I have come to take you home

Space to breathe

It is a blustery winter evening, and I am sitting by the fire, fingers wrapped around a mug of Rooibos tea. I am listening to Marie’s stories. Raised in a coloured household on the remote Moravian mission of Wupperthal, Marie left the Cederberg Mountains of the Western Cape to work for White men during the apartheid era. As a single mother and democracy activist, she fought to give her son access to the education she had been denied. In the post-apartheid era, she has taken great pleasure in witnessing her son’s contribution to educational reform in Cape Town, and when she retired, he invited her to move in with family. Through all the years of her life, Marie had never stopped longing for the wide-open lands of her childhood, so she returned to the Cederberg instead. Now Marie lives in a spartan cottage in the centre of the mission hamlet of Heuningvlei, located at the base of Pakhuis Pass where arid mountain meets agrarian marsh. Known to all in Wupperthal as Tannie Nuus (Auntie News), Marie is famous for her fierce intelligence and neighbourly spirit. Scrambling to survive on her meagre pension, a small hillside crop of Rooibos, and a micro used-clothing enterprise that is more charitable than profitable, she says that life is bitter, but the Cederberg gives her space to breathe.

Ancestral origins

South Africa

In 1999, UNESCO added three paleo-archaeological sites to its World Heritage list. Situated in South Africa, these offer crucial evidence into the origins of our species, for their artefacts show that early hominids began living in Southern Africa more than three million years ago and that human ancestors domesticated fire more than a million years in our past (UNESCO, 1999). In northwest South Africa, the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site (2020) claims that our ‘collective umbilical cord lies buried’ in Africa, where the earliest hominids emerged about seven million years ago, invented stone tools more than two million years ago, and evolved into modern humans around 200000 BCE. Although archaic humans, such as the Neanderthal, have been found in other parts of the world, the genetic and fossil evidence points to an African genesis of anatomically modern humans (Relethford 2008). As genetic findings indicate a degree of interhominin mixing, modern human ancestry is mostly, although not entirely, African in origin.

Given its placement at the confluence of two oceans, Southern Africa is a biodiverse and heterogeneous land. Khoekhoe and Sān peoples comprise its original inhabitants (Besten, 2009). Among the most diverse peoples on earth, the gather-hunter Sān historically lived in ethnically defined areas, where they moved according to the seasons in symbiosis with water, plant, and animal life. Sān societies spoke numerous unrelated languages, some of which remain in use (Barnard, 2019). Khoekhoe societies either displaced or broke away from the Sān around 2,300 years ago when these peoples accepted animal husbandry as a way of life (Smith, 2009).

Introduction

This introductory chapter will open the conversation around pregnancy and new motherhood in prison. Having provided the context and explored the mother and baby unit (MBU) application process, the chapter will bring to the fore some of the tragic losses that have underpinned the drive for improvement in the care of pregnant and new mothers in prison. The chapter will then highlight our underpinning research and will make clear our position as researchers and practitioners.

In March 2019 both authors, together with women who have lived experience, other academics and practitioners, including from the Royal College of Midwives and the charities Birth Companions and Children Heard and Seen, gave televised evidence to the Joint Human Rights Committee (JHRC). Despite the lifelong implications of separation, or the trauma of being pregnant in prison, until recently very little was known about the experiences of women in such circumstances, particularly women from ethnic minority backgrounds. Pregnancy and imprisonment is a topic that has recently begun garnering interest. The subject had previously not enjoyed a particularly high profile, politically, academically or in terms of public interest. However, in more recent times the excellent work and campaigning of charities like Birth Companions and Women in Prison, and important publications of the authors and others (Raikes and Lockwood, 2011; Galloway et al, 2014; O’Keefe and Dixon, 2015; Baldwin and Epstein, 2017; Dolan et al, 2019; Minson, 2020; Baldwin, 2022a, 2022b; Epstein et al, 2022), has shone light on the experiences of imprisoned mothers and babies. Consequently, the experiences and needs of this previously largely invisible population are now being discussed and, importantly, being considered in prison policy development and practice. Significantly, with a view to effecting meaningful change for the first time in many decades, not least via the Ministry of Justice’s Review of Operational Policy on Pregnancy, Mother and Baby Units and Maternal Separation published in July 2022.

Introduction

All mothers take with them a legacy from their time in prison and/or a prison MBU. Sometimes that legacy is positive; for example, some mothers may have benefited from a safer and intentionally supportive space to begin life as a mother than they might otherwise have had (though most often not without some cost), but often there are negative and complex consequences too. This evidence-based volume has revealed and unpicked some of those realities.

