“Scum (of the Earth)”: Incarcerated Mothers’ Experiences of Slow Violence

Abstract

Incarcerated mothers experience multiple forms of harm embedded within the criminal legal system, yet relatively little attention has been paid to incarcerated mothers’ experiences of slow violence, violence whose harm occurs gradually over time, often in mundane and disregarded ways. We conducted semi-structured interviews with incarcerated mothers to explore their parenting experiences while in prison and analyzed their experiences through the frame of slow violence. The findings include salient themes of environmentally hazardous prison conditions that negatively impacted their health; broken phones that disrupted communication with and parenting of their children; and unending waitlists that jeopardized their parenting rights and delayed reunification with their children. We situate these findings within the framework of slow violence to highlight the insidious and overlooked forms of harm in the prison environment which impacted aspects of incarcerated mothers’ wellbeing. We argue that understanding incarcerated mothers’ experiences within this framework draws attention to ways that state actors, as well as common theoretical framings of incarceration dynamics, perpetuate and normalize the suffering of incarcerated mothers. By reframing the harms of incarceration as acts of slow violence, new insights are gleaned for theorizing and addressing violence against incarcerated women.