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Issues with pregnancy in prison
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Prison is no place to raise a baby. Or is it? Pregnant, incarcerated women should be allowed to nurse their babies behind bars to make sure they develop biologically, socially, or logically. I plan to carefully and thoroughly touch upon the important aspects of this essay by covering most importantly the advantages, the history regarding nursing program facilities, a psychology concept, and the struggles within the mother and child and etc. The external factors that have influenced the changing status of truth or falsity within this discipline includes cultural prejudice, gender bias, politics, and social media. Although, the theme of babies being raised behind bars isn’t as prevalent, it’s vital in babies needing developmental support from …show more content…
Natalie Valios, editor of “Mothers Behind Bars”, provides steps on how everything is handled while caring for the well-being of the baby 's development and mother’s rehabilitation. Dr. Janet Stockheim, a pediatrician, believes babies will do better inside prison with their mothers than they would on the outside. Mothers would have to deal with coping methods after being separated when the child’s length of stay is up. Women can be medically diagnosed with postpartum depression within the first couple of weeks after giving birth or anytime afterwards. In this circumstance, the outcome affects her while having to carry out their sentence surrounded by prison walls and if without the most important factor, the child, disrupting her …show more content…
Tessa Baradon, author of Relational Trauma in Infancy: Psychoanalytic, Attachment and Neuropsychological Contributions to Parent-infant Psychotherapy, addresses the mother and child’s relationship on development in psychotherapy. For the mother, events that occurred during childhood, such as rape, abuse, and violence may affect the relationship with the infant. As for the child, observation of dissociation will occur, causing fear, stress, and anxiety. This statement comprises the truth that rough, past occurrences of the mothers may cause developmental problems for babies. In the serial, “This Mother’s Day, think of those behind bars,” James Alan Fox mentions the struggles amongst the incarcerated mothers. During visitation hours at typical prisons, mothers don’t get to spend enough time with their children on Mother’s Day. With this external conflict, it disrupts the relationship between the mother and child. The child may grow up and be teased by other children at school and also, be known as a criminal’s child. In “Raising Babies in Prison”, Jessica Hansen-Weaver establishes strong viewpoints of herself and other experts on the advantages and disadvantages of keeping babies behind bars with their mothers. The overall style flowed thoroughly, including the structure and word choice. The content was well put together regarding
The job of a child welfare worker appears to be a demanding profession that promotes the child’s safety, but also strengthens the family organization around them in order to successfully raise the children. This child welfare workers work in the system known as the Child Protective Services whose initiative is to protect the overall welfare of the child. The short novel From the Eye of the Storm: the Experiences of a Child Welfare Worker by Cynthia Crosson-Tower demonstrates the skills necessary to deal with the practice of social work along with both its challenges and its happy moments. The novel consists of some of the cases involving Tower’s actual career in social work. In reading the book, I was able to experience some of the actual cases in which children dealt with physical and mental abuse from their families that caused them to end up within the system. Also, some of these children had issues in adapting to foster and adoptive families based on the issues they faced earlier in life. As we have learned earlier in the course, the violence that a child experiences early in life has an overall affect on the person they become as they grow into adulthood. When children deal with adverse childhood experiences, they are at a higher risk for abusing drugs and/or alcohol, increased likelihood of abusing their own child or spouse, higher rates of violent and nonviolent criminal behavior, along with several other issues throughout their lifespan.
When a person becomes a parent, their role in life undoubtedly changes. The person must become a teacher, a guide, and a helping hand in the life of the child. Research has shown that there is a distinct connection between how a child is raised and their overall developmental outcome. John Bowlby’s attachment theory emphasizes the importance of the regular and sustained contact between the parent-infant or parent-child relationship (Travis & Waul 2003). Yet, what happens when the only physical contact a child can share with their parent is a hand pressed on the shield of glass that separates the two? What happens when the last memory of their mother or father was from the corner of their own living room as they watched their parent become handcuffed? In 2007, there was an estimate of approximately 1.7 million children of incarcerated parents in the United States (Poehlmann, Dallaire, Loper & Shear 2010). Of those 1.7 million children, 58% of those children are under the age of 10, with the mean age being 8 (Travis & Waul 2003). The children of incarcerated parents are often moved from one family and one school to the next. The child must cope with this issue in home and in school, and may find it especially hard to cope with during school. Schools, however, can be a safe place for these children. This research explored the psychological effects of parent incarceration on the child, the school-based problems that occur as a result, and what educators can do to support children of incarcerated parents.
