Relational Vulnerabilities of Incarcerated and Reentry Mothers

Abstract

A qualitative study involving a follow-up interview with 10 incarcerated and reentry mothers in rural southwest and central Virginia was conducted to explore the influence that women’s close relationships have on their reentry experiences with their families. The Vulnerability Conceptual Model (VCM) was used to sensitize an examination of how incarcerated and reentry mothers negotiate relational vulnerabilities in the context of varying situational vulnerability. Grounded theory analysis revealed three themes that characterized relational vulnerabilities. Given our focus on close relationships and the potential of the VCM to identify opportunities for resilience and vulnerability, we highlighted the influence of ambiguous and ambivalent relationships and unresolved loss and grief due to relationship dissolution or the death of a parent, sibling, child, or intimate partner in the reentry process. The data revealed two types of reentry mothers with divergent trajectories for social reintegration. Implications of these types for therapeutic treatment approaches for reentry women are discussed.

Keywords

ambivalence ambiguous loss intimate violence mothers prisoner reentry substance abuse vulnerability

By the end of 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that about 7.1 million people, or 1 in 33 adults, were under the supervision of adult correctional authorities in the United States. Women made up about 23% of the nation’s probationers and 12% of the parolees (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009). At least 712,000 women were on probation and 103,000 women were on parole at year-end 2010 (Glaze & Bonczar, 2011). Researchers have identified multiple factors related to women’s incarceration and recidivism. These factors are present in literatures pertaining to women’s incarceration and recidivism, and they include maternal distress (Arditti & Few, 2006, 2008; Bloom, Owen, & Covington, 2003), substance abuse and addiction (Brownsberger, Love, Doherty, & Shaffer, 2004; Richie, 2003), mental health difficulties (Arditti & Few, 2006, 2008; Richie, 2003; Warren, 2007), traumatic childhood experiences (Chesney-Lind, 1997; Enos, 2001; Greene, Haney, & Hurtado, 2000), and abusive or exploitive relationships with men (Bloom et al., 2003; Green, Miranda, Daroowalla, & Siddique, 2005). These factors place women at the intersection of relational and situational vulnerability. Few and Rosen (2005) defined relational vulnerability as “one’s beliefs about self in relationships with others and what is normal within an intimate relationship” (p. 271) and situational vulnerability as encompassing life circumstance (e.g., incarceration history, poverty, violence-prone neighborhood) or life-stage stress (e.g., teenage pregnancy, feeling out of synch with a normative family development pattern, early widowhood; p. 271).

Criminal justice involvement is a unique and gendered context of situational vulnerability that is characterized by intense stigma and social isolation (Arditti, 2012). The embeddedness of women’s close relationships in conjunction with situational or contextual demands and deficits is an important aspect of women’s pathways into criminality as well as their ability to desist from crime after reentry. Unfortunately, intermittent reincarcerations interrupt social reintegration and are an all too common feature of women’s reentry pathways (Travis & Visher, 2005).

The issue of relational vulnerability is of great significance for women who have been incarcerated given that the strength of family bonds is an important ingredient in successfully reentering life and not getting rearrested after incarceration (Petersilia, 2003). Despite the contention among criminal justice and legal scholars (e.g., Petersilia, 2003) that “family matters,” the current lack of a process-oriented understanding of family relationships has been identified as a serious gap in the research on incarceration and prisoner reentry, particularly for women (Bahr, Harris, Fisher, & Armstrong, 2010; Hagan & Coleman, 2001; Uggen & Wakefield, 2005; Visher & Travis, 2003). Female offenders face daunting challenges on release, particularly in conjunction with any plans they may have to reunify with children and perhaps take on the responsibilities associated with their care. They must find employment while dealing with the demands and often conflicting responsibilities (i.e., work and family) of life on the outside (Travis, 2005). In considering the challenges associated with prisoner reentry and the potential helpful role that strong relational bonds can play, Hagan and Coleman (2001) criticize laws and policies designed to hold parents in prisons longer and terminate ex-offender’s parental rights. They argue that such practices fuel difficulties in maintaining family bonds during incarceration, those ties that are deemed critical to the support and resource sharing necessary for reentry success (Hagan & Coleman, 2001; Petersilia, 2003). This study contributes to the discourse on family relationships and prisoner reentry by examining the nature of those family ties with a theoretical sensitivity grounded in women’s day-to-day lives and involving the people who have been most influential in reentry patterns—the women’s parents, children, and intimate partners.

