Mothers in Prison in England For Class Printout

I  found two great sites pertaining to mothers in prison. I will highlight the key points and then list the website below each section.


1.
*There are 14 women's prisons in England.

*There are 7 mother and baby units.

*Around 55% of women in prison have a child under 16, 33% a child under 5 and 20% are lone parents.

*The specialist medical services provided for the women include breast and cervical screening, family planning and sexual health services.

* Every woman who is known to be pregnant will be consistently medically assessed and monitored, just as in the community.

*There are currently seven Mother and Baby Units. 2 of them allow mothers to keep their babies with  up to the age of 9 months.  4 of them accommodate babies with their mothers up to the age of 18 months.

** Each application for admission is assessed on an individual basis by a multi-disciplinary-team, whose focus will be the best interests of the child.

*Children are allowed to visit their mothers in prison in the same way as other visitors. In some instances, prisoners are allowed extended, more relaxed visits with their children or can get permission to visit their children where they are living.

**If a friend, who would not normally qualify for travelling expenses from the Assisted Prisons Visits Unit, brings the children to the prisoner, then they would be able to have their travel expenses reimbursed.

http://www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/adviceandsupport/prison_life/femaleprisoners/

2. *Currently, there are over 80 places for mothers and babies in prisons across the UK

(This was a pdf that was 38 pages long but thought it may be useful to print out certain excerpts from pages 12-25 more most interesting) These are chapters on  pregnancy, mothers and baby units, and separation. The above excerpt is from the separation chapter).

http://maternityaction.org.uk/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/prisonsreport.pdf

Vanessa

According to HMPS, it is policy to facilitate a mother leaving prison with her child, if at all

possible, thereby avoiding any separation. For example, a woman serving a four year sentence

who enters prison with her baby can probably expect to be paroled when her baby

is 18 months old, if she meets the conditions for parole. However, under existing policies,

some mothers do have to be separated from their babies while in prison.

Mothers in Prison

Ironic- In my Politics of Reproduction class we are talking about FAS, narcostics during preganncy, smoking during pregnancy (more of the entries into motherhood leading to incarceration). I know that motherhood most definately goes far far beyond birth but just have everything we've studied about new mothers becoming incarcerated before/shortly after giving birth.

Unfortunately, the stereotype of mothers who are in prison are not ethnically white. However, depending on the drug  that a woman uses for instance women who do crack are more likely to be African American but women who do meth are more likely to be white. (Just discussed in class today).

I have very mixed feelings of mothers in prison. I think it's easy to pass judgement on a mother who is in prison without seeing a face or a their situation that led them to being convicted and being sentenced to prison.

Something to think about: since women are in prison are less than 2% for violent crimes and most are drug related, misuse of credit cards, fraud, etc. (mostly drug convictions I'm thinking of) what is the problem here? Maybe government funding/tax dollars should be spent on recovery/prevention programs/child care programs rather than tax dollars to women being incarcerated and the children suffering from having their mother absent during their life.

Looking forward to tomorrow and I think may be a heavy day if we're talking about motherhood while incarcerated. Something I think that will be extremely touchy and personal for the women incarcerated who are mothers (rightfully so). See you tomorrow :) !