Haney2013 PDF

Motherhood as Punishment: The Case of Parenting in Prison
Author(s): Lynne Haney

Source: Signs, Vol. 39, No. 1, Women, Gender, and Prison: National and Global Perspectives
(Autumn 2013), pp. 105-130
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670815 .
Accessed: 08/11/2013 13:50
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Lynne Haney
Motherhood as Punishment: The Case of Parenting in Prison
I t has been nearly thirty years since the United States began its social and
political experiment of mass incarceration. In that time, the US penal
system has reached a size unknown in other times and places: it now
incarcerates over 2 million citizens in prison and jail, while placing another
5 million under correctional supervision through parole, probation, and
community programs ðBureau of Justice Statistics 2010Þ. The system is
quite literally bursting at the seams—with many states operating at far
over capacity, often amid legal orders to reduce overcrowding and im-
prove prison conditions. Yet the old solutions to such legal mandates are
meeting new economic realities; the reflex to simply build more prisons is
butting up against state and local budget crises. As a result, federal and
state officials have been forced to consider new approaches to the carceral
problem: from the Republican-backed Second Chance Act to the Webb
National Criminal Justice Commission to reform proposals of the conser-
vative group Right on Crime. At the local level, alternatives have prolifer-
ated even more rapidly, with many officials contemplating penal reforms
that were unthinkable only a few years ago.
Interestingly, many of these proposed reforms target female prisoners. In
the past decade, women’s incarceration rates increased more rapidly than
men’s. Although women make up roughly 7 percent of state and federal
prisoners, their numbers increased by 650 percent since 1980, as com-
pared to men’s 300 percent increase ðWalmsley 2009Þ. Most women are
doing time for drug-related offenses and property crimes; about 10 per-
cent are convicted of violent offenses.1 This is partly why penal officials look
Many thanks to all the colleagues and friends who offered insightful comments on the
ideas in this article, including Andras Tapolcai, John Pratt, Maximo Sozzo, Suzanne Kraus-
man, Sonja Snaken, David Garland, Jim Jacobs, Michael Burawoy, Ruth Horowitz, Jill
McCorkel, Nina Eliasoph, Rickie Solinger, and Ann Orloff. I am especially grateful to mem-
bers of the NYU Law School’s Criminal Law Group for their brilliant comments on a draft
of this article and for the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice for pro-
viding the intellectual space and resources for me to think through the analysis.
1
In this way, the rise in women’s incarceration has more to do with changes in sentencing
laws than with an increase in women’s offending per se. Women were hit particularly hard by
mandatory minimum sentences and fixed sentencing guidelines that excluded information
about offenders’ contexts and backgrounds. For insightful analyses of the gendered nature of
sentencing trends, see Kruttschnitt and Gartner ð2005Þ and Kruttschnitt ð2010Þ.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2013, vol. 39, no. 1]
© 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2013/3901-0005$10.00

106 y Haney
to them as subjects of reform—although stigmatized for nonnormative

gender behavior, women are constructed as less risky to decarcerate ðSudbury
2005Þ.
This is precisely what has happened in California, the state that impris-
ons over 10 percent of all US female inmates. It is also the state under the
most pressure to reform its penal system—a pressure that came most re-
cently from the US Supreme Court, which ordered California to reduce its
prison population by over thirty thousand inmates by 2013. In response,
officials have proposed all kinds of reforms: from moving inmates in state
prison to local jails, to releasing those who are “primary caregivers” to GPS-
monitored home detention, to creating a network of low-security facilities
for women called Female Rehabilitative Community Correction Centers
ðCURB 2010Þ. In fact, California has already introduced risk assessment
formulas to gauge which inmates are good candidates for early release
programs—and simply being a woman gets an inmate categorized on the
less risky end of the continuum.
In many respects, this is a moment that critics of mass imprisonment
thought would never come: a time when our ideas about alternatives to the
carceral state might be taken seriously. But critical scholars need to proceed
with caution here. More precisely, we first need to take those alternatives
seriously ourselves—separating myth from reality and interrogating our
own assumptions about what promising alternatives to mass incarceration
would look like. Long before the recent round of mass incarceration, so-
ciologist Stanley Cohen ð1985Þ warned that systems of control can expand
as they become decentralized and diffuse. This insight becomes all the
more prescient now as prison officials contemplate new community-based
correctional programs. As those same officials institute everything from
“gender-responsive” corrections to gender preferences in risk assessment to
gender-specific community corrections, we need to think seriously about
how penal reforms can quickly become symptoms of gendered and racial-
ized injustices ðChandler 2010Þ. Without serious analysis, we may end up
decarcerating in the way we deinstitutionalized mental hospitals in the
1970s: carelessly and irresponsibly.
This article offers such an analysis through a case study of one area of
alternative punishment: prisons designed for female offenders and their
children. In recent years, this old form of punishment, once the norm in
early twentieth-century women’s reformatories, has been given new life
ðFreedman 1981; Craig 2009Þ. In part, this resurgence was the work of
feminist lawyers trying to deal with one of the most intractable problems
of mass incarceration—what to do with the millions of children with in-

S I G N S Autumn 2013 y 107
carcerated parents ðBarry 1989Þ. Since research shows that parental sep-
aration harms both parent and child, many assumed that the alternative
would be to keep their bond intact. Yet we know very little about what
parental practices in prison actually look like. Based on three years of eth-
nographic research in a mother/child prison, I provide a sketch of what
it means to parent inside the penal state. What is the experience of care
work when done in prison? What meanings become attached to mother-
ing? Here I argue that the realities of parenting in prison ended up con-
flating motherhood, power, and punishment. Mother/child prisons were
characterized by a collision of logics, where the institutional realities of
punishment met the imperatives of care work. And the former were so strong
that they ended up prevailing over the latter, turning motherhood into a
technique of control and a means to a punitive end.
Given the powerful pull of the penal state, this outcome may not be
entirely surprising. Yet the actual mechanisms through which punishment
prevailed are quite revealing—both for feminist understandings of pun-
ishment and for a politics of penal reform. The institutional practices of
this mother/child prison conflated motherhood and punishment in ways
that reflected dominant ideas about gender, race, and class. These prac-
tices not only reinforced the assumption that women are responsible for
caretaking, but they replicated the cultural control of poor mothers. First,
they mimicked a culture that idealizes the mothering of some women while
thoroughly devaluing the parenting of others. Second, they reinscribed a
cultural dichotomy that privatizes some women’s mothering while subject-
ing the caretaking of others to near-constant public scrutiny. And, finally,
they mirrored cultural norms that regulate poor women through their chil-
dren and pit women’s needs against those of their children ðRoberts 2002;
Solinger 2005; Flavin 2009Þ. In doing so, these penal practices highlighted
the cultural contradictions of motherhood—and the inequities and injus-
tices accompanying them ðHays 1996Þ.
In what follows, I analyze how what began as a promising alternative to
punishment morphed into its own form of power and control. I begin with
a discussion of work on the reproductive politics of mass incarceration and
analyses of how penal power has been enacted through separation and
denial. I then briefly trace the emergence of mother/child penal programs
as alternatives to such separation. This is followed by an analysis of what
this alternative looked like when implemented in one institutional space
and how it ended up undermining, subsuming, and punishing mother-
hood, often in quite contradictory ways. Although most of my analysis is
devoted to how motherhood was conceptualized and practiced in prison, I

