On prison

Prison brawl…

Both Broadsheet and the G&M are talking about women, babies, and prison on the same day! And not referring to each other!

So I am making the connection. Maybe this is more about making connections than skirting the issue. Hmm.

Okay, so Salon’s Carol Lloyd wrote about how she found out in Mexico, mothers who go to jail must take their children with them, and they stay with them until the children turn six, at which time the kids are wrenched from prison (and sus madres).

Today a BC woman convicted of manslaughter and her infant went to jail together. Well, they’d actually been in jail already for two years served, or so it seems. The woman killed her common-law husband. For the sake of this argument I’ll assume away the intuitive wonderings about battered women’s syndrome, self-defense, defense of her children, etc. I am taking it for granted she was a cold hearted killer, even though the stats are against me on this one.

The questions: Are prisons good places for kids? Do criminals have the right to keep their kids with them? If the kids are very young? If they are nursing? If the sentence is really short?

The comments sections for both articles are rife with the predictable: “what about the daddies?”; “will the infants sue for wrongful imprisonment?”, “this is motherhood worship”, etc.

Now, motherhood worship (different from the worship of my own mother, very different) is gross to me. I’ll get into that another time, and I admit I probably have a unique personal vexation towards this, and social belly-rubbing is not necessarily an apocalyptic sign that women have lost all meaning on the planet other than as wombs. I acknowledge that’s probably taking a bit far. Maybe I just fear the idea of nine months of people giving me the evil eye over my drunken olive gin martini.

Back to the questions: of course prisons are horrible places for kids. Prisons are horrible places for anybody. But a lot of places are horrible for kids. And it’s not like all of these women have wonderful men at their side ready to parent 100% while she does time. Sometimes the fathers are, uh, dead.

Some commentators suggested women lose all rights to their children when they commit crime (I really hope the writers meant serious, violent crime…because losing your children over a bunch of neglected parking tickets is, uh, well, tacky). Then the children are sent off to be adopted by “barren 40 year olds”. SERIOUSLY. Somebody wrote that. Enter Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner.

The reason this is about women is because very very few men single parent. It’s going up, but it is still extremely rare. And of course no men breastfeed. And of course of course, no men give birth while behind bars. Until these things change, it will remain a bigger deal for kids when women are sent to jail. We don’t even need get into the bonding mother-love mumbo-jumbo, we can just stick with the numbers.

Women, kids and prisons are a complex scenario, sure. But women don’t tend to be serious violent offenders, and as a result, women’s prisons aren’t generally as horrendously barren coffin-like as our movie imaginings of jail. Which makes me think: if the mom is not in jail for child abuse, and no nice legal guardian (such as Dad) is willing and able to take over, and it’s decided that the kid isn’t going to jail with its mother, there had better be a better alternative awaiting it. And besides a nice legal guardian I am not sure what that is. Not the adoption circuit, that’s for sure. Very few sentences are for the roughly 18 years we think it takes to become an adult. Mom is coming back. Kids aren’t dogs you give away when you move into a non-dog-friendly condo. In fact, you shouldn’t even do that to a dog, that’s heartless and selfish.

Maybe this issue is more about the need for a massive overhaul of how we do prison business and rehabilitation than it is about motherhood.