Introduction According to Bowen’s (2013) family systems theory, individuals in a family unit are all interconnected and the system is comprised of interlocking connections (Bowen, 2013). Consequently, whenever an individual in a family system is experiencing a stressor or problem the other individuals in the system will be affected by the stressor and will experience a change in the family system (Bowen, 2013). Bowen (2013) suggests that this family system can be used to understand the dynamics of the family unit and explains that an individual’s behavior has a specific function in his or her own family system (Bowen, 2013). By taking into consideration this theory when looking at a family struggling with an incarcerated parent, it is evident that the spouse, children, and grandparents of the family system will be impacted by the incarcerated individual’s situation.
In 2007 there were approximately 77,200 fathers and 65,600 mothers incarcerated in the United States (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2007). As our society continues to grow, our jail and prison population are growing as well. When a parent or guardian is taken into custody the juvenile (child) is taken and released to a relative or child protective services. The children are either given to a close family member or a surrogate parent, meaning a foster home. This may have an emotional impact on the juvenile involved, which may lead them to committing delinquent acts. The children sometimes feel they are left to fend for themselves emotionally and the stress of these emotions are left upon the guardian at the time. These intense sufferings sometimes leave the juveniles in a harmful mental state resembling depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and feelings of abandonment from their parents/guardians. Children with incarcerated parents are five times more likely than their peers to commit crimes (Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 2008).
Mothers are usually the primary caretaker and if the mother is imprisoned the risk of trauma is greater than if a father were to be incarcerated. The main challenge researchers face with this severely understudied population is that it hard to decipher the effects of parental incarceration from the effects of other factors that could have existed long before incarceration.
Statistics have shown that one in every five children has seen their parent’s arrest. For young children, who were present at the incarceration have numerous short term effects. Children that are under the age of seven experienced nightmares and flashbacks from the event. At times the child is at school while their parent is being taken away. This causes them to come home to an empty house, and oblivious to the arrest. It is laborious for young children to grasp what is happening to their parent, that's why it’s crucial for parents to clarify the situation. Only about twenty percent of parents offered an explanation about the imprisonment. Supplying the children affected by the incarceration of a parent with authentic statements gives them an understanding of their new conditions. It also gives them guidance to manage the deprivation of the parent (Ross).
“The Long Goodbye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison”, written by Amanda Coyne depicts the struggles of parents and family members with the emotional trauma children go through due to the absence of their loved one. The story tugs the heart strings of readers with its descriptive account of Mother’s Day in a minimum security federal prison. Coyne describes the human emotions and truly gives an accurate account of what being in a visitation room is like. “The Long Goodbye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison” makes the reader question the criminal justice system and convinces him or her to adjust their way of thinking towards the definition of criminalization through the logos, pathos, and ethos demonstrated throughout the text.
“Although nearly 90% of children remain with their mothers when fathers go to prison, grandparents usually care for children when mothers are incarcerated” (Johnson & Waldfogel, 2002; Snell, 1994 as cited in; Poehlmann). This shows that the family structure is more drastically upset when the mother is imprisoned versus the father. This also shows that just losing one parent while staying in the same environment is easier to self-adjust back into equilibrium than it is to fully change and integrate into another household. While the mother is in prison, the child is now in the care of someone else and where that child is, is crucial to their development. This explains that a disrupt in family structure can impact a child’s skills that are necessary to a positive development, such as reading and math skills and the ability to focus in class to learn. Emily Durkheim’s structural functionalism theory can be used to further explain this topic. A child’s family is an organism, no matter that typicality of it’s makeup. Every person has a role in the structure and when a mother is incarcerated that disrupts the system and the children are moved into a new structure, the process towards equilibrium can be tough and in some cases detrimental to their development as they are exposed to more intellectual
Not only is prison ineffective in preventing reoffending in women and is expensive, it can be extremely damaging to the female’s well-being and their families. The effect that a custodial sentence has on women is arguably far worse than for men. Women are often not prepared or equipped for their life following their prison sentence; due to the fact that women are more likely to be lone parents before prison (Social Exclusion Unit, 2002), are more likely to leave prison homeless and unemployed (Wedderburn, 2000), and are more likely to lose access of their children whilst serving their sentence (Corston, 2007). Statistics from 2010 showed that around 17,000 children become separated from their mother by imprisonment (Wilks-Wiffen, 2011). This can be absolutely devastating to not only the female offender, but to their innocent children too. Moreover, due to the small number of women’s prisons, the average distance that women are sent away from their homes is around 60 miles (Women in Prison, 2013). Therefore, even if the women are lucky enough to keep in contact with their children, it can be tremendously hard to organise visitation and uphold
There are many prison programs that can incarcerated families especially mothers and fathers. These programs that are made up are there to help parents reunite with their children by giving them tools and information about how to treat children, to control their emotions and reaction towards issues that might get out of control, some programs even help by educating and increasing a parents self-esteem by giving them knowledge information. Not only do parenting prison programs help bond parents and children but it also helps the incarcerated person get connected with the outside world again by giving their community an insight on how to help and respond to an incarcerated person needs. In this research paper the following issues will be looked at: attachment-based program, the types of problems parents have with their children while incarcerated, and the teachings of parental strategies to use when in prison and out of prison.