108 y Haney
conclude with some ideas about why it became a form of control, suggesting
that the master status of the “prisoner” remains so all-encompassing that it
trumps all others, even that of parent and mother.
A family portrait of mass incarceration: Punishment as separation

and denial
Mass incarceration in the United States has been studied from many angles,
with scholars analyzing everything from the complex factors giving rise to
it to the racial politics motivating it to its implications for political and eco-
nomic life.2 Until recently, one area that remained largely ignored was its
consequences for kin and community life. Here feminist scholarship has
been particularly transformative, revealing the myriad ways in which mass
imprisonment changes the practices and relations of social reproduction
ðLeBaron and Roberts 2010Þ. Most generally, by removing close to 2 mil-
lion men from social life, it changes all sorts of divisions of labor and re-
sponsibilities. This is especially true of caretaking. There are almost as many
children with parents in prison as there are male and female inmates: 1.8 mil-
lion at last count ðWPA 2009Þ. Roughly 10 percent of minor children in
the United States have a parent under correctional supervision. Over 2 per-
cent of all US children have a parent in prison, while 7 percent of African
American children have at least one incarcerated parent ðVera Institute of
Justice 2004Þ. Gender scholars have shown how all the work that goes into
caring for these children and addressing their needs then gets absorbed
by women ðFlavin 2009; Kruttschnitt 2010Þ. They have also revealed how
mass incarceration not only denies children access to their fathers but has
left many mothers without partners—intensifying the demands placed on
them as caretakers and breadwinners ðEnos 2001; Sudbury 2010Þ. And they
have documented how these women struggle amid constant deprivations
and indignities to keep their families afloat and their male partners con-
nected to them ðComfort 2008Þ.
In addition to separation from men as partners and parents, mass im-
prisonment denies women access to their offspring. This is most pressing
for the two hundred thousand women incarcerated in the United States,
over 70 percent of whom were caring for minor children prior to their
incarceration ðCenter for Law and Social Policy 2005; Tapia 2010Þ. For
them, imprisonment has turned their lives as caretakers upside down, forc-
ing them to rear children from afar and through intermediaries ðBosworth
1999; Ferraro and Moe 2003Þ. Unlike male inmates, 86 percent of whom
2
See Garland ð2001Þ, Mauer ð2006Þ, Western ð2006Þ, and Wacquant ð2009Þ.

rely on their children’s mothers for care while in prison, female inmates
more often turn to female kin and friends for support. In fact, 26 percent
of imprisoned women’s children reside with fathers, while 66 percent live
with female family members and friends ðVera Institute of Justice 2004;
WPA 2009Þ.
Feminist work reveals how this pattern further feminizes the care work
of mass incarceration, placing more pressure on women who are overbur-
dened financially and straining already fraught kin relationships ðGilmore
2005; Flavin 2009Þ. They have also documented the many problems fe-
male inmates’ children encounter. Young children experience develop-
mental delays, separation anxiety, and attachment difficulties ðBloom and
Steinhart 1993Þ. School-age children exhibit behavioral problems, educa-
tional delays, and emotional troubles ðSeymour and Hairston 2001; West-
ern and Petit 2010Þ. Older kids are more likely than their peers to drop out
of school and end up incarcerated themselves ðJohnston 1995; Bernstein
2005Þ. Children of all ages are more likely to live in poverty ðWestern 2006;
DeFina and Hannon 2010Þ.3
When taken together, this research paints a family portrait of mass
incarceration: a picture of a family with a missing partner and parent, be it
a mother, a father, or both. It is through their absence that punishment
operates—through the loss of the support, care, and resources that the miss-
ing person could provide. Penal power also reaches the missing person, sev-
ering her ties to loved ones on the outside. This family portrait of denial and
separation thus reveals how punishment reverberates through kin and com-
munity networks to affect many more people than the incarcerated them-
selves.
Yet there may be even more to the picture. As we know from other
public arenas, state power can operate not only through the denial of fa-
milial ties but also through remaking them. Centuries of welfare policies
and practices reveal how states have tried to mold women into particular
types of mothers. As Dorothy Roberts ð2002Þ argues in her work on the
foster care system, the removal of children from their homes is only one
way that state power disrupts, restructures, and polices poor, primarily
African American, families. Indeed, there is much to suggest that penal
power works in a similar way: not simply as a force of separation but also
as a force of restructuring.
3
Prisoners are also more likely to have their parental relationship severed: the 1997
Adoption and Safe Families Act mandates that parental rights be suspended if a child is in
foster care for fifteen of the last twenty-two months. Since 20 percent of kids in foster care
have mothers with criminal records, the threat of having their parental connection absolved
is ever present ðVera Institute of Justice 2004Þ.

110 y Haney
For instance, Megan Comfort’s ð2008Þ study of prison visiting rooms

brilliantly reveals how prison infiltrates the heterosexual relationships of
women and imprisoned men. In part, this occurs through the ways prison
allows women into male inmates’ lives: from the rituals of humiliation
women endure while entering the prison to the home-cooked meals they
are expected to deliver to men while in the prison to the overnight visits
they cherish for their semblance of a family life they rarely experienced
outside of prison. Yet this also happens through the complex ways women
rework their ideals of love and intimacy as they adapt to the realities of
prison. As they show care through cooking for and corresponding with the
imprisoned, their expectations for themselves shift. As they experience safe
intimacy within time-limited visits, their expectations for men change. As
they see once violent, unresponsive men transform into loyal, disciplined
partners—albeit only for an overnight stay or weekend visit—they begin to
interact with the prison as a domestic satellite and a protector of an other-
wise unattainable family ideal. The prison thus leaves its mark in deep,
meaningful ways.
Might something similar occur with parenting in prison? When the
penal system gives women access to their children in its own space and on
its own terms, what kind of imprint is left? As with other familial relation-
ships, parenting is infused with social ideals, expectations, and identifica-
tions—all of which are ripe for state intervention. As Barbara Katz Rothman
ð2005Þ argues, parenting is also a key arena in which we learn human at-
tachment and intimacy; it is a primary relationship in which we learn to feel
a safe connection to and dependency on others. How are these connec-
tions experienced in a space so marked by power and punishment?
Parenting within the penal state: Punishment as maternal control

and contradiction
In 2002, I set out to work through some of these questions in an ethno-
graphic study of a California mother/child prison. The facility, which I call
Visions, was part of the statewide Community Prisoner Mothers Program
ðCPMPÞ.4 Located in the Bay Area, Visions was run by a large nongov-
ernmental organization ðNGOÞ with a diverse female staff. It was consid-
ered by many to be a flagship facility. I spent three years doing hard eth-
nographic time in the prison. During those years, hundreds of women and
4
As in most ethnographic work, I use pseudonyms to refer to the institutions I studied—
as a way of protecting the privacy of the staff, the inmates, and the children with whom I
worked.

children passed through Visions’ steel doors. I participated in and observed

most aspects of their lives: I went to their house meetings, encounter
groups, and public performances; I taught them creative writing and ré-
sumé writing; I hung out with them before and after their mandatory classes;
and I attended staff meetings and evaluations. By the end of the research, I
had keys to the facility—I had become that integrated into its everyday life.
Yet such integration was not without its tensions, especially given the facil-
ity’s extreme power differentials. As a feminist researcher, I felt pulled in
conflicting directions. My commitment to alternative corrections, as well as
my own class and educational background, meant that I shared quite a bit
with the Visions staff—and they frequently tried to use me to bolster their
claim to be doing corrections differently. Yet my sense that something very
wrong had happened when this alternative ideal was implemented, as well
as my desire to provide female inmates with programs they found meaning-
ful, meant that the inmates often felt like they had an ally in me. These com-
peting pulls always felt fraught, sometimes even impossible to manage.5
Visions is part of a larger trend in corrections: the move from parenting
from prison to parenting in prison. While prison nurseries have operated
across the United States since the inception of women’s prisons, more re-
cent additions are residential facilities for female inmates and their chil-
dren. The federal government and eleven states operate mother/child pris-
ons, with new states adding them every year ðWPA 2009Þ.6 These programs
house anywhere from 20 to 150 inmates and their children for the duration
of the mothers’ sentences. The relatively small size of the prisons has led
some to call them “mini-prisons” ðCURB 2010, 330Þ. They are often lo-
cated outside of traditional penal institutions in “community” settings and
are frequently run by human-service NGOs, with contracts from state de-
partments of corrections. The ages of the children residing in them vary—
some limit kids’ ages to under six years old, although most allow older kids
to stay on. School-age kids usually attend local schools; preschoolers have
on-site child care. Otherwise, kids’ lives are dictated by the structure of con-
finement: they cannot come and go as they please or visit with friends and
relatives outside scheduled visiting hours.
While both prison nurseries and residential facilities are on the rise in
the United States, for a variety of reasons, the latter have become especially
popular. At last count, there were over one hundred such facilities operating
5
For another discussion of negotiating the complexities of power and identity in divided
spaces like penal facilities, see Haney ð1996Þ.
6
These states include California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Massa-
chusetts, Texas, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia.

