Rehabilitation, Risk, and the Carceral Mother: Subjectivity and Parenting Classes in Prisons

摘要

Parenting education classes are ubiquitous in the correctional system, particularly for female inmates. This approach to reforming women embodies a maternal subjectivity far removed from the poverty-stricken, criminalized, largely Native Hawai‘ian population in Hawaii’s prisons. Neoliberal governance views poor parenting as the reason for crime, poverty, and a host of social ills. Parenting classes, while well meant and popular among female inmates, foster a reality grounded in notions of middle-class family life. Prisons and other disciplinary systems (such as child welfare) target women’s maternal concerns in order to manage risk, both among female inmates and, potentially, among their children through parenting education. Using data from 240 prison case files and 25 in-depth interviews of mothers on parole supervision, this study finds that the white, middle-class notions embodied by the parenting class are largely at odds with the lived experience of parenting women who are incarcerated.