Prioritizing Protection: How Jailed Women Challenge Maternal Stigma

• Published date: 01 October 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/15570851231189757
• Author: Lisa Broidy,Ella Siegrist
• Date: 01 October 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Feminist Criminology

2023, Vol. 18(4) 325–352

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/15570851231189757

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Prioritizing Protection: How

Jailed Women Challenge

Maternal Stigma

Lisa Broidy

1

and Ella Siegrist

2

Abstract

Using interview data from 23 mothers in jail, we detail how jailed mothers use op-

positional identity work to challenge maternal stigma. Their reframing of “good”

mothering prioritizes children’s emotional security and physical safety over intensive,

hands-on child-care. Findings suggest that oppositional identity work helps mothers

cope with internal and external attributions of maternal failure. Findings also highlight

the limits of oppositional identity work from the margins for countering entrenched

social norms. We conclude with a call to build correctional practices and policies that

ref‌lect the lived realities of marginalized mothers in ways that support rather than

stigmatize them.

Keywords

maternal incarceration, gender, identity work

Introduction

As the numberof women incarcerated rises, so too doesthe corollary problem of maternal

incarceration.The literature has consistently found deleterious consequences that accrue

to communities, families, and children as a result of maternal incarceration (e.g. Arditti,

2015;Besemer & Dennison, 2018;Harvey, 2018;Huebner & Gustafson, 2007). In-

carcerated mothers experience unique and compounded mental health complications

1

Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

2

Department of Sociology, Washington University St. Louis, MO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Lisa Broidy, Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA.

Email: lbroidy@unm.edu

related to thestrains of both physical separationfrom their children and theirown sense of

maternal failure (Crewe et al., 2017;Morash et al., 2020). This internalized sense of

failure stems from incarcerated mothers’experiences of being routinely stigmatized and

criminalized as “bad”mothers, with women of color facing disproportionate crimi-

nalization and ensuing stigma (Garcia-Hallett, 2023). A growing body of literature

examines how incarcerated mothers adapt their maternal identities and practices in the

context of incarceration (Aiello & McQueeney, 2016;Banks 2022;Easterling et al.,

2019;Hoskins & Cobbina, 2020) and upon re-entry (Baldwin, 2018;Brown & Bloom,

2009;Garcia-Hallet 2023). This literature suggests that motherhood, and more specif-

ically,being a “good”mom, is of central import to incarceratedmothers. However, these

very attempts to enact “goodmotherhood”are also often implicated in their experiences

of criminalization.

Many women f‌ind themselves caught up in the criminal legal system for instru-

mental, nonviolent crimes committed for the express purpose of protecting and

supporting their children (Ferraro & Moe, 2003;Garcia-Hallett, 2019;Miller et al.,

2015). Others f‌ind themselves incarcerated as a consequence of substance use, as-

sociated with histories of abuse and trauma, and often exacerbated by feelings of

hopelessness at not being the mother they think their children deserve (Ferraro & Moe,

2003;Miller et al., 2015). The current study echoes these past f‌indings: while in-

carceration is often used to mark women as “bad”mothers, the irony is that it is their

commitment to their children and their related emotional vulnerabilities that often drive

their incarceration. This irony is at the heart of their efforts to cope with and reject the

“bad”mother label. In fact, challenging this label is of central import to the future selves

incarcerated mothers envision (Banks, 2022;De Coster & Heimer, 2020;Giordano

et al., 2002;Morash et al., 2020).

At the same time, incarceration marks mothers in ways that problematize their

efforts to claim a “good”mother identity, particularly in the context of a correctional

regimes that prioritize narrow, hegemonic norms of maternal f‌itness and reinforce

controlling images that characterize Black and Brown mothers as unf‌it parents (Garcia-

Hallett, 2023). Understanding how incarcerated mothers, particularly poor mothers of

color, manage this identity challenge is important for theorizing about mothering on the

margins and in the context of criminal legal surveillance. As well, identifying the

institutional and personal struggles and stigmas these mothers endure provides insights

about the support needs of mothers facing a range of structural, institutional, and social

marginalization.

In this paper, we build on the growing literature that examines how incarcerated

mothers reframe motherhood by actively crafting maternal identities that support their

claims to a “good”mother identity in the face of direct and indirect messages that they

have failed as mothers. Relying on interview data from a sample of largely Hispanic

1

and Native-American mothers, we examine how these claims unfold both in con-

versation with, and in opposition to, dominant ideologies of motherhood. We argue that

resistance projects focused on redef‌ining “good”motherhood represent an important

kind of oppositional identity work (Schwalbe & Schrock, 1996) that aims to challenge

326 Feminist Criminology 18(4)