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Family life can be seriously disrupted when a mother is imprisoned. The separation changes and often reduces the type, frequency and quality of contact that can be achieved between family members, and especially for children when their mothers were their primary carers and living with them before her imprisonment. In England and Wales, prisoners are permitted contact with children and families through prison visits, telephone contact and letter-writing through the post, and in some prisons via email. Despite the recent policy interest in supporting prisoners' family ties, research has highlighted the challenges that families and prisoners face using these communicative mechanisms. Building on this, the chapter contributes new knowledge by shifting the lens to explore how family members construct and adjust their practices to promote mother–child contact during maternal imprisonment.

The empirical study draws on semistructured interviews with mothers in prison and family members (caregivers) to children of female prisoners. Guided by a ‘family practices’ theoretical framework (Morgan, 2011), the findings show innovative adjustments, a willingness to make sacrifices and alternative routes to improve contact utilised by mothers and caregivers to prioritise mother–child contact. We see the strength, resilience and autonomy shown by family members to promote their relationships in spite of communicative barriers. There are important lessons to be learned from the families' lived experience for policy and practice, which, without due and genuine consideration, might further hinder opportunities for mother–child contact during maternal imprisonment.

From June 2017 to May 2018, the Prison Reform Trust partnered with Families Outside to identify the particular impacts on children of a mother's involvement in the criminal justice system. This included a literature review and extensive consultations with 25 children and 31 mothers with lived experience. This chapter presents the main findings of the research, which identified five key themes: ‘Children with a mother in prison are invisible within the systems that are there to protect them’; ‘Every aspect of a child's life may be disrupted when a mother goes to prison’; ‘Children feel stigmatised when a mother is involved in the criminal justice system’; ‘Children affected by imprisonment face many barriers to support’ and ‘With the right support, children can become more resilient and develop the skills they need to thrive’. The material presented in this chapter constitutes a compelling case for reform. The chapter concludes with recommendations for action at local and national levels to protect children from the harm caused by maternal imprisonment.

The definition of the term “family” around the Western world is more heterogeneous than ever before and so are its roles and the social expectations of it. However, prisoners’ families (specifically parents and siblings) are expected to support their incarcerated son/brother as they are perceived responsible for his choices and as having the closest relationship with him. Based on a study of parents and siblings of incarcerated men in Israel, this chapter’s goal is to shed light on families’ choice to support their incarcerated son or brother and the struggles this choice entails. A thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 17 parents and 10 siblings of incarcerated men in Israel showed that nuclear family members may experience various struggles throughout the legal proceedings, including family hardships, negative social experiences, and negative experiences with formal institutions – all leading to social self-exclusion. Looking through the intersectionality lens, the findings show that when accumulating hardships that prisoners’ families experience encounter perceived harsh institutional systems of oppression, preordained marginalization can be deepened as families operate in opposition.

The chapter centres on a practitioners' experience of supporting children affected by maternal imprisonment for over a decade in Liverpool, Merseyside in the United Kingdom.

Using the data derived from my PhD ‘Bubbles, Brick Walls and Connectivity’, I offer ‘whole families’ experiences of support systems including their experience of statutory services, nonstatutory services, family and friends and ‘Good Practice’ suggestions are proffered.

Consideration is given to what support can look like, the successes and the challenges. Attention is paid to how to help children who have contact with their mothers and how this help might differ to children for whom contact has been severed.

The chapter also focusses on supporting children and families post release and the challenges of engaging the mother in the service. Stories which highlight how the mother/child relationship can become fragmented/disrupted, either prior to or owing to imprisonment, are shared.

Intergenerational confinement is an under-recognized, policy-driven issue which greatly impacts Indigenous and racialized peoples in countries with ongoing colonial legacies. Numerous policy solutions enacted over colonial history have exacerbated instead of mitigated this situation. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the impacts of carceral legacies, moving beyond the dominant focus of parental incarceration in the literature. Focusing on Indigenous peoples, multiple generations in families and communities have been subjected to changing methods of confinement and removal. Using critical policy analysis and interview research, this chapter interrogates these intergenerational impacts of carceral policy-making in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 124 people in the three case countries, this chapter centers perspectives of people who have been intergenerationally confined in carceral institutions. With a goal of transformation, it then explores an alternative orientation to policy-making that seeks to acknowledge, account for, and address the harmful direct and indirect ripple-effects of carceral strategies over generations.

