Episode 9 - Mothers & Babies In Prison

Crystal's baby Zandra arrived dramatically on the floor of her cell with all her friends around her. By an extremely fortunate coincidence Karen Betts was previously a nurse and had trained as a midwife, so everything went smoothly.

In general pregnant prisoners are often placed together on a unit or landing where they can be provided with care quickly if needed. Very few babies are born in prison as mothers are usually transferred to hospital when labour starts. A few years ago there was a successful campaign to stop women prisoners being handcuffed during labour in outside hospitals.

After the birth Crystal and Zandra were transferred to the prison's mother and baby unit and this is what usually happens when the mother and her baby return from the hospital.

There are 72 mother and baby unit places in women's prisons in England and Wales. This does not seem many when more than 1000 women prisoners are thought to have children under 5 years old. Until last year there was a fairly inflexible rule that babies could stay with their mothers in 'closed' prisons until they were 9 months old, and in 'open' prisons until they were 18 months old. Last year two prisoners challenged this in the High Court on the basis of the right to family life enshrined in the Human Rights Act. One was successful and the policy now has to be more flexible. Obviously this is good news in some ways, but prison is not the best environment for a growing child, and places remain limited, so that older children remaining may mean babies are unable to be with their mothers.

As well as babies born while their mothers are prisoners, mother and baby units contain women who already have young babies and have then been imprisoned. If there is no space in a unit then the baby must be cared for by someone on the outside. Mother and baby units are usually decorated with nursery characters and have staff who are interested in helping the women learn to cope with motherhood, but they are still part of the prison. Some mothers find it very stressful to be locked in a cell with their screaming baby in the middle of the night, so life on these units has its own pressures.

Generally great care is taken not to separate mothers and babies, but sometimes it does happen and when it does it often attracts considerable media attention. Sometimes babies are removed from their mothers because there is no realistic prospect of the mother caring for the baby in the future. For example, if a mother has already had other children taken from her because of neglect or cruelty. The Social Services might well recommend that the baby be removed at birth if the mother was not in prison, and it would probably be in the baby's interests to be removed. Other cases are more complicated. Obviously the Prison Service has a duty to make sure that all the babies and other mothers in the mother and baby unit are safe. If a prisoner's behaviour threatens that safety in any way (through violence, drug use, hiding drugs in places where crawling babies might find them) then she cannot be allowed to remain on the unit, but if she is not on the unit then she cannot have her baby with her. This sort of situation requires judgements to be made and cause a great deal of heartache for everyone concerned.