We, the authors, have both undertaken multiple research projects that inform our writing here, but the bulk of the evidence for this book came from two main studies, Motherhood Challenged (Baldwin, 2021a) and The Incarcerated Pregnancy (Abbott, 2018). We acknowledge that since our research was undertaken there is more of an appetite and motivation for positive change (in part, stimulated and assisted by our research). This change, although coming on the back of the aforementioned tragedies, is welcome.

This chapter incorporates a reflective summary of the takeaway messages of the book while re-stating the current landscape and present commitment to change. Drawing on our own thoughts, research and the women’s voices, we conclude with 21 recommendations, which, if implemented, we feel would go some way towards minimising harm and improving outcomes for pregnant and new mothers in and after prison.

Appetite for change

It is positive that the Ministry of Justice has committed to improving conditions for mothers and their babies, and that they are heeding advice and guidance from experts like the authors, charitable organisations like Birth Companions and activists like the gender justice pressure group Level Up. We echo the recommendations we have made previously, and those outlined in the recent reviews. The Trowler review and the Review of Operational Policy on Pregnancy, Mother and Baby Units and Maternal Separation are important and influential reports that shine a light on the current provisions made for mothers and babies, where the gaps in provision are and how best to improve responses.

Introduction

This chapter offers a view of the needs and experiences of pregnant women and mothers of infants in prison from two women who have lived it, and the charity that supported them during that time and beyond, namely Birth Companions. It considers the value of specialist, voluntary sector provision in prison, the need for scrutiny and for holding the state to account for its provision of care to women and babies in incarceration. It argues the case for a different approach to the sentencing of pregnant women and mothers. Ultimately, like the authors, we believe that, while improvements in the care of women who are pregnant or have recently given birth must be made, the prison environment will never be a safe and appropriate environment for those women and their babies, and that reform of the practices around remand, sentencing and licence recall is essential in order to bring an end to imprisonment for these women in all but the most exceptional of circumstances.

This chapter is co-authored by Samantha, Michelle and Kirsty; three members of the charity Birth Companions, which has specialised in supporting and advocating for pregnant women and new mothers in contact with the CJS for more than 25 years. Samantha and Michelle are members of the Birth Companions Lived Experience Team; a group of over 40 women who are committed to using their experiences of the criminal justice, social services and maternity systems to drive improvements in the care of other pregnant women and mothers. Kirsty is head of policy and communications at the charity, working closely with the Lived Experience Team to influence policy and practice across these systems.

The Birth Companions Lived Experience Team

The Lived Experience Team is a group of volunteers, many of whom have received Birth Companions’ support themselves while in prison or in the community. Members of the team are recompensed for the work they do at the NHS Patient and Public Voice payment rates, in recognition of the expertise they bring to the projects they are involved in, including policy consultations, research, training and resource development. Where payments may have implications for a woman’s welfare benefits, staff provide support on obtaining appropriate advice.

Introduction

The ‘pains of imprisonment’ (Sykes, 2007 [1958]), and even gendered pains of imprisonment to an extent (Crewe et al, 2017), are recognised and familiar, however our research responded to gaps in knowledge around the maternal pains of imprisonment (Abbott, 2018; Baldwin, 2021a). The pains of maternal imprisonment are not left at the prison gates, for the mothers (and their children and babies), the legacy of maternal imprisonment endures (Eaton, 1993; Baldwin, 2017, 2020a, 2022a; Masson, 2019). This chapter examines this legacy. It reveals how the shame women felt in prison persists post-release. It reveals the multi-layered traumatic impact of imprisonment on the mothers and their families, and the importance of ‘hope’ in resilience.

Post-prison guilt, stigma and shame

Layered shame

Research with post-release women found that there were many challenges specifically related to motherhood in the immediate aftermath of prison, but also significantly, for many years, and sometimes intergenerationally (Baldwin, 2021a, 2022a). Although feeling stigmatised is a common feeling for many post-release prisoners (Goffman, 1963), for mothers it was often specifically related to their motherhood and was frequently related to a fear of negative evaluation by others (Liss et al, 2013; Baldwin, 2022a).

Meditation

Winds of change

On a cool and cloudy evening in the late Baltic summer of 1989, a northern wind was blowing. Protesting the Soviet occupation of formerly sovereign lands, two million people peacefully joined hands on 23 August to form the Baltic Way to independence. Flowing unbroken for 675 kilometres through the capital cities of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, this human chain occurred as part of a Singing Revolution that had been shaped by a series of environmental protests (Darst, 2001). Baltic insurrection generated rapid social change. Alongside its sister states, the Republic of Latvia regained its independence in 1991, enabling Latvians to embark upon a massive project of national reconstruction.

