Mother figures behind bars

Abstract

For over 100 years, mothers have been allowed to keep their babies with them in prisons, with these arrangements being formalised in England and Wales in the early 1980s. Every year, 600 pregnant women are held in prisons in the UK, yet Ministry of Justice figures suggest that only 100 babies live with their mothers in prison. This chapter presents a Foucauldian-inspired critique of the production of meaning through discourse to examine the contemporary discourse around motherhood in prison in the UK, alongside a critique of Mother and Baby unit application criteria. This chapter exposes the implicit and yet underpinning notional representations of 'appropriate' motherhood in this context.