112 y Haney
nationwide. In states like New York, California, Illinois, and North Car-
olina, antiprison activists fought for their creation. The goal was to disrupt
the punishment-through-separation model by uniting mothers and chil-
dren ðLSPC 2010Þ. For instance, the California CPMP network grew out
of a long battle fought by feminist lawyers who insisted that women should
have a legal right to raise their children while incarcerated ðBarry 1989Þ.
Drawing on a long-forgotten statute in the 1979 state penal code, they won
the legal battle in 1990, and CPMP facilities proliferated over the next
decade—with six facilities operating across the state to serve hundreds of
women and children every year ðHaney 2010Þ.
Indeed, the CPMP promise of parent/child reunification in the com-
munity made them ideals for many progressive critics of mass imprison-
ment ðEnos 2001; O’Brien 2001Þ. It also made them models for advocates
of gender-responsive corrections, or of penal policies that target problems
and needs thought to be unique to women ðMorash 2010Þ. The promises
of cost cutting only broadened the appeal of such facilities. It is no coin-
cidence that proposals for familial reunification in prison were implemented
when the fiscal crisis of the penal state hit. Since children are expensive when
raised on the outside, the plan was to save money by having them join their
mothers. All the better if mothers could move into “community” facilities,
which are not only less expensive but are often run by human-service NGOs
or religious groups—what Malcolm Feeley ð2002, 322Þ calls “penal entre-
preneurs”—and thus rely on a mixture of public and private funding. Sud-
denly, mother/child prisons began to emerge in places not known for their
progressive penal culture, like Alabama, Florida, and Texas.
I purposefully grounded my research in the most promising of facili-
ties: if parenting in prison could work anywhere, I surmised, it would be
in a place like Visions, located in a Bay Area city and run by a “women-
centered” staff. This challenged me as a researcher as I grappled with how
and why those promises remained unmet. Despite being pulled in differ-
ent directions in my day-to-day interactions with the staff and inmates, at
an analytical level it became clear that the facility had become a microcosm
of the cultural contradictions of motherhood—as it simultaneously un-
dermined, subsumed, and punished the inmates’ caretaking.
Motherhood undermined
Unlike those working in traditional correctional facilities with entrenched
penal cultures, the staff of miniprisons like Visions had considerable room
to decide how to focus their program. Of course, as with most decisions,
the staff did not come to theirs under conditions of their own making. In
part, their constraints were material—they relied on contracts with the

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation ðCDCRÞ, which

provided limited funding and forced them to turn to other private and
public sources for support.7 Their constraints were also institutional—as a
CDCR satellite, the program had to meet state approval. Given that there
was competition among NGOs for CDCR contracts, facilities had to se-
cure places for themselves in a crowded state arena. This had implications
for how the program was run: from its production of glossy promotional
materials to its refusal to do serious program assessments for fear of jeop-
ardizing its external funding. Visions knew it had no future without its
CDCR contract.
Yet the Visions staff also realized the facility would close without a steady
stream of female inmates—and they knew what kind of program appealed
to them. Since inmates had a choice of programs, recruitment took place.
According to the inmates, it went like this: CPMP representatives showed
up in the yard at one of the two large correctional facilities for women, tell-
ing inmates about the program. Those inmates thought to be eligible for
it were invited to an informational session. At the meeting, they were told
about the benefits of the program. They saw a promotional video of a home
in a suburban neighborhood—a warm environment geared toward sup-
porting women as they readjusted to mothering after separations from their
children.
There was something quite cynical about this recruitment process given
its implicit awareness of what female inmates wanted—and how that bore
little relationship to Visions’ reality. In fact, the best way to get a discussion
going in my writing classes was to ask the inmates about their first impres-
sions of Visions. In unison, the inmates recounted how the CPMP video
hid the realities of the facility. It did not show Visions’ location on a tough,
inner-city street in a former single-room occupancy building. “I struggled
to get outta places like this,” Tanisha remarked. “Then prison brings me
right back.” The video failed to portray the actual living arrangements,
with the double and triple celling of entire families. “When I saw where
we were gonna live, with all those other women and screaming kids,”
Brenda recalled, “I couldn’t talk for days. Where were the nice rooms they
showed in the video?” It did not reveal how little time inmates spent with
their children: kids spent the day at day care or school, while mothers went
7
The CDCR paid Visions a fixed sum for each inmate. Since that amount was not enough
to cover much beyond basic upkeep, funding for additional programming and for the care of
the inmates’ children came from other sources. As a result, Visions’ funding structure was
inordinately complex—its budget had seven categories of funding; within each category they
were several different subcategories. These funding streams all came with their own require-
ments and constraints, thus placing different ðand often conflictingÞ pressures on the facility.

114 y Haney
to encounter groups and counseling. “I never see my girl,” Maria ob-

served. “How could this be a mother prison when I never see my baby?”
Most glaringly, the video never mentioned the rules forbidding women
from working for wages and restricting their movement. In effect, the video
failed to mention that Visions was run like a prison, albeit a prison in a com-
munity setting.
In fact, it was Visions’ decision to retain key elements of a prison that
created the greatest obstacles for inmate parenting. While some aspects of
its program were mandated by the CDCR—like the inmate counts that
occurred five times a day or the rule that required inmates to wear their hair
off their faces at all times—most were not. In particular, there were two
institutional processes that ended up undercutting women’s ability to
mother, neither of which was CDCR mandated. The first was the decision
to strip female inmates of all authority. This is an essential aspect of most
penal institutions: their dynamic of control and submission, of power and
domination. Most obvious in facilities that warehouse offenders, this dy-
namic also occurs in “rehabilitative” facilities where the staff diagnoses and
treats inmates’ problems while inmates must submit to those diagnoses
ðMcCorkel 1998; Hannah-Moffat 2001Þ. So it was at Visions. Inmates
were denied the most basic authority to decide what to do and when to
do it. They were under constant surveillance. Their daily schedules were
planned for them, with few changes or alterations allowed. They under-
went body searches and pat-downs when they came and went from the
facility. Their rooms were searched and many of their belongings dis-
carded without their consent. It was not unusual for the facility to go on
a lockdown, or what the Visions staff called a freeze, when all normal activ-
ity ceased and all movement into and out of the facility ended. The inmates
had no authority to contest any of this.
Underlying these practices was the assumption that inmates could not
be trusted to wield authority. While this might have been true of some
inmates, there was little evidence that it applied to most Visions women:
to get into a CPMP prison, women had to be cleared through a complex
vetting process, in which their backgrounds were searched for histories
of child abuse, neglect, and other dangerous parental behavior. Despite
this, their status as prisoners made these mothers suspect. While the cloud
of suspicion is hard for any inmate to endure, it is particularly difficult for
inmate parents who must also rear children. Once inmates have been de-
nied the authority to make the most basic of decisions, how can they con-
vincingly exert parental authority over their kids? Once they have been
forced to submit to infantilizing practices like room searches, freezes, and
pat-downs, how can they proclaim themselves authority figures vis-à-vis

