“We’re Not Being Treated Like Mothers”: Listening to the Stories of First Nations Mothers in Prison
Abstract
:Sensitivity note: circumstances and recollections in this piece can trigger trauma, especially for people formerly imprisoned, people who have experienced child removals by the state or child protection interventions and First Nations people.
1. Introduction
“I have five kids, they are the light of my life.”
2. Systemic Discrimination and First Nations Mothers
3. Epistemological Carceralism
“We all deserve a right. And what they’ve done to us, they’ve just put us in greens and stripped our names, and they gave us a six-digit number. That’s it, go stand in line.
And once they give you that number, that sticks with you. No matter what. You’ve got one little charge that you’ve been locked up for. Once you go to jail, you’re not going to get bail again.”
4. Methodology
4.1. Guiding Principles
4.2. Location
4.3. Recruitment
4.4. Ethics
4.5. The Women
4.6. Listening
“I think I’m a strong person no matter what situation because I’ve been through so much, so like yes they send … I’ve got a time I talk them around and I bring them back to normal. So then they can sleep that night, grab them and bring them back to reality, do you know what I mean?
… basically everyone can come and talk to me about anything …”
5. Diverse Strengths of First Nations Mothers
“We’re not being treated like mothers. We are strong independent black women and we deserve our rights, you know?”
“Now I’m the fighter of the family. So … when it comes to my family I’m a big protector.”
6. Impact of Imprisonment on First Nations Mothers and Children
“We talked a lot about closing the gap. You know how they create the gap? By taking our children away from us. You and me. Putting behind this, they don’t care about them. No one wants their kids more than their own family …”
“[The department has] taken them away from me again. … My kids, they’re like, ‘Mum, why don’t you come home with us?’ They don’t understand. … They say, are the police hurting you? … And they say, Mum, can we have a sleepover with you? It breaks my heart. They’re too little, to know what the fuck this means. But now, my five-year-old’s never going to forget this. I remember when I was five, I’m pretty sure he will too …”
“I’m a mother of four children, and due to my reoffending, the reason why I’m here today, I lost my children. DOCS [Department of Child Services] took my children and placed them with a white family, not that I’m racist or anything, but placed them with a white family … There was three months between my babies being taken, my relapse and everything else, and me coming to jail. I haven’t seen my children once since I’ve been in here. I’ve had a couple of phone calls that is it. You know what I mean? That is it. I haven’t seen my babies once, and they wonder why I carry on the way I do sometimes.”
“DoCS threatened me from the day I gave birth to my kids that they were going to come and remove my kids.
I struggled at 18 to be a mum. Not having a mum, so I struggled bringing them up. … But when I asked for help, I wasn’t provided the help. Then four years ago, I gave birth to my little boy and then DoCS took my son. … He was 16 days when they come and took him from the hospital. So, I haven’t seen my son since that day. They’ve taken him from New South Wales. I’ve been trying to contact DoCS from the day he was taken to get rights to him to know what’s happening. … He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t get to meet his sister. And all of my family have been cut off from both of my kids.
As a young kid, growing up in care, I was being told that you’re not good enough.”
“I’ve got to open the doors and let a whole bunch of kids in. But that affects me again, because I don’t ever get to see my own kids.”
7. Constrained Contact between Mothers and Children
“I just think they’d be disappointed with me. … But I miss them so much.”
“I’ve never had a visit. I’ve never, ever, had a visit, the whole time I’ve been in gaol. … Too far for my family to travel.”
“My mum has a brother that lives in Sydney, [unclear] he’s come down twice. [The prison’s] out in the middle of nowhere. So it’s kind of hard. I’m surprised how he found the place.”
7.1. Lack of Support to Bring Up Their Children
“[we want] to get the right help and support within the community, especially so that we don’t have to be concerned or worried that the next time in jail we could be sharing a cell with our kids.”