An equally powerful wind was blowing at the southern tip of Africa. Less than two weeks after Latvians participated in the Baltic Way, South Africans converged in Cape Town on 2 September 1989. Demanding an end to White supremacist rule, thousands of activists took to the streets in a peaceful demonstration of civil disobedience that soon became known as the Purple Rain Protest (Smuts and Westcott, 1991). The police sprayed a volley of purple water onto protestors to mark people for arrest, and so the following day, graffiti sprung up around Cape Town stating ‘The Purple Shall Govern’. In less than a year, South Africa began transitioning to multiracial democracy, with the anti-apartheid movement’s revolutionary leader, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, assuming the presidency in 1994 (Kök Arslan and Turhan, 2016).

The state apparatus was powerless to halt these winds of change. The final Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, had opened the door to democracy by embarking upon perestroika in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, but his plan to reform the Soviet Union was overwhelmed by populist demands for more revolutionary change (MacKinnon, 2008).

South Africa’s multi-ethnic heritage

African science articulates a cosmology of interconnectedness like that of the Baltics. According to Mathias Guenther (2020), the Sān peoples of Southern Africa shared a common perception of the universe as unbounded and changeable. Roaming an arid landscape alongside the other species they depended upon for subsistence, the ancient Sān believed humans and animals flowed into one another through spacetime. These social interactions brought meaning and order to the chaotic impulses of a participatory universe. In contrast to the gather-hunter Sān, who recognized the right of all life to a free existence, the pastoral Khoekhoe possessed livestock and paid tribute to tribal leaders (Smith, 2009). While Khoekhoe societies introduced a degree of hierarchy into the self-other relationship, animal welfare was a shared value among all Indigenous Southern Africans, who often shifted between herder and hunter lifestyles and Khoe-Sān identities (Barnard, 2008).

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, Bantu-speaking societies teach a similar worldsense. Experiencing the cosmic web of life as a divine Vital Force, Bantu-speaking peoples recognized the rights of other species to wellbeing, with cultural philosophers appointing the spirits, ancestors, and living human elders as ecological guardians. During the colonial era, the Bantu concept of Vital Force merged with Christian notion of God, giving rise to African Christianity, in all its cultural, linguistic, and ethnic forms (Kaoma, 2014).

Ubuntu is a pan-African moral philosophy. Although the term derives from the Xhosa and Zulu languages of Southern Africa, Ubuntu concepts undergird moral thinking across the continent. As a distinctly African science, Ubuntu challenges the Euro-Western discourse on human rights, which places individual and collective rights into opposition rather than recognizing their interdependence. In The Lessons of Ubuntu, Mark Mathabane (2018) identifies the hostile and nihilistic ideologies undergirding racial and ethnic relations within the neoliberal world-system. The survival-of-the-fittest theorem buttressing modern rational discourse reduces human agency to a stark choice: ‘to hate or be hated, to oppress or be oppressed, to kill or be killed’ (p 9).

Latvian folk song

Land and freedom

It is an early morning on Ataugas Farm. I awake under the wooden rafters of Aivars and Lilija Ansoni’s home and groggily make my way down the stairs, unsure what the day will bring. I arrived on the farm the evening before, having arranged to work in exchange for an account of Latvia’s organic farming movement from a couple who has been involved since its inception. Aivars is in the kitchen, frying eggs in a skillet. He adds a generous dollop of sour cream to the sizzling eggs then slides them onto a plate and hands the food to me, blue eyes twinkling. I inhale the rich aroma with surprised pleasure. Aivars laughs and tells me that this is one of the many benefits of being a farmer: ‘I have always loved sour cream on fried eggs,’ he says, ‘but it was too fattening to eat when I worked in the city. This will give you the energy to work hard today!’

The agrarian ideal runs deep in the Latvian national consciousness for, in this formerly colonized society, land is a potent symbol of cultural freedom. When Latvia first secured its independence from foreign rule in 1920, the young Republic immediately passed the Agrarian Reform Law. Transferring land ownership from the Baltic German nobility – who at the time were less than 4 per cent of the population – to Latvian peasants, the Republic abruptly dismantled a colonial production regime that had been in existence since the fourteenth century (Plakans, 1995). This act radically transformed the agrarian landscape, as large estates were carved into small-scale family farms. When Latvians again declared their independence in 1990, the transitional government re-enacted the agrarian reforms of the First Republic, encouraging a new generation of Latvians to return to the land and take up the national tradition of homesteading (Žakevičiūtė, 2016).

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).