their children? “My mommy is in trouble,” five-year-old Malik announced

to me one afternoon. “She was bad and can’t leave her room today.”
Indeed, it often felt as though the parent/child roles had been reversed
at Visions. Many women insisted they had lost control of their kids. Like
Kelly, whose six-year-old daughter began swearing and spitting at other
kids, despite her mother’s pleas to stop. Or Rosa, whose three-year-old
son Mario tried to escape from the facility every day by scaling its outside
fence, screaming: “I go home now. I no like it here.” Rosa struggled to get
Mario to stop his escape attempts, only to have him hit and punch her in
the face, completely undeterred by her interventions. Others felt as though
their children used Visions’ rules to manipulate them. I often observed kids
using the prison’s power dynamics to try to control their mothers, warning
their mothers that they were “being bad” or complaining about them to
the staff. “My mommy hit me,” cried little Sarah as she ran through the staff
office—followed by her mother who desperately denied the charges. “Don’t
you lie, girl, I never touched you.”
In many areas the inmates’ parental authority was taken over directly by
the staff. Visions had clear rules about how mothers were to reprimand
their children. There was to be no corporeal punishment of any sort at
Visions; spanking was strictly forbidden. There were lots of snacking rules
dictating what and when kids could eat outside of mealtimes. And there
were television rules structuring what kids could watch. Never mind that
some inmates had different ideas about how to feed, entertain, and dis-
cipline their children. Some inmates did challenge their lack of authority,
like Karrina, who frequently launched into angry tirades at house meet-
ings about how she should have the final say in her seven-year-old son’s
upbringing: “I’m a single mother from South Central ½Los Angeles and
I’m just trying to prepare my son for our reality. . . . He needs to learn to
be independent and tough. For his survival and for my survival. If you like
it or not, that’s how I’m gonna raise him. Just watch me.” But they never
prevailed. At Visions, mothers did not have the authority to assert their
parental preferences.
This mother-doesn’t-know-best stance led to the second institutional
process that undermined women’s ability to mother: Visions denied women
all privacy. Such denial is also standard practice in traditional prison. That
Visions chose to retain it reveals another assumption underlying its pro-
gram: if given private space to rear their children, the inmates could po-
tentially harm them. Never mind that there was little evidence of this—
again, inmates underwent a screening process before coming to Visions
to weed out those with histories of abuse. Never mind that there was no
CDCR rule prohibiting Visions from allowing inmates private time with

116 y Haney
their kids; the no-privacy practice prevailed. Here, too, women’s status as
prisoners seemed determinant, leading the staff to worry about the travel-
ing of transgression—as if women’s legal transgressions could become
a maternal transgression if given the space.
So Visions tried to close off this space. The clearest example of this was
living arrangements: women parented in rooms they shared with up to
three other families. This meant there could be as many as eight people
living in a single room. And these were small rooms, the size of a college
dorm room. All four walls had bunk beds lining them; each bunk bed
housed an entire family, usually with the mother on the bottom and the
childðrenÞ on top or in a crib on the side. Such overcrowding meant there
was rarely a time when inmates’ rooms were empty, which made having
one-on-one time with their kids impossible. Lest we assume that such over-
crowding was a financial issue, Visions always had empty rooms available—
they just chose not to use them. In fact, the facility was rarely at its official
capacity, yet the staff insisted on keeping women and children cramped
in cell-like rooms.
Troubled by their constant exposure, some inmates surrounded their
bunk beds with sheets, creating a cavelike area where they could retreat
with their children. They even decorated the inside of their bed caves with
pictures of and letters from loved ones—usually from their kids’ fathers.
For instance, this was what Rosa did after her son Mario spent his first six
weeks at Visions crying and screaming through the night. With the other
families in her room also sleep deprived, huge fights ensued, which made
Rosa feel worse about the situation. Finally, at the urging of her room-
mates, Rosa constructed a bed cave where she could lure Mario back to
sleep in private. For a week or so, it seemed to diffuse some of the tensions.
But then the staff had the cave taken down, citing prison rules about vis-
ibility and child safety. As the director explained to the angry group of
roommates who contested the decision, “It is important that we keep
things out in the open here. . . . No hiding behind curtains of any kind.” In
effect, there was to be no space outside the gaze of others.
While Visions’ insistence on denying inmates privacy is not uncommon
for a penal institution, it posed particular problems for inmate parents.
Everything an inmate said or did with her child was analyzed by guards,
counselors, and other inmates. When she made mistakes, which all moth-
ers do, there were hundreds of eyes watching, ready to point it out to her
and to the prison staff. The resulting evaluations were consequential: they
not only affected how an inmate was treated by the staff and other inmates,
but they helped determine who was worthy of release. Staff evaluation meet-
ings frequently focused on an inmate’s maternal practices and behavior.

“She’s raising her son like a gangster from the hood,” a counselor once
proclaimed about Karrina, whom the staff considered a model prisoner in
other respects. “I’m worried about what this says about her mindset and
how she’ll be on the outside.” The concern was then noted in Karrina’s file,
which followed her to her release hearing.
With other spaces closed off, inmates had one private space to retreat to:
the bathroom. Many inmates took their children to bathrooms when they
needed to be alone with them. While sitting on toilet seats, mothers and
children played games, told stories, and sang songs. This was also where
women disciplined their kids. As Rosa once explained to me, “Some days I
sit with Mario in the bathroom. We spend hours in there. It’s the place I can
be alone with him. I can calm him down in there when it’s just us.” The
image of Rosa huddling with Mario in the bathroom exemplifies how, as
punishment collided with parenting, the former prevailed—with the im-
pulse to surveil trumping women’s need for parental authority and privacy.
In the process, these institutional practices ended up replicating key as-
pects of the cultural control of poor mothers. First and foremost, they mim-
icked a culture that makes motherhood so private for privileged women,
yet so forcibly public for others. Be it through child protection agencies,
welfare caseworkers, or family court judges, poor women’s mothering has
always received considerable public scrutiny. This is especially true of Afri-
can American women, who are forced to submit to public inspections of
their caretaking—as if they could not be trusted to wield maternal authority
outside the gaze of others ðSolinger 2005Þ. Yet, as Patricia Hill Collins ð2000Þ
reminds us, this public scrutiny can have unintended consequences: at key
historical moments, public motherhood socialized African American parent-
ing, thus taking some of the pressure off of biological mothers. There were
certainly moments of this at Visions—as when some women took care of
the kids of inmates who were having bad days. Or during house meetings
when children would go from woman to woman, being held and hugged by
everyone.
But because of the realities of penal confinement, the scrutiny of public
mothering seemed more pervasive. This led to the other cultural message
resounding throughout Visions: motherhood was not to be a respected
entitlement or a right for these women. It was not to be an arena of value
or influence for them. It was not to be a relation they could shape in ways
they found fulfilling or rewarding. Or, in Karrina’s words, they were not
permitted to decide what was necessary for their children’s survival. Here,
too, dominant ideas about class and racial surfaced, as the inmates’ com-
mitment to mothering was devalued, questioned, and even negated—
while their parental judgments were assumed to be suspect and in need of

