Returning to Motherhood: Post-Incarceration Reintegration and Mothering for Justice-Involved Black Women

Abstract

Feminist criminologists have centralized gender’s importance in studying justice-involved women’s lives, but understanding how socio-cultural expectations and racialized constructions of motherhood affect post-incarceration reintegration is lacking. Extant research overlooks the consequences of incarceration for poor, Black mothers. To rectify this gap, this paper uses qualitative data collected from semi-structured interviews and participant observation with 12 formerly incarcerated Black mothers residing in a large urban city in the midwestern United States. This article fills this gap by using an intersectional framework to illuminate the conflicts between their lived experience as women with criminalized social identities and the societal expectations placed upon them as women and mothers. Findings reveal that post-incarceration reintegration reintroduces stressors associated with mothering while also magnifying the effects of criminalization, punishment, and resource constraints for justice-involved women and mothers.