Enhancing Opportunity and Equity for Incarcerated Women: Exploring Mothering As Resilience

PURPOSE: We know that the more than two hundred thousand currently incarcerated women differ from their male counterparts in their offending behavior, service needs, and motivations for change. However, the majority of prevention, intervention, and reentry strategies are based on our understanding of incarcerated men and fail to emphasize incarcerated women’s resilience and strengths. In many ways, the dominant narrative is that incarcerated women - and especially incarcerated mothers - are selfish, that they made reckless decisions to endanger their children, ultimately depriving them of a mother. The purpose of this study is to explore how mothering can be reframed as a key facet of resilience and augment the promising gender-responsive and trauma-informed programs which have begun to disrupt the male-centric approach to women’s corrections.

METHODS: This project analyzes the voices of 113 incarcerated women in response to the question: “How can we better help women like you?” Women were randomly selected for recruitment at two state prisons in the southeastern US as part of a larger study evaluating the relationship between interpersonal victimization and behavioral health outcomes. The mean age of the sample was 40 and the majority (72%) identified as White. Responses to the open-ended prompt were recorded using brief, direct quotes, and qualitative data were coded by two coders. For this analysis, quotes which included references to mothering were examined, categorized, and coded thematically.

RESULTS: The complexities of mothering were a prominent theme in the data. Prior to their incarceration, women engaged in a variety of (legal and illegal) behaviors to protect and care for their children. Likewise, women identified being unable to access community-based domestic violence shelters and drug treatment with their children, which prevented them from making positive life changes. During custody, women stressed the profound need to create/expand opportunities for them to interact regularly with their children. They spoke about how their children’s health and well-being motivated and sustained them through the change process. Finally, women expressed anxiety about reentry, as few resources for women like them exist to help them thrive while regaining/maintaining custody of their children.

CONCLUSIONS: Incarcerated women with children spoke of the complicated ways their role as mothers contributed to their incarceration and was a source of strength within prison. Prior to prison, women heavily prioritized their children’s safety and shelter, even when that meant remaining with a violent partner, foregoing drug treatment, engaging in survival-type crime, or “taking charges” to keep a teenaged child out of the system. Women viewed their relationship with their children as a source of motivation and strength once incarcerated. We suggest reframing incarcerated women’s behavior as a function of survival under extremely challenging circumstances and we propose that mothering be incorporated into program development as a key facet of incarcerated women’s resilience. Gender-responsive and trauma-informed practices can be expanded to actively incorporate the mothering status, create opportunities for positive interaction with children, and develop survival and coping strategies which consider the difficulties of mothering upon release.