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 :) !
I also have mixed feelings about mothers in prison. It is so easy to pass judgment and say that putting their children in danger is an inexcusable offense; however, I doubt that endangering their children was the intention of any of these mothers and was instead an unfortunate side effect of their behavior. This makes determining which mothers "deserve" to have parental rights and which do not a very difficult task.
ReplyDelete