tetlow, 2009). Over five million children in the United States have experienced the incarceration of a parent. She had been first arrested at age 15 for fighting on school grounds. Women & Criminal Justice, 28(1), 6380. (2011). Predicting the prison misconducts of women offenders: The importance of gender-responsive needs. Washington, D. C.: National Conference of State Legislatures. [We need to] have better support for women with children while they are getting help, like childcare. These women are often described by criminal justice stakeholders as having chosen drug use, relationships, or crime instead of choosing their children (Aiello, 2013). They were eager to participate in parenting programs designed to increase mother-child connection and facilitate visits and they identified the mothering role as a key mechanism of change in substance use disorder treatment programs. The growth of incarceration in the United States: Exploring causes and consequences. These concerns will likely be amplified in the future as prisons specialize and focus all programming on one issue (e.g., mental health or substance abuse), leading more mothers to transfer between facilities to access services and programs. Chapter Little is known about how incarcerated mothers make meaning of their parenting role and relationship with their children prior to incarceration and during custody. (2018). (2009). Likewise, the domestic violence sheltering system is perpetually under-resourced, turning away thousands of requests for help across the nation every day (National Network to End Domestic Violence, 2016). Studies that focus on incarcerated mothers suggest that mothers report higher rates of child maltreatment when compared to incarcerated fathers (Allen, Flaherty, & Ely, 2010; Casey-Acevedo, Bakken, & Karle, 2004) and mothers are far more likely than men to experience domestic violence and to come to prison through intimate partner entanglements (e.g., Barlow, 2016; Richie, 2001). Some incarcerated mothers described how pregnancy and motherhood complicates existing troubling relationships with abusive intimate partners, creating a nearly inescapable cycle of violence (e.g., DeHart, 2008; Fuentes, 2014). First, the current study did have mothering as an eligibility criterion for participation; women were randomly selected for participation from the census at three state-level prisons. The prison environment offers few opportunities to foster mother-child connection; most mothers never receive even one visit from their children. Parental rights of incarcerated mothers with children in foster care: A policy vacuum. Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (P.L. Charmaz, C. (2006). Web00:00 / 00:00. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 28(1), 85104 https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12058. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Corrections. For example, participant 9, a Black mother, stated, I had to be aggressive in the streets to take care of my kids. Each participant was interviewed by a member of the research team who was a social worker with clinical interviewing experience. 
Protection and care, for some mothers, extended beyond providing food and shelter, and included ensuring that children were physically safe in their environments. mothers of incarcerated share their pain. The Gendered Pathways Perspective (GPP) emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century as a framework for understanding womens intersection with both crime and the criminal justice system (e.g., Daly, 1992; Owen, 1998; Richie, 2018). Overlooked: Women and jails in an era of reform. Few prison nursery programs are available to incarcerated mothers nationally only eight states have any prison nursery program, often run out of only one womens prison (Carlson, 2018). Belknap, J., Lynch, S., & DeHart, D. (2016). According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, nearly 66,000 mothers were parenting 150,000 children from their prison cells in 2007, and thats not even counting women in county jails. Lynch, S. M., Dehart, D. D., Belknap, J., & Green, B. L. (2012). Wattanaporn, K. A., & Holtfreter, K. (2014). We chose not to report participant age to ensure anonymity for each mother. Washington, D.C.: USDOJ, National Institute of Corrections. Teather, S., Evans, L., & Sims, M. (1997). Justice Quarterly, 34, 517541. When surveyed, few correctional administrators are familiar with more intensive parenting programs or prison nurseries (Campbell & Carlson, 2012). Tripodi, S. J., Mennicke, A. M., McCarter, S. A., & Ropes, K. (2017). After he threatened to harm her children, she borrowed a gun from a neighbor and tried to kill him. Weare, S. (2013). Imprisoned womens maternal experiences before and during confinement and their postrelease expectations. Visiting Mom: A pilot evaluation of a prison-based visiting program serving incarcerated mothers and their minor children. Consensus was achieved about both the codes and the themes they represented. Women underscored how their identities as mothers could be used to catalyze their own change processes. It is time to challenge the inertia of a criminal justice system created by men for men based on the understanding of the needs of men which has functioned largely unchanged for a century. On average, the 41 mothers in the sample were 38years old (SD=10.9; range: 2363) and self-identified as White (67%), Black (25%), and Native American (8%). Incarcerated mothers, therefore, are subjected to additional layers of scrutiny and judgment; they are framed not simply as criminals or deviants, but as selfish, thoughtless women who made reckless decisions which did not preference their children or honor their duty as mothers (Allen et al., 2010; Berry & Eigneberg, 2003; Chesney-Lind, 2017; Moe & Ferraro, 2006). Include any more information that will help us locate the issue and fix it faster for you. Incarcerated mothers are far more likely than fathers to be the sole or custodial parent, therefore they risk having their parental rights terminated due to limitations on how long children can stay in foster care before they are freed for adoption (Adoption and Safe Families Act of, 1997). Kauffman, K. (2001, February). If you aren't able to contact your children, there are some ways to gain peace and improve your outlook. Analyses were conducted by two independent coders, each of whom interviewed women as part of the primary study. We'll do our best to fix them. This is most powerfully illustrated in our