118 y Haney
change. And the way they were to change further reflected the cultural
contradictions of motherhood.
Motherhood subsumed
Rarely a day went by when the inmates were not reminded of how lucky
they were to be at Visions. This almost became a mantra: providing access
to their kids was something being done for the inmates; allowing families
to live together was so special the women should be grateful; giving women
the chance to raise their offspring was a gift. Even though most inmates had
to pay Visions to cover their children’s room and board, which put most of
them in financial debt during their incarceration, the staff claimed that the
inmates were indebted to them for the chance to raise their kids. They could
pay off this debt through compliance. In exchange for regaining access to
their kids, mothers had to be open to being taught.
When it came to caretaking, Visions had a clear idea about what inmates
needed to learn: they had to be taught to put the needs of their children
above their own. In the staff ’s terms, they needed to learn to bond with
their children. In fact, the insistence on maternal bonding was the glue
that held an otherwise diverse staff together. From the facility director to
the part-time cook, everyone claimed that mother/child bonding was the
caretaking goal. For this to happen, though, inmates first had to learn to
reduce any needs they might have to those of their children. In the weekly
parenting class, the focus was always on how mothers should put aside
their needs for the benefit of their children: how holding a child was the
best way to fulfill a desire for physical closeness or how watching a child
grow was most emotionally gratifying. There was no room for tired, angry,
or ambivalent mothers; there should only be mothers willing and able to
stifle those feelings for the sake of their kids. Anything else was selfish.
The centrality of mother/child bonding suggests that Visions spent a
lot of time addressing women’s concerns as mothers. But they did not.
Despite all the talk about the need to bond, there was almost an avoidance
of motherhood in the prison. Or, more precisely, there was a deafening
silence about women’s needs as mothers. On the one hand, Visions offered
inmates no way to address the concrete material issues confronting them
as parents. Inmates got no help navigating the world of subsidized child
care and housing. They got no support as they managed their kids’ edu-
cational needs. They received no legal assistance with child custody or child
support cases, which so many of them had pending. There was never any
discussion of the loss of public assistance benefits that came with many of
their felony convictions ðAllard 2002Þ. And there was never any mention of
how the inmates could repay the material and nonmaterial debts so many

of them owed to kin for the care work they did while these women were
incarcerated. In short, there was little attention paid to the material and
social issues facing sole parents living in poverty, which the overwhelming
majority of Visions inmates were.
Perhaps even more deafening were the silences about the inmates’
partners and children’s fathers. While fathers were allowed to come to Vi-
sions during weekend visiting hours, few ever did. In some cases, this was
because the men were themselves incarcerated. But many of them were
not—and those men were also absent on family days. This caused enor-
mous sadness and frustration in the women, both for themselves and for
their kids. In my years at Visions, there was never any dialogue about how
to draw these men into care work. Whenever the inmates asked that
fathers be invited to house outings and events, their requests were rejected—
ostensibly because of security concerns. Similarly, on the few occasions
when inmates asked that fathers come to Visions’ mothering classes, they
were denied. “You need to deal with your own issues first,” counselor Jane
responded to one such request from Jackie—the implication being that
Jackie would use her husband to avoid her own problems.8
The gendered message here was clear: women were primarily, even
solely, responsible for caretaking. Yet there was also very little attention to
how this burden affected women. Many inmates had real ambivalence
about their roles as mothers. Some were overwhelmed by the responsi-
bilities and obligations of parenting. Jeanne, who had three children, no
formal work experience, and a male partner in prison for drug dealing—
always had a beleaguered look on her face, especially when her kids were
around. Others claimed to fear the connectedness associated with moth-
ering. They often spoke about those fears in my writing class, claiming to
be terrified by the idea that their kids depended on them so much. “That
whole breastfeeding thing just didn’t work for me,” Keisha insisted. “I
didn’t want some little thing attached to my boob all the time, looking
at me like a cow at every meal.” Still others had few role models for good
parenting, which made them nervous about their own ability to caretake—
like Veronica, who always gave unsolicited accounts of her own abuse as
a child during the parenting class. “I remember my mama locking me in
the closet for days,” she proclaimed in a group discussion of how to dis-
cipline kids. “I won’t be looking to my childhood for any good examples.”
8
Visions’ stance on fathers was not at all unique. In fact, while mother/child prisons are
on the rise across the United States, no father/child prisons currently exist. While many
women’s prisons have some sort of mothering program or support group, similar groups for
father are rare—despite the fact that roughly 80 percent of incarcerated men are fathers.

120 y Haney
Moreover, many Visions women associated motherhood with guilt.

Few of them were new to prison, which meant that they had been moving
in and out of their children’s lives for years. Some had spent little time with
their kids before coming to Visions. They had built up walls to protect
themselves from a sense of loss. Once at Visions, those walls frequently
came crumbling down, leaving them with difficult emotions. It was not
uncommon for Visions mothers to cry for days after being reunited with
their children. In my writing classes, they often wrote about how sad they
felt when their kids first arrived at Visions and how they were reminded
of all the times they had abandoned and neglected their children. They
wrote about their feelings of guilt for bringing kids to prison and for
the restrictions placed on their daily lives. Yet these complex emotions
usually remained unspoken outside our classes—or were given little space
to emerge. When they did push through, the inmates were instructed to
deal with them through attachment and bonding.
What made the imperative to suppress so curious was that the Visions
kids did not seem to be unusually distressed. Of course, they experienced
constraints on their freedom of movement: outside of school, their lives
were confined to the prison. They couldn’t leave the facility when they
pleased; they couldn’t see relatives and other parents when they wanted.
Some kids did beg to break free from such confinement, like Mario with
his daily escape attempts or Stephen with his angry tantrums. But of the
hundreds of kids I met, Mario and Stephen were the exceptions. Maybe
this was because many of the kids were too young to show signs of trou-
ble. Maybe those signs would develop later, as they grew up. And maybe
it was that their alternatives were even less appealing: for most Visions
kids, the alternative was living with extended kin who were already over-
burdened by caring for other children, in a foster-care placement, or with
fathers who could be unstable and unreliable ðGiordano 2010; Kruttschnitt
2010Þ.
But at Visions the kids had a safe place to sleep and three meals a day.
They had good child care and access to a decent public school; they got
tutoring if they needed it. They had health care. In essence, they had the
benefits of a welfare state, albeit of the penal-welfare state, which are cru-
cial for young children. They were also part of a community of kids expe-
riencing a similar plight and confronting similar stigma. And they were
surrounded by a community of other mothers, which as Collins ð2000Þ
documents, is critical to the survival of disadvantaged children. So how-
ever counterintuitive it might be, life at Visions was a mixed bag for the
kids. Still, the women were told never to let their own needs supersede
their kids’ needs. They were never even encouraged to find ways to differ-

