Love is Not Enough: Mothering and Desistance After Incarceration
Article notes[1]
This edition of The Scholar & Feminist Online focuses on the
many thousands of American children with incarcerated parents. While
individual children may have specific caretaking needs, research and
therapeutic conclusions consistently hold that parent-child separation
due to incarceration can have myriad negative consequences from school
performance to emotional health (Bocknek, Sanderson & Britner
2009; Dallaire, 2007; Miller, 2006; Poehlmann, 2005; Vacca, 2008).
I worked for almost six years at the Women's Prison Association (WPA)
in New York City. My job involved the collection of data about the
clients served at WPA: who they were, what services staff members
provided, and how did those services affect women's lives. In collecting this data
and talking with the clients, I found that a large number of these
women spoke about wanting to be with
their children upon reentry into the community, and that women who had been
released spoke about wanting to reunify with their children. While a
substantial body of research on people leaving incarceration has focused
on the effects of employment, education, and substance abuse on
subsequent criminal behavior, there has been limited research on the
effects of reunification with children on desistance behavior, the
stopping of criminal activity. Anecdotally, of course, the women
at WPA often spoke of wanting to get jobs, to further their education,
to find stable housing, and to achieve sobriety. The importance of
relationships with children, however, was a particularly passionate
refrain.
Aside from women's individual stories, why do incarcerated and
formerly incarcerated mothers matter on a national scale, if the vast
majority of the people in prison are male? Although American
imprisonment rates in general are leveling out, women make up an
increasing percentage of our incarcerated population: the national rate
of female incarceration grew by 757% between 1977 and 2004, nearly two
times the 388% increase for men (Frost, 2006). In addition, women's
incarceration and successful reentry matter for two main reasons: first,
women in prison are far more likely than similarly situated men to have
been the caretakers of children before their incarceration (Mumola,
2008). This means that the incarceration of women has more widespread
effects on families and communities than the incarceration of men.
Second, women's reentry is often more difficult because they
enter prison facing more challenges than their male counterparts.
Specifically, we know from a growing body of literature that women
involved in the criminal justice system, compared to their male
counterparts, generally have lower educational achievement (Greenfeld &
Snell, 1999; Johnson & Waldfogel, 2002), less work experience and fewer
job skills (Greenfeld & Snell, 1999; Harlow, 2003); more severe and
qualitatively different substance abuse (Belknap, 2003; Johnson &
Waldfogel, 2002; Mumola, 1999); more physical (Acoca, 1998; Messina &
Grella, 2006), and mental health problems (James & Glaze, 2006); and
more extensive histories of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, in
both childhood and adulthood (Belknap, 2001; Bloom, Owen & Covington,
2004; Covington, 2002; Johnson & Waldfogel, 2002; Messina & Grella,
2006; O'Brien, 2002; Owen, 1998). Given these myriad challenges,
formerly incarcerated women often find it more difficult than their male
counterparts to establish themselves in the community after prison.
Extensive research in the field of criminology has shown that bonds to
pro-social institutions, such as schools, jobs, churches, and families,
are protective against criminal behavior. Given women's weaker bonds to
some of these types of institutions, their prospects for recidivism in
reentry are particularly high.
Parents' experiences of reunification with children after
incarceration vary quite a bit. For the most part, when men are
incarcerated, children are left in the care of their mothers. The
practicalities of reunification for these men are usually limited to
interpersonal negotiations, although fathers no longer romantically
involved with the mothers of their children often struggle with child
support payments upon their release. When a mother is incarcerated, on
the other hand, children are most often not in the care of their
fathers. If children have nowhere to go when their mother is arrested,
they might become a part of the foster care system, where they will live
in a group home or in the care of non-kin families. Although the goal
of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), reauthorized in 1997, was
to reduce the amount of time children languished in foster care, an
unfortunate loophole means that incarcerated mothers' legal rights to
their children are often terminated. As a result, those children may be
available for adoption by others. This happens despite the fact that
visits are difficult or impossible due to incarceration, rather than the
lack of care assumed by the ASFA guidelines. On the other hand, if
children are in the care of a friend or family member, they may still be
legally retained by an incarcerated mother, and, depending on the
mother's relationship with the caretaker, the children may be returned
to her at any time after incarceration, regardless of her income,
housing, or health (or lack thereof).
Given the combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence
pointing toward the importance of mothers' relationships with their
children to desistance, I embarked on a study to further solidify this
relationship. For my study, Going Straight for her Children? Women's
Desistance After Incarceration (2007), I interviewed 100 formerly
incarcerated mothers about how their relationships with their children
kept them away from criminal behavior. 75% of the respondents had not
reunified with their children, and within that group, about 60% were
seeking reunification. These women spoke not only about wanting to be
with their children, but also about the importance of these children to
their own desistance:
Lynn[2]:
I want to get [my son] back! I want to be with
my kids, I love my kids. Even though I messed up, I'm still, I try to do
my best for them, you know, 'cause I'm not messing up today, I'm doing
much better than I was. It's just me being in the shelters, making it
kind of hard, you know, 'cause I don't have nowhere else for them to
go.
What follows is a discussion of the qualitative findings of this
study as they relate to the role of children in mothers' desistance, and
a set of policy recommendations related to the findings.
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