work comparing individual states incarceration rates to other countries.See also the underlying data. Unfortunately, there is emerging evidence to suggest that the tension between rehabilitation (in the form of gender-responsive and trauma-informed programs) and punishment (the penal paradigm) may not be able to be reconciled in locked spaces (e.g., Aiello, 2013; Belknap, Lynch, & DeHart, 2016). Prisoners in 2017 (NCJ 252156). I just want to be a better parent to my kids. She was serving 3 years for larceny and drug possession and she had a long history of arrests and incarcerations related to drug addiction. Interviews were conducted in a large common space like a visitation room or classroom; correctional officers were not present for interviews. Punishment & Society, 20, 351374 https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474517697295. Wolff, N., Shi, J., & Siegel, J. Feminist Criminology, 1, 4871. Finally, mothers suggested that capitalizing on the mothering role might be a potent mechanism for change, especially as related to substance use disorder treatment. Children visiting mothers in prison: The effects on mothers' behaviour and disciplinary adjustment. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 45(1), 830 https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854817736083. Women of reproductive age may experience pregnancy and mothering in a correctional environment designed for men. For children whose mothers are currently in jail or prison, Mothers Day is likely to be marked by absence, powerlessness, and pain. Further, the mothering identity is rarely incorporated into other in-prison intervention programming (e.g., substance use disorder treatment or cognitive behavioral therapy-based programs designed to decrease criminal thinking) or explored as a meaningful catalyst to spark incarcerated womens change process (e.g., Jbara, 2012; Luke, 2002). Chesney-Lind, M. (2017). In cases where no prison nursery program is available, women who give birth during incarceration are separated from their newborn within 24 to 72h (The Rebecca Project for Human Rights, 2010). Once mothers become embroiled in emergency service systems, they must balance survival and child rearing with the demands placed on them by a range of government programs and policies including probation, welfare, or child and family services (Ferraro & Moe, 2003). Kennedy, S. C., Tripodi, S. J., Pettus-Davis, C., & Ayers, J. They just dont know how lucky they are. . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Help parents understand that addiction is a family B., & Tuerk, E. H. (2006). Behind every woman in prison is a man: Incarcerated womens perceptions of how we can better help them in the context of interpersonal victimization. The mothers in our sample wanted family counseling, psychological help, and emotional support both for themselves and their children. ), Imprisoning America: The social effects of mass incarceration (pp. He said he will always be happy with who he is from now on, no matter the mistakes he has made. The man who killed a Cattaraugus County woman more than 20 years ago is set to walk free from prison Wednesday, March 29th. Finally, incarcerated mothers discussions of motherhood and mothering were synthesized and presented in dominant themes. Never enough transitional homes for women and their kidsIn [my town] theres a domestic violence shelter but I could only bring the baby. Search and discover articles on DeepDyve, PubMed, and Google Scholar, Organize articles with folders and bookmarks, Collaborate on and share articles and folders. Correspondence to Kennedy, S. C., & Mennicke, A. M. (2018). (2005b). The interviewer recorded her answer using brief, direct quotes, writing down the participants words exactly as they were spoken. 
Mothering emerged as a theme at all three prisons and transcended variations in age, racial and ethnic identity, current charges, and sentence length. Mothers who had tried time and again to access community resources to escape domestic violence or to enroll in substance use disorder treatment were angry that help had not been accessible. For some mothers, engaging in nonviolent crime like theft or fraud was perceived as a reasonable vehicle to ensure the survival of their children without directly harming other people (Ferraro & Moe, 2003). Moe, A. M., & Ferraro, K. J. 
Scientists have studied the long-term effects of We incarcerate to set free: Negotiating punishment and rehabilitation in jail. The correctional environment is designed to control all aspects of the lives of incarcerated individuals incarcerated mothers note how the prison milieu limits their decision-making power as mothers and stymies their ability to create safety and a home-like environment for themselves and their children (Aiello, 2013, 2016; Luther & Gregson, 2011). Check all that apply - Please note that only the first page is available if you have not selected a reading option after clicking "Read Article". Despite her own experiences of trauma, this participant and many others viewed their children as a source of strength and conceptualized their care and worry about their children as intrinsically motivating. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice. All procedures were approved by the Florida State University and the University of Connecticut, and the Department of Corrections Human Subjects Review Boards in Florida and North Carolina. It eats away at me. Neither the primary study nor the current secondary data analysis were funded. New York: Routledge. Some people have that support and they take it for granted. MATCH for this. statement and DeHart, D. D. (2009). Incarcerated women are serving prison sentences as punishment for their crimes; the loss of physical contact with and parental rights to their children should not be part of that punishment. Women & Criminal Justice, 21, 198224. The Role of Stressful Life Events and Cultural Factors on Criminal Thinking Among African American Women Involved in the Criminal Justice System. She spoke of waiting until he fell asleep and sitting in the darkness with the gun aimed at his head. In this vein, participant 11, a Native American mother, talked about how she had taken charges for a 13-year-old son to keep him out of the system. Maggie Luna, a single parent whose first prison term began in 2011 after she was convicted of writing bad checks, has lost custody of her three children. 
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mothers of incarcerated share their pain