entiate among their children’s needs—to separate the rational ones from
the irrational, the satiable from the insatiable. Doing so would be further
evidence of the selfishness the staff maintained had led them to crime
in the first place. In this way, Visions’ version of the culturally pervasive
ideology of intensive mothering was fraught with class and race assump-
tions. It wished away women’s own needs not because Visions insisted
they did not exist but because those needs were deemed destructive: un-
checked, undisciplined, and out-of-control needs that led women to of-
fend in all sorts of ways. These same assumptions underlay the denial of
women’s parental authority and privacy. But here they led to the imper-
ative that inmates replace their dangerous desires with the pleasures of
parenting. The ideology of intensive mothering, prison-style, thus led
to further replications of the cultural contradictions of motherhood. Al-
though the inmates had no privacy to parent, they were called on to bond
with their kids in a way that expressed unambivalent dedication. Although
they were reminded constantly of all the times they had been unable or
unwilling to parent their kids, they were required to enmesh themselves
in caretaking with abandon. And although they parented under the watch-
ful eyes of prison officials, the inmates were expected to exhibit a selfless
commitment to and joy in caretaking. Failure to navigate all of these com-
peting expectations could become yet another reason for punishment.
Motherhood punished
Since the Visions kids were at school or in day care all day and their mothers
were not allowed to work for wages or leave the facility for classes, one
might wonder what the inmates spent their days doing. Visions deemed
itself a therapeutic community, a form of corrections that is on the rise
across the United States ðNolan 1998Þ. To be sure, there is nothing new
about subjecting wards of the state to therapeutic intervention; such in-
terventions have long histories as forms of state subjugation, as technol-
ogies of the self ðValverde 1998; Rose 1999Þ. In its contemporary incar-
nation, state therapeutics is marked by a disregard for all things social; it
approaches inmate rehabilitation by treating addiction and vice ðMcKim
2008Þ. These programs often come across as mixtures of AA and EST;
they draw on influences as varied as Dr. Freud and Dr. Phil ðHaney 2010Þ.
Inmates, or clients, as they are often called, thus spend time delving into
their personal demons and issues through mandatory counseling and en-
counter groups.
At Visions, the inmates’ limited education and work experience and lack
of housing and health care—basically, their poverty—were all bracketed.
For a variety of reasons that were at once organizational, professional, and

122 y Haney
financial, the staff reduced women’s troubles to individual, psychological

problems. They then located these troubles in inmates’ low self-esteem
and set out to address them by making the “internal external” ðMcCorkel
1998, 228Þ.
The impulse to turn everything into a psychological issue was so strong
that the Visions staff folded mothering into this frame. On the one hand,
mothering became a method of therapeutic evaluation, a way for the staff
to diagnose inmates. How a woman mothered became a window into her
true psyche. If a mother yelled at her children, she was diagnosed with “an-
ger” issues. If she spanked them, she had “control” and “violence” issues.
If she didn’t hold her child enough, she was plagued with “intimacy” issues.
Most of all, if she expressed any maternal ambivalence, she had “bonding”
issues. All of these diagnoses required inmates to do more therapeutic work.
“Here comes Bad Mama the Great,” counselor Lesley announced as La-
shondra entered the group room. “With all her head games, she’s never
going to bond with her girl. . . . She can’t even read a book to her without
getting up to escape.”
While women like Lashondra may indeed have had bonding issues, they
were not necessarily attributable to deep-seated pathologies. Under con-
ditions of confinement, one could imagine how even the most uncon-
flicted parent might find it hard to take pleasure in caretaking—and how
she could begin to act in ways that became fodder for the diagnostic mill.
Rosa, for example, became so exhausted by Mario’s crying that she rarely
smiled at or laughed with him—only to be assessed by counselors as self-
centered. At the other extreme was Samantha, who felt so alienated from
other inmates that she had her son accompany her everywhere, acting al-
most as a protective shield—only to be evaluated as overbearing and inse-
cure. In this way, there was something quite painful about Visions’ use
of motherhood as a diagnostic tool. It delegitimized the very real ambiva-
lence some women associated with mothering, turning those feelings into
signs of wrongdoing. It made failure to bond a punishable act.
In addition, inmates’ relationships with their children were frequently
used to bring mothers into line. Parenting was something the inmates
were given less say over when they misbehaved or resisted. This may seem
contradictory; it is indeed bizarre to punish a woman’s failure to bond by
withdrawing access to her children. But so it was at Visions. For instance,
when the facility was put on a freeze, all interaction had to stop, including
those between mothers and their children. While on freezes, no one could
come or go from the facility, including the Visions children. All mother-
child activities outside the facility stopped during a freeze, including walks
to and from school, doctors’ appointments, and prearranged excursions.
The same restrictions applied when women were required to stay in their

rooms for designated amounts of time—so Malik’s mom could not eat
with him, go to the backyard with him, or watch TV with him while she
was punished in her room for “being bad.” Indeed, the strongest push for
the inmates to get back into line during freezes and segregations was the
need to restore normalcy for their children—and for their parental re-
lationships.
This use of motherhood as a tool of punishment was not a reflection
of the staff ’s mean-spirited or manipulative attitude. Most Visions staff
members believed in therapeutic corrections. So whatever they could do
to further the cause was ultimately beneficial to the inmates. The staff also
used the kids in a way that simply reflected their roles as prison officials.
One common aspect of penal institutions is their tendency to turn every-
thing into a site of power. Penal environments are so deeply marked by
dynamics of control and submission that spaces of power multiply; simply
wearing one’s hair in a certain style or transforming the shape of one’s
body can become signs of rebellion ðHolmberg 2001; Kruttschnitt and
Gartner 2005Þ. This multiplication is most extreme in super-max prisons,
where bodily fluids and the smallest gestures get mobilized in staff/inmate
battles ðRhodes 2004Þ. In a penal context where therapeutic power reigns,
the most powerful tools are those that engage emotionally and psychody-
namically. And children fit the bill.
So inmates faced some real dilemmas: if they did not appear to “work the
program” ðor were perceived as not engaging fully in therapeutic prac-
ticeÞ, their stays at Visions might end; likewise, if they gave the impression
that they were at Visions merely to be parents and not to work on them-
selves, they could lose access to their children. This put enormous pres-
sure on them to conform to the dictates of the prison. If they refused to
engage in the mandatory therapy and encounter groups, would their kids
suffer? If they rejected a counselor’s evaluation of them, would their kids’
lives be curtailed even more? Or if they resisted the staff ’s therapeutic plan
for them, would they be kicked out of Visions and have their kids re-
moved from the facility altogether?
Further upping the ante to conform was the reality that the Visions kids
were often brought into staff/inmate conflicts as explicit reprimands for
women’s bad behavior. Defiant or resistant inmates did have access to their
kids curtailed—even when their defiance had nothing to do with moth-
ering. “What do you mean I can’t pick up Victor from school?” Karrina
cried out after she was put in lockdown for stealing a bag of potato chips
from the kitchen. “I get him every day so he’s not gonna ½go to school if
I can’t get him.” When inmates talked back to staff members, they were
restricted from going on group excursions. “They say all kinds of shit about
me,” Towanda recounted in one of our writing classes. “But if I say shit back,

124 y Haney
I can’t go out with my girl or take her to the doctor myself. . . . Now, is that
fair?” On the rare occasions when inmates violated a serious rule, by having
a weapon or using drugs, their children were removed from the facility im-
mediately—often without an opportunity to say a proper goodbye.
Of the many examples of the intersection of mothering and punish-
ment, one of the most unforgettable was forty-year-old Irene, a heroin ad-
dict in for her fourth drug arrest. Upon entering Visions, Irene was imme-
diately enrolled in a local detox program, which the staff escorted her to
daily. Irene was so fragile that the staff kept her at Visions for weeks before
allowing her five-year-old daughter, Amanda, to join her. Once Amanda
arrived, Irene’s anxiety reached new levels. She had a hard time talking to
Amanda; she rarely held or touched her. When Amanda cried, Irene got
incredibly agitated and would walk away from her. So Amanda was often
left sitting alone in the TV room. The situation was painful to watch.
Whenever Irene’s case was raised in staff meetings, the discussion fo-
cused on her detoxing—because her methadone appointments were in
the late morning, Irene often came to group meetings “dosing” from the
treatment. Since dosing could mimic signs of being high, other inmates
made fun of her: “Hey, Irene, can you hear me in there?” “Does Irene
need some smack to calm herself down,” they taunted. The staff talked
constantly about whether Irene should continue to come to group meet-
ings while dosing. Could these taunts lead Irene to relapse? Might her dos-
ing be a “trigger” for other women? There was no talk of how to address
her complicated reactions to Amanda or to being a caretaker again for the
first time in years.
Then, one afternoon, while on a doctor’s visit, Irene disappeared. When
Amanda returned from school, the staff locked her down in the prison.
Irene resurfaced later that afternoon and tried to enter the prison. Appar-
ently, she was visibly high, so the staff refused her entrance. Then she be-
came manic, throwing herself at the steel entry door and crying that she
just wanted to see Amanda. The police were called. As the cops cuffed her
and put her in the police car, Irene continued to scream that she needed to
see her daughter one last time. She never got the chance. Irene was im-
mediately sent back to prison; Amanda was returned to foster care the next
morning.
Parenting through mass imprisonment