Whilst small, the number of women in Cambodian prisons has been growing rapidly. These women are often first-time offenders, detained on drug or poverty-related offenses. Most women are detained pre-trial, then sentenced harshly. Children in Cambodia can accompany their mother in prison, but there is no standardized process for this to occur. Conditions within the prisons have been described as substandard and extremely challenging, with a lack of appropriate nutrition, health care, and environmental stimulation. There is also a lack of humanitarian programs addressing the specific needs and challenges faced by women prisoners, and their children. This chapter provides an overview of the work of This Life Cambodia, a Non-Government Organization (NGO), which delivers targeted programs to both women and their children, during and after imprisonment. It discusses the role of the This Life in Family (TLIF) program, which provides valued support to vulnerable families at risk of separation. The program primarily targets mothers in prison from poor, disadvantaged and multiple deprived communities, who are accompanied by, or separated from, their children.

The title of this chapter was inspired by Martin, a prisoner the author met while conducting fieldwork. Martin remarked that, despite the common rhetoric around prisoners ‘maintaining’ their family ties, the reality was that during imprisonment it became more about trying to cling on to them. Imprisonment is perhaps one of the most brutal disruptions a family can undergo, leaving them little choice but to adapt to this enforced transition. Immediately, the spaces where family life can happen narrow severely and become dictated by the prison environment and the plethora of rules that regulate it. The immediate physical separation, onerous restrictions on physical contact and the heavily surveilled nature of family contact during imprisonment constricts space for emotional expression, often rendering romantic relationships clandestine and fatherhood attenuated. Further, the temporal space for family is reduced as limited opportunities for visits lead prisoners to eschew contact with wider family members and prioritise their ‘nuclear’ family. Drawing on empirical research conducted at two male prisons in England and Wales, this chapter then, will detail the complexities of how families navigate this transition and the limitations on what family can mean in the prison environment. The chapter will conclude with the implications of these restrictions for the ultimate transition when prisoners return ‘home’.

Over 2 million individuals are incarcerated in the US criminal justice system. More than half of incarcerated Americans are also parents of minors. Parental incarceration can lead to a higher risk of mental illness and enduring trauma in children, as well as other problematic cognitive, developmental, and educational outcomes. Examining parental incarceration through a racial equity lens is critical, as people of color make up 67% of the incarcerated population despite making up only 37% of the US population. Further, gender-related equity issues pose important challenges for families with incarcerated parents. Here, we discuss prison-based psychosocial interventions designed both to build parenting skills and to improve parent well-being within a racial and gender equity lens. We hypothesize that effective services in these areas are essential components in a broad strategy designed to mitigate the potential negative effects suffered by families and children of incarcerated parents of color as a result of their imprisonment.

In recent years, academics, policymakers and activists in a number of countries have become increasingly concerned with the needs and experiences of imprisoned mothers and their children. With a few exceptions, this research has tended to focus on single jurisdictions or on limited jurisdictional comparisons. Several common themes emerge when considering international perspectives on mothering and imprisonment, but political, social, cultural, economic and penological factors mean that these issues can play out differently in different settings. Thus, in the United Kingdom and the United States, much of the debate is around keeping mothers and babies together, whereas in many other countries the focus is on the desirability of developing realistic and practical alternatives to children growing up in the prison with their mother. International organisations such as the UNCRC have considered the particular needs of children imprisoned with their mothers and also the challenges of ‘mothering from the inside’. That said, this research has tended to focus on narrow biological and gestational definitions of motherhood which may not reflect contemporary realities. With this in mind, this chapter will outline and explore international perspectives on mothering and imprisonment, identifying key issues of commonality and difference and situating these perspectives within emerging research on imprisonment, diversity and mothering.

This review integrates and builds linkages among existing theoretical and empirical literature from across disciplines to further broaden our understanding of the relationship between inequality, imprisonment, and health for black men. The review examines the health impact of prisons through an ecological theoretical perspective to understand how factors at multiple levels of the social ecology interact with prisons to potentially contribute to deleterious health effects and the exacerbation of race/ethnic health disparities.

This review finds that there are documented health disparities between inmates and non-inmates, but the casual mechanisms explaining this relationship are not well-understood. Prisons may interact with other societal systems – such as the family (microsystem), education, and healthcare systems (meso/exosystems), and systems of racial oppression (macrosystem) – to influence individual and population health.

The review also finds that research needs to move the discussion of the race effects in health and crime/justice disparities beyond the mere documentation of such differences toward a better understanding of their causes and effects at the level of individuals, communities, and other social ecologies.