Fight or Flight: How Jailed Mothers Envision Future Motherhood

• In Event: Intersectionality and Women's Offending and Criminal Legal System Experiences

Abstract

A growing body of work shows that jails and prisons simultaneously promote hegemonic motherhood and exclude incarcerated mothers from “good motherhood.” Less understood is how these experiences influence mothers’ plans to care for their children following jailtime. Using interviews with 23 mothers in jail, we find that jailed moms respond with “fight” or “flight.” Most moms plan to “fight for their kids,” leaning into an aspirational vision of motherhood and reunification despite inadequate structural supports to actualize those goals. Fewer mothers respond by taking “flight” from motherhood. These mothers withdraw from future visions of motherhood, becoming convinced that they “wouldn’t be good for their kids.” This response shows how jailed mothers’ abilities are ideologically undermined and materially unsupported. Even among jailed mothers who hope to reunify with their children and to support them after incarceration, actualizing this reality proves complicated because they leave jail without the resources needed to actualize positive motherhood. By demonstrating how mothers react to the double-bind of sanctioned and promoted motherhood, we argue that the only effective pathway to addressing rising maternal incarceration is to reinvest in social supports and reconsider punitive intrusions into families.

Authors

• Ella June Siegrist, Washington University

• Lisa Broidy, University of New Mexico