Invisible Mothers

System management and compensatory parenting: Educational involvement after maternal incarceration

“…Importantly, the primary audience of school involvement was not the school itself but children first and foremost, along with the alternative caregivers with whom relationships had been strained by maternal incarceration. In addition to wanting to "make up for lost time" (Garcia-Hallett, 2022), mothers also understood their children as a source of pride and self-worth and viewed their children's educational attainment as a barometer of their parenting, a finding that was consistent across race. In contrast to the literature on "intensive motherhood" (Hays, 1996), compensatory parenting had more straightforward measures of success: Mothers wanted their children to graduate from high school and to avoid following the mother's path into the carceral system.…”

“…When necessary, hypervigilance converts to "crisis motherwork," temporarily abandoning all other obligations to fend off an immediate situational threat of CPS intervention (Gurusami, 2019). Relative to similarly disadvantaged mothers without an incarceration history, formerly incarcerated custodial mothers may be even more actively involved in institutional settings such as schools, increasing system management to meet the elevated risk of CPS involvement that follows a maternal incarceration history (e.g., Garcia-Hallett, 2022). This behavior may be particularly heightened among Black formerly incarcerated mothers and kinship caregivers given the racialized threat of CPS intervention (Roberts, 2012).…”

“…In place of system avoidance, research has found that low-income (although not necessarily formerly incarcerated) women may instead carefully curate their interactions with surveilling institutions, intending to demonstrate that they are fit parents in hopes of avoiding CPS involvement (Fong, 2019). For both custodial mothers and kinship caregivers, a maternal incarceration history may increase efforts to curate system involvement further, both to defend one's parenting rights in the face of a heightened risk of state intervention (Gibson, 2002;Garcia-Hallett, 2022;Gurusami, 2019;Hanlon et al, 2007) and in response to internalized norms of motherhood that are violated by incarceration. These efforts may include increased involvement in children's education, particularly in school settings.…”

Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

“…2 This taking of children and parents and families from each other is part of a broader project of domestic warfare waged against Black communities, and the domestic and care labor that emerges from this context is unevenly borne by Black mothers, women, girls, queer and non-binary people (e.g. James, 2016;Vasudevan and Smith, 2020;Mondé, 2022;Garcia-Hallett, 2022;Mitchell and Davis, 2019;Williams et al, 2021;Willingham, 2011;Solinger, 2010;Ritchie, 2017;Richie, 2012).…”

“…It is also not uncommon; one in nine Black children have an incarcerated parent (Murphey and Cooper, 2015), and Blackwomen disproportionately bear the childcare burdens caused by carceral institutions (e.g. James, 2016, Garcia-Hallett, 2022Roberts, 2022). These conditions seem to cause enough to reconsider the "broken systems" trope.…”