Introduction

Reflecting on the mothers’ narratives, this chapter will reveal the significance of mothers’ own experiences of being mothered as well as the circumstances and context of their lives before prison. The chapter will go on to reflect on the relationship between motherhood and desistance before exploring CJS responses to criminalised mothers.

The mothers’ experiences before criminalisation and/or prison: missed opportunities

For many criminalised pregnant and new mothers, the point at which they are sentenced or appear in court is often not their first foray into the CJS. Baldwin (2022b) describes a ‘Circle of Circumstance’ (see Figure 3.1), which is a common living space for women who will become criminalised. Most imprisoned pregnant and new mothers have experienced or are in the midst of experiencing multiple challenges, discrimination and disadvantage before they enter the prison space (Epstein et al, 2022). Baldwin’s (2022a, 2022b) research highlighted how, long before most of the mothers entered prison, there had often been multiple missed opportunities to support mothers differently. These missed and lost opportunities were often about responses to trauma, mental health, abuse, poverty and addictions, but significantly also around pregnancy, new motherhood and motherhood more generally. Torchalla et al (2014), in their study with women struggling with substance use during pregnancy and early motherhood, highlighted how participants had ‘experienced multiple and continuing forms of adversities and trauma, often in form of gender-based violence, in a variety of contexts, from a variety of offenders and on multiple levels’ (O’Malley et al, 2022: 3). As previously noted, and as argued by Clarke and Chadwick (2018), the focus of the CJS is too often to punish the individual, rather than understand or challenge the system which inflicts harm on women in contact with the CJS. This is despite the fact the ‘offender’ will almost certainly have been failed multiple times and by multiple agencies (Baldwin, 2015, 2021a, 2022a).