Mass imprisonment puts inmate mothers like Irene in a no-win situation:
they can struggle to parent from a distance in prison, or they can find their
way to a program like Visions and parent in prison. Neither one offers

particularly good caretaking options. In the years I worked at Visions, I

could never decide whether, in the end, parenting in prison was preferable
to parenting from prison. Ultimately, I concluded that without any serious
evaluation of other mother/child prisons or surveys of inmate mothers
about their preferences, the issue was irresolvable. I had a different aim in
this paper: to broaden our empirical lens to encompass how punishment
operates not only through familial separation but also by remaking familial
relationships. We already know a great deal about the punishing effects of
the former. Yet parenting in the penal state, on its terms and under its
conditions, can also be quite punishing. The institutional processes of con-
trol and domination that operate in traditional prisons do not vanish when
inmates are taken to miniprisons in the community and reunited with their
kids.
Rather, those disciplinary mechanisms can be reconstituted to reflect
dominant ideas about gender, race, and class. In this mother/child prison,
several institutional processes worked to undermine, subsume, and punish
inmates’ mothering. Motherhood became many things at Visions, most of
them contradictory: it was at once held out as an expression of true inti-
macy and as a sign of potential pathology; it was at once presented as a
model of selflessness and as an indication of selfishness; and it was at once
represented as a way to absolve oneself of past crimes and as a symptom
of those crimes. At a minimum, these contradictions created practical im-
pediments to caretaking and obstacles to women’s enjoyment of their kids.
More troubling were the ways in which competing and contradictory ma-
ternal pulls seemed to enhance the ambivalent relationship some women
already had to mothering. And the ways they mirrored the larger cultural
contradictions of motherhood—idealizing the mothering of some, deval-
uing that of others, and thus leaving mothering all the more bound up with
power and punishment.
Hence, the key question may not be whether parenting from prison is
better or worse than parenting in prison. Instead, it should be how we can
do better to create real alternatives to the penal state. Yet before we can
contemplate this, we need to understand why a project like parenting in
prison ended up distorting so many of its promises. Here, too, my data are
limiting: one case study of one mother/child penal facility can hardly sub-
stantiate large causal claims. Still, my ethnographic analysis does offer some
clues as to the reasons for the distortion. On the one hand, it was related
to this prison’s structure: hybrid state institutions like Visions are often
plagued with internal and external conflicts of staffing, budgets, and pro-
grammatic focus. Such conflicts can make them unusually susceptible to
cultural quick fixes. So it may have actually been Visions’ alternative form

126 y Haney
that allowed some of the worst elements of the surrounding culture to

shape its institutional practices. At the same time, Visions’ therapeutic fo-
cus played an important role here: in its insistence on disregarding all things
social, stressing individual vice, and calling on women to “take responsibil-
ity.” All of this pushed women to hold themselves personally accountable
for what were largely societal failings—including social barriers to becoming
the kind of mothers they wanted to be.
Another explanation for the gap between Visions’ promise and reality
relates to the broader pathologization of prisoners. The social category of
the prisoner has become such a master status that all kinds of other trans-
gressions seem to flow from it—from violent predator to drug addict to
gangbanger to irresponsible mother. These traveling transgressions un-
derlie larger institutional processes—from employment discrimination to
felon disenfranchisement to public assistance bans ðAllard 2002; Manza
and Uggen 2006; Pager 2007Þ. In this way, Visions was not simply an ab-
erration; it was not one anomalous example of a bad program. If anything,
it was symptomatic of prevailing penal practices. As Pat Carlen ð2002Þ re-
minds us, penal institutions are premised on the notion that inmates must
be punished and reprimanded. They are marked by dynamics of control
and submission, of power and domination—even in alternative and ther-
apeutic facilities ðMcCorkel 1998; Hannah-Moffat 2001; McKim 2008Þ.
These were the precise dynamics that undercut women’s parenting at Vi-
sions, leading to its lack of privacy, denial of inmate authority, and perpet-
ual surveillance. So strong are these cultures of control that it is difficult
even to imagine a prison reorienting itself to the everyday realities and needs
of children—much less to the child-rearing needs of inmate mothers.
Thus, just as this ethnographic case study allows us to observe what
happens when dominant conceptions of punishment collide with other so-
cial identities, it offers ideas for how we might approach penal reform. These
include specific reforms like policies to protect the rights of mothers care-
taking in prison and programs to remove inmate mothers from the penal
system altogether. Such reforms would thus involve providing the supports
women need to parent outside of prison and to foster their social integra-
tion—particularly since social inclusion is associated both with stronger par-
enting and with lower recidivism. In this way, the story of Visions suggests
the importance of linking feminist alternatives to mass incarceration with a
rethinking of the politics of punishment. While economic exigencies may
provide the will to reform and even to decarcerate, we must be cautious
about the way we do it. Even if done under the guise of gender-responsive
or community-based corrections, such reform will be limited if not ac-
companied by a questioning of the strong cultural impulse to punish and

assumptions about the transgressions of the punished. Without such ques-

tioning, the master status of the prisoner will continue to wipe out other
social roles and identifications—while the pull to punitiveness will con-
tinue to undermine the promise to provide real alternatives to incarcera-
tion.
Department of Sociology
New York University
References
Allard, Patricia. 2002. “Life Sentences: Denying Welfare Benefits to Women
Convicted of Drug Offenses.” Report, the Sentencing Project, Washington, DC.
http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/03–18–03atricia
AllardReport.pdf.
Barry, Ellen M. 1989. “Pregnant Prisoners.” Harvard Women’s Law Journal,
no. 12: 189–203.
Bernstein, Nell. 2005. All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated. New
York: New Press.
Bloom, Barbara, and David Steinhart. 1993. “Why Punish the Children? A Reap-
praisal of the Children of Incarcerated Mothers in America.” Report, National
Council on Crime and Delinquency, San Francisco. http://www.nccdglobal
.org/sites/default/files/publication _ pdf/why-punish-the-children.pdf.
Bosworth, Mary. 1999. Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s
Prisons. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2010. “Prison Inmates at Midyear 2009.” Report, US
Department of Justice, Washington, DC. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content
/pub/pdf/pim09st.pdf.
Carlen, Pat. 2002. “Introduction: Women and Punishment.” In Women and
Punishment: The Struggle for Justice, 3–20. Portland, OR: Willan.
Center for Law and Social Policy. 2005. “Every Door Closed: Facts about Parents
with Criminal Records.” Report, Community Legal Services, Washington, DC.
http://www.clasp.org/admin/site/publications _ archive/files/0139.pdf.
Chandler, Cynthia. 2010. “The Gender-Responsive Prison Expansion Move-
ment.” In Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United
States, ed. Rickie Solinger, Paula C. Johnson, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds,
and Ruby C. Tapia, 332–37. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cohen, Stanley. 1985. Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classifi-
cation. Cambridge: Polity.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and
the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Comfort, Megan. 2008. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the
Prison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