This article describes the similarities and parallelism of the foster system to the prison systems and how they perpetuate and are influenced by each other. It describes how these systems commodify and dehumanize these human beings, especially women who receive long, severe sentences for minor offenses and are thus denied ability to parent their child from behind bars. This, thus, affects the child in the short and long term because these children are taken from their mothers by the state, often put into foster care, in which the state then refuses to take care of these motherless children. This then leads to social workers developing more aggressive and hostile tactics when dealing with these types of cases, because often the children must scavenge the streets in order to survive and become troubled by the social realities they face. The author then begins to discuss how the welfare system becomes heavily involved with these families, along with the stigmatizations government assistance is attached with. . It is unfortunate that this article only very briefly discusses pregnant, black incarcerated women, and the lack of prenatal care they are provided with during
Although the actual number of pregnant women incarcerated in the United States is somewhat unclear, it is estimated that six to ten percent of the females sentenced to prison are pregnant when incarcerated. (Guerino et.al., 2011) The majority of female inmates that are sentenced to prison after felony convictions are s...
From the moment the prison system had to deal with pregnant inmates, the subject of prison nurseries became controversial and it remains as such to this day. Prison nurseries provide housing for inmates’ newborns and allow the inmates to co-reside with their infants for a limited amount of time, giving them the opportunity to be part of their development for at least the first months of their lives. Furthermore, these housing arrangements let them be their children’s primary caregiver (Byrne, Goshin, & Joestl, 2010). While there are groups that advocate and promote their existence, there is also a side that concerns itself with the security risks and liabilities that come with raising infants in a prison setting. Regrettably, these risks and liabilities fall on the infants all too often and by looking at the research, it will be clear that prison nurseries actually end up being more of a punishment for the children than rehabilitative help for the mother.
The challenges of children who grow up with parents whom were incarcerated at some point in their childhood can have a major effect on their life. The incarceration of parents can at times begin to affect the child even at birth. Now with prison nurseries the impregnated mother can keep her baby during her time in jail. With the loss of their parent the child can begin to develop behavioral problems with being obedient, temper tantrums, and the loss of simple social skills. Never learning to live in a society they are deprived of a normal social life. “The enormous increase incarceration led to a parallel, but far less documented, increase in the proportion of children who grew up with a parent incarcerated during their childhood” (Johnson 2007). This means the consequences of the children of the incarcerated parents receive no attention from the media, or academic research. The academic research done in this paper is to strengthen the research already worked by many other people. The impact of the parent’s incarceration on these children can at times be both positive and negative. The incarceration of a parent can be the upshot to the change of child’s everyday life, behavioral problems, and depriving them a normal social life.
In the reading by Lynne Haney, “Motherhood as Punishment: The Case of Parenting in Prison”, Haney decided to focus on analyzing a facility that allows mothers to parent from prison. She analyzed what it meant for mothers to have to parent in prison. Specifically she wanted to investigate why it seemed that this program seemed to promise a new alternative, in order to reunify family. However, through her observations she saw that motherhood was being undermined and if anything the mothers had less power, even though the program promised more. She specifically discusses four main points in the article that are as follows: Motherhood is undermined, subsumed, punished, and finally how she observed parenting from mass incarceration.