“Instead of taking you and your kids putting you somewhere safe, they take your kids and then expect you to deal with it. They don’t give you counselling or anything like that, and if you get counselling they use it against you. … My DOCS [Department of Community Services] worker told me, if I work with her and be honest with her, she will help me. But she used that against me.”
“Like housing is one of the main things … you know we are mothers, we want to get our kids back but we can’t cause we keep coming back to jail because there are no houses for us … [so] we can’t get parole … we are back 2 or 3 months later because we got nothing.”
7.2. Lack of Judicial Recognition of the Costs of Imprisoning First Nations Mothers
“[The magistrate] didn’t care that my kids are struggling, and I was doing everything in my power to get the right help for them”.
“Well, when you come up for sentencing, you need to make sure that you’re heard properly and that everything’s good. You know, they understand what effects… it doesn’t just affect the women, it affects our whole family”.
8. First Nations Women in Prison Have the Solutions
8.1. Bail and Sentencing Reform
“Im not sure what kind of sentence would be right for us but I do know that to(sic) many of us are in jail for small things when we could be at home with our familys and most of all our kids and grand kids.”
“I’M NOT SURE, BUT JUST COZ WE’RE BLACK WOMEN, WE ARE ALSO MOTHERS, SISTERS & DAUGHTERS WHO WERE VICTIMS LONG BEFORE WE WERE CRIMINALS. JAIL IS NOT THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING. WE NEED TO KEEP FAMILIES TOGETHER.”(capitals in original survey)
“…we all do have kids and we wanna get out and stabilise ourselves and get our kids back, but its hard, its hard, you know what I mean? … But we try and try, we all try, it’ll never been enough for them…you continue to breach…you gotta do this, you gotta do that…why can’t they understand.”
8.2. Breaking the Cycle Means Removing Prisons from Our Lives
“We don’t want to keep coming in and out of gaol, because our kids and our grandkids and nephews are going to think my aunty and uncle are coming in and out of gaol … “I’m gunna go to gaol when I get older”, and that’s sad.”
8.3. Building Supports in the Community
“… we have a baby girl now. We like to help her, just encourage her and stuff because we’re still only young … We wish we had our Elders too, hey, babe, on the outside to help us.”
“I think that what they need is a support group for blackfullas and non blackfullas, a support system there should be like a workplace to support people when they get out for housing and stuff. You know what I mean, does that make sense. We talk about this a lot when we are up there, we don’t just sit around we talk about what needs to be done what we are going to do on the outside. You know we do have a proper life and stuff like that, we don’t want to keep coming in and out of gaol, because our kids and our grandkids and nephews are going to think my aunty and uncle are coming in and out of gaol mad I’m gunna go go to gaol when I get older and that’s sad that really is …”
9. Conclusions: First Nations Mothers’ Resilience and Strengths
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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1 | The term ‘lived sentence’ was coined by Maggie Hall to describe how people experience prison sentences and their perspectives on the sentence. See (Hall 2016). |
2 | The Mothers and Children program in NSW is available at Emu Plains and Parramatta prisons, which enables a select number of sentenced mothers to have their children in custody (see New South Wales Corrective Services 2020a). |
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Anthony, T.; Sentance, G.; Behrendt, L. “We’re Not Being Treated Like Mothers”: Listening to the Stories of First Nations Mothers in Prison. Laws 2021, 10, 74. https://doi.org/10.3390/laws10030074
Anthony T, Sentance G, Behrendt L. “We’re Not Being Treated Like Mothers”: Listening to the Stories of First Nations Mothers in Prison. Laws. 2021; 10(3):74. https://doi.org/10.3390/laws10030074
Chicago/Turabian StyleAnthony, Thalia, Gemma Sentance, and Larissa Behrendt. 2021. "“We’re Not Being Treated Like Mothers”: Listening to the Stories of First Nations Mothers in Prison" Laws 10, no. 3: 74. https://doi.org/10.3390/laws10030074