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Mother's Identity In Prison Essay

688 Words3 Pages

Factors affecting a mother’s identity in prison and its impacts
There are factors that can affect a mother’s identity in prison and one of which is the prison environment. Longer sentences, harsher prison conditions along with pressure that has been created by overpopulation and budget cuts, threatens the existence of treatment and reform-oriented prisons and that it would eventually swing back to disciplinary model prisons (Clark, 1995). Despite of the punitive and inappropriate acts in prison those mothers have been experiencing, many of them take advantage of the self-help, educational, vocational, and various parenting programs that would be essential for their change and self-development and would give them opportunities to redefine themselves …show more content…

All of the things that prisoners will be doing are controlled by correctional officers and adult’s roles and responsibility has been taken away from them. Inmates cannot be trusted with too much of responsibility because they’re in prison to be corrected and to learn to accept authority (Clark, 1995). At some point, because of the tradition and current practice of treating mothers in prison as wayward children (Burkhart, 1973; Carlen, 1985; Chesney-Lind & Rodriguez, 1983; Dobash, Dobash & Gutteridge, 1986) they’ve become like kids on playground; yelling at each other, giggling, horse playing and these “kids” are mothers with children of their own (Clark, 1995). The Prison which represented by officers, staff, and administration act as “Parent” which impose rules and sanctions which may result to negative self-representations and impulses that can re-create some of the same problematic family and interpersonal dynamics mothers had experienced. Furthermore, this has been significant given the large percentage of women and mothers in prison reported experiences of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse (Grossman, 1985), Moreover, according to Sykes (1958), many have noted that prison, with its great number of annoying rules, develops a society of rule breakers and antiauthority norms and values. Mothers in prison live with deep guilt (Baunach, 1985; Lundberg et al., 1975) both for

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