128 y Haney
Craig, Susan C. 2009. “A Historical Review of Mother and Child Programs for
Incarcerated Women.” Prison Journal 89 ðsuppl.Þ: 35S–52S.
CURB ðCalifornians United for a Responsible BudgetÞ. 2010. “Reducing the
Number of People in California Women’s Prisons: How ‘Gender-Responsive
Prisons’ Hurt Women, Children, and Families.” In Interrupted Life: Experiences
of Incarcerated Women in the United States, ed. Rickie Solinger, Paula C. John-
son, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds, and Ruby C. Tapia, 328–31. Berkeley:
Univerity of California Press.
DeFina, Robert H., and Lance Hannon. 2010. “The Impact of Adult Incarceration
on Child Poverty: A County-Level Analysis, 1995–2007.” Prison Journal 90ð4Þ:
377–96.
Enos, Sandra. 2001. Mothering from the Inside: Parenting in a Women’s Prison.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Feeley, Malcolm. 2002. “Entrepreneurs of Punishment: The Legacy of Privatiza-
tion.” Punishment and Society 4ð3Þ:321–44.
Ferraro, Kathleen, and Angela Moe. 2003. “Mothering, Crime, and Incarcera-
tion.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32ð1Þ:9–40.
Flavin, Jeanne. 2009. Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduc-
tion in America. New York: New York University Press.
Freedman, Estelle. 1981. Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America,
1830–1930. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Garland, David, ed. 2001. Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences.
London: Sage.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2005. “Pierce the Future for Hope: Mothers and Prisoners
in the Post Keynesian California Landscape.” In Global Lockdown: Race, Gender,
and the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Julia Sudbury, 231–54. New York: Rout-
ledge.
Giordano, Peggy C. 2010. Legacies of Crime: A Follow-up of the Children of Highly
Delinquent Girls and Boys. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Haney, Lynne A. 1996. “Homeboys, Babies, Men in Suits: The State and the Re-
production of Male Dominance.” American Sociological Review 61ð5Þ:759–78.
———. 2010. Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hannah-Moffat, Kelly. 2001. Punishment in Disguise: Penal Governance and Fed-
eral Imprisonment of Women in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Hays, Sharon. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Holmberg, Carl Bryan. 2001. “The Culture of Transgression: Initiations into the
Homosociality of a Midwestern State Prison.” In Prison Masculinities, ed. Don
Sabo, Terry A. Kupers, and Willie London, 78–92. Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press.
Johnston, Denise. 1995. “The Care and Placement of Prisoners’ Children.” In
Children of Incarcerated Parents, ed. Katherine Gabel and Denise Johnston,
103–23. New York: Lexington.

Kruttschnitt, Candace C. 2010. “The Paradox of Women’s Imprisonment.” Daeda-

lus 139ð3Þ:32–42.
Kruttschnitt, Candace, and Rosemary Gartner. 2005. Marking Time in the Golden
State: Women’s Imprisonment in California. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
LeBaron, Genevieve, and Adrienne Roberts. 2010. “Toward a Feminist Political
Economy of Capitalism and Carcerality.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society 36ð1Þ:19–44.
LSPC ðLegal Services for Prisoners with ChildrenÞ. 2010. “California’s Mother-
Infant Prison Programs: An Investigation.” Working paper, LSPC, San Francisco.
http://fcnetwork.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/Complete-CPMP-report
_ resources _ 2011.pdf.
Manza, Jeff, and Christopher Uggen. 2006. Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement
and American Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mauer, Marc. 2006. Race to Incarcerate. Rev. ed. New York: New Press.
McCorkel, Jill A. 1998. “Going to the Crackhouse: Critical Space in Total In-
stitutions and Everyday Life.” Symbolic Interaction 21ð3Þ:227–52.
McKim, Allison. 2008. “ ‘Getting Gut-Level’: Punishment, Gender, and Thera-
peutic Governance.” Gender & Society 22ð3Þ:303–23.
Morash, Merry. 2010. Women on Probation and Parole: A Feminist Critique of
Community Programs and Services. Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England.
Nolan, James L., Jr. 1998. The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Cen-
tury’s End. New York: New York University Press.
O’Brien, Patricia. 2001. Making It in the “Free World”: Women in Transition from
Prison. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Pager, Devah. 2007. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass
Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rhodes, Lorna A. 2004. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum
Security Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Roberts, Dorothy. 2002. Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. New York:
Basic.
Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Rothman, Barbara Katz. 2005. Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption.
Boston: Beacon.
Seymour, Cynthia, and Creasie Finney Hairston, eds. 2001. Children with Parents
in Prison: Child Welfare Policy, Program, and Practice Issues. New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction.
Solinger, Rickie. 2005. Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive
Politics in America. New York: New York University Press.
Sudbury, Julia. 2005. “Introduction: Feminist Critiques, Transnational Land-
scapes, and Abolitionist Visions.” In Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the
Prison-Industrial Complex, xi–xxviii. New York: Routledge.

130 y Haney
———. 2010. “Unpacking the Crisis: Women of Color, Globalization, and the
Prison Industrial Complex.” In Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated
Women in the United States, ed. Rickie Solinger, Paula C. Johnson, Martha L.
Raimon, Tina Reynolds, and Ruby C. Tapia, 11–25. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Tapia, Ruby C. 2010. “Introduction: Certain Failures: Representing the Experi-
ences of Incarcerated Women in the United States.” In Interrupted Life: Ex-
periences of Incarcerated Women in the United States, ed. Rickie Solinger, Paula
C. Johnson, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds, and Ruby C. Tapia, 1–6. Berke-
ley: University of California Press.
Valverde, Mariana. 1998. Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Free-
dom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vera Institute of Justice. 2004. “Hard Data on Hard Times: An Empirical Analysis
of Maternal Incarceration, Foster Care, and Visitation.” Report, Vera Institute
of Justice, New York. http://repositories2.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle
/2152/15169/HardData _ HardTimes _ Vera.pdf ?sequence52.
Wacquant, Loı̈c. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social
Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Walmsley, Roy. 2009. “World Female Imprisonment List, Eighth Edition.” Re-
port, International Centre of Justice, Kings College London. http://www
.prisonstudies.org/info/downloads/wppl-8th _ 41.pdf.
Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell
Sage.
Western, Bruce, and Becky Petit. 2010. “Incarceration and Social Inequality.”
Daedalus 139ð3Þ:8–19.
WPA ðWomen’s Prison AssociationÞ. 2009. “Mothers, Infants, and Imprisonment:
A Look at Prison Nurseries and Community-Based Alternatives.” Working
paper, WPA, New York.


Haney2013 PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Haney2013 PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Haney2013 PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Motherhood as Punishment: The Case of Parenting in Prison

Author(s): Lynne Haney

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

Motherhood as Punishment: The Case of Parenting in Prison

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

to them as subjects of reform—although stigmatized for nonnormative

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

A family portrait of mass incarceration: Punishment as separation

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

For instance, Megan Comfort’s ð2008Þ study of prison visiting rooms

Parenting within the penal state: Punishment as maternal control

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

children passed through Visions’ steel doors. I participated in and observed

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation ðCDCRÞ, which

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

to encounter groups and counseling. “I never see my girl,” Maria ob-

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

their children? “My mommy is in trouble,” five-year-old Malik announced

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

Moreover, many Visions women associated motherhood with guilt.

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

financial, the staff reduced women’s troubles to individual, psychological

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

Parenting through mass imprisonment

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

particularly good caretaking options. In the years I worked at Visions, I

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

that allowed some of the worst elements of the surrounding culture to

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

assumptions about the transgressions of the punished. Without such ques-

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

Kruttschnitt, Candace C. 2010. “The Paradox of Women’s Imprisonment.” Daeda-

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

This content downloaded from 152.14.136.96 on Fri, 8 Nov 2013 13:50:49 PM

You might also like