Women Coping In Prison

Women Coping in Prison: How Mothers in Prison can Stay Connected to Their Children
Columbia Southern University

Over the past thirty years, throughout every state there has been a drastic increase in the number of women in prison. There are only nine states which have a prison nursery in operation or currently under development. According to the “Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2004 four percent of women in state prisons and three percent of women in federal prisons were pregnant at the time of their admittance to prison” (Corrections.com, 2009). If pregnant women or new mothers in prison are allowed to keep their babies for a fixed period of time it gives the mother bonding time with the infant as well as togetherness
These nursery programs can be either on-site within the prison or off-site in a community correction setting. When the nursery is on-site it is either in a wing or separate unit of the facility away from the general population. There are guidelines that incarcerated women must meet to be a candidate for the nursery programs in prisons. A few of these guidelines are their convictions are for a nonviolent crime, and cannot have a history of child abuse or neglect with the exception of the nursery program in Washington State these mothers are not limited to convictions of nonviolent crimes. The time that a mother is allowed to parent her infant with their prison nursery programs can range from 30 days to 30 months depending on the facility in which she is incarcerated (Stein Jiang, 2010). New York was the first state to introduce the nursery program in 1902. New York stood as the only state with such a program until 1994 when the state of Nebraska started a nursery program (Stein Jiang, 2010). The other seven states which have introduced nursery programs are California, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota, Washington, and West Virginia. West Virginia has been the most recent state to begin a nursery program it was opened in 2009 (Stein Jiang, 2010). The following table shows the states that have prison nurseries, the year the nursery program was introduced, and the amount of time the mothers can keep
If the mother is serving a prison term and is a non-violent offender with no history of child abuse or neglect the best place for an infant is still with its mother. There is only a hand full of expectant mothers in the prison system allowed to keep their babies for more than 24 – 48 hours after delivery. The few that are lucky enough to meet the guidelines and be accepted into one of the prison nursery programs will get to keep their babies anywhere from 30 days to 30 months. The prison nursery program comes with many benefits for both the mother and child. The first benefit of these programs is that the mother and child have the opportunity to bond which is considered by some experts to be a critical stage in infant development (Corrections.com, 2009). Another benefit is mothers participating in these programs are required to take parenting and infant development classes, childcare and breastfeeding classes (Ford, 2008). There are still more benefits of nursery programs in prison “One-third of women that delivered their babies while serving a prison sentence and were forced to give the child to family members, friends or the foster care system had returned to prison within three years of their release, while only 9% of the women who participated in the nursery programs were re-offenders within the same time frame (Goshin Smith, 2009). There are always critics and some critics of the prison