Maternal Imprisonment and Family Life. Booth, Natalie

of this form of punishment for the whole family. To begin to redress this balance, this book intends to highlight the lived experiences of caregiving kin so that they may be incorporated into our understanding of the implications of imprisoning a mother. The Preface to the book began by introducing readers to the story of Linda, a grandmother caring for her three grandsons following her daughter’s unexpected imprisonment. Likewise, the family-centred approach underpinning the study places the caregivers’ thoughts, perceptions and experiences at the heart of the research process and, correspondingly, throughout this book.

      Notes

¹Following definitions of ‘kin’ and ‘kinship’ in the sociological literature, throughout this book, this term denotes anyone related to, or associated with, the family, including those traditionally seen as family through blood marriage and law, as well as friends and other members within the family’s social network (McCarthy and Edwards, 2011).

²However, there are welcomed discussions taking place which propose that sentences of six months or less should be removed (Dearden, 2019).

³This is through the adoption of principles in the Human Rights Act 1998.

⁴Depicting the population of female prisoners (both Welsh and English) in the prisons in England, the term ‘serving England and Wales’ will be used to account for the distribution of women’s prisons in this book.

⁵NICCO is an online information service established for anyone (for example, professionals and academics) who comes into contact with children and family members who have a relative in prison (see: https://www.nicco.org.uk/).

⁶Awareness of how prison is ‘hidden’ in our society was a key motivator for the prison placement that was undertaken before planning the study (see the Preface).

       TWO

       Researching the caregiver’s lived experiences

      Introduction

      The aim of the research presented throughout this book was to explore how maternal imprisonment was experienced from a family-centred perspective. The intention was to provide an in-depth analysis of the experiences and perceptions of relatives looking after children whose mothers were in prison. To explain how this was achieved, this chapter is divided into three sections: the first section provides a description of the theoretical framework; the second section is an overview of the research methods adopted; and the third section introduces the caregiving kin and their familial circumstances. While this third section veers away from conventional academic norms, it does enable the participants’ lives and experiences to be foregrounded not only to enable the reader to become familiar with their family circumstances, but also to act as a point of reference, a reminder of the realities that they were negotiating.

      

      Theoretical framework: ‘family practices’

Recent sociological conceptions of ‘the family’ emphasise the fluidity and active nature of ‘family practices’ by members of kin networks (Morgan, 1996, 1999, 2011), creating a useful lens with which to explore family life. ‘Family’ is characterised by interactions, roles and responsibilities that are negotiated and communicated, rather than normatively defined and static (Finch and Mason, 1993). As such, ‘individuals are doing family instead of simply passively residing within a pre-given structure’ (Silva and Smart, 1999: 5, emphasis original). This perspective helps to account for the more diverse forms of family life observed in contemporary society, including the alternative living arrangements of adults, with more cohabiting couples, single-occupancy households, re-partnering and ‘blended’¹ families, as well as the greater prominence of friendships (Williams, 2004). Although maternal imprisonment is not a new family formation, these changes in family construction will hold contextual and pragmatic significance for all forms of contemporary family research. For instance, as will be discussed later in this chapter, some caregiving kin interviewed in this study were friends of the family or in blended families (for example, two fathers interviewed were caring for both their biological and stepchildren). A hetero-normative definition of ‘family’ in a nuclear construction (for example, a husband and wife living in a household with biological children) would not have accounted for these varied family forms. Yet, existing criminological research with prisoners’ families has failed to critically engage with more fluid definitions of ‘the family’ or, indeed, the sociological literature, which has instead explored family life through their active practices and a focus on what they are ‘doing’. Therefore, the innovative application of this theoretical framework in this study responds appropriately to this gap in order to generate a more nuanced account of caregiving in the context of maternal imprisonment.

      Applying ‘family practices’ to maternal imprisonment

Morgan’s (1996, 1999, 2011) seminal work depicts the existence of fluidity in family life through his theory of ‘family practices’.² He writes that ‘family represents a constructed quality of human interaction or an active process’ (Morgan, 1999: 16), which has a reactive capacity that changes in accordance with circumstances, and is located in culture, history and personal biography. Research from this perspective facilitates more openness around what counts as ‘family’, and while it does not deny the cultural and biological connections (such as those found in the nuclear family), it can also include other family-like relationships (Jones, 2013). Such an approach allows social actors to create and negotiate their family obligations according to their own understandings and relationships, as is achieved using a constructionist epistemology (Berger and Luckman, 1966). Correspondingly, friendships and ‘fictive kin’ have become an area of increasing sociological interest in recent years (Allan, 2008; Wrzus et al, 2012), being considered as important in addition to familial relationships and, in some instances, as a substitute for them. To account for this, there is growing agreement that discussions about prisoners’ families should include greater diversity than just blood or marital kin ties (Jardine, 2018; Masson and Booth, 2018).

      Appropriately, ‘family practices’ are not isolated to the household, but extend beyond the boundaries of a family’s home and interact with other areas of existence. This indicates how familial issues – loss, relationships and practices – also manifest and intersect with different spaces and contexts in an individual’s life. The readjustments