The present study is an extension of our earlier work that sought first to describe the family relationships of reentry mothers (Arditti & Few, 2006), and second, generate grounded theory pertaining to maternal distress (Arditti & Few, 2008). Our participants were probationers either under the supervision of a probation and parole office and released to reintegrate into their families and communities after incarceration or reincarcerated at the time of interview. In this final paper on the mother reentry data, we shift our emphasis from mother–child relationships to mothers’ close relationships with intimate others and their family of origin. We applied elements of Few and Rosen’s (2005) Vulnerability Conceptual Model (VCM), originally developed to understand the decision-making processes of women with chronic patterns of relationship violence, to sensitize the exploration of the relational vulnerabilities of mothers with incarceration histories. Central to the model is a conceptualization of vulnerability as a dynamic state of susceptibility to negative outcomes in decision making when a culmination of risk factors overshadows protective factors. Using the VCM, we theorized that women who had high relational vulnerability and highly situational vulnerability (e.g., volatile home environments) faced greater challenges than those with low relational and situational vulnerability. The present analysis is in response to two research questions:

Research Question 1: How are relational vulnerabilities manifested relative to justice-involved women’s situational vulnerability?

Research Question 2: What are the implications of relational vulnerabilities for women’s reentry experiences?

Close Relationships and Women’s Criminality

We situated our focus on women’s close relationships and the vulnerabilities characterizing those relationships given their salience in women’s pathways into crime, and their ability to desist from criminal behavior on reentry (Gaskins, 2004; Henriques & Manatu-Rupert, 2001). Intimate relationships are defined as close relationships in which emotional and/or physical intimacy is shared (Giddens, 1992). Although there are multiple studies that link domestic violence, substance abuse, and incarceration (see, for example, Brownsberger et al., 2004; Staton, Leukefeld, & Webster, 2003), further understanding is needed to deconstruct these nuanced connections and theorize how relational vulnerability can exacerbate or ameliorate the many challenges of reentry. Upon reentry, offenders must unlearn their “dependence” on prison to successfully make it on the outside. Female detainees may be at particular risk of a deeply ingrained dependency given traditional gender socialization that ascribes empathic and dependent roles to women (Henriques & Manatu-Rupert, 2001). Financial and psychological dependency on release from prison makes women particularly vulnerable to involvement (or in many cases, re-involvement) in oppressive and criminally-oriented relationships.

The VCM places women’s dependency and their reentry challenges into historical and real-time context, weighing how individual perceptions of relationships and context intersect to inform decision making at different points across the life course. The VCM highlights two interdependent dimensions of vulnerabilities, relational vulnerability and situational vulnerability. Clearly, reentry women are in an extreme state of situational vulnerability, not only due to their intense cumulative disadvantage (Chesney-Lind, 1997; Young & Reviere, 2006), but also as a result of their incarcerative experience. Situational vulnerability likely fuels and intensifies relational vulnerabilities.

Relational Vulnerabilities in the Context of Women’s Criminal Justice Involvement

Justice-involved women’s relational vulnerabilities occur in a situational context of cumulative disadvantage. In this respect, an examination of the family backgrounds and social environments of female offenders suggests that women involved in the criminal justice system are perhaps the most vulnerable women in the United States (Hanlon, O’Grady, Bennett-Sears, & Callaman, 2005). For female offenders, similar to their male counterparts, economic deprivation and residential instability seem to be common childhood experiences (Greene et al., 2000; Hanlon et al., 2005). For many women, this deprivation may continue into adulthood (Greene et al., 2000), as evidenced by high levels of reliance on public aid at the time of their arrest. Women’s economic deprivation and lack of financial independence is particularly damaging because their need is great, particularly if they are single mothers responsible for the care of children. These women are far less likely to receive child support than more advantaged mothers (Grall, 2006). In many circumstances, the men in their lives (e.g., intimates and family members, but not necessarily their children’s fathers) have also lived in disadvantaged environments, and may be women’s main source of financial support. Many of these men are engaged in criminal, drug-related activities, which place women at further risk of entering and maintaining relationships characterized by drug use and/or crime.

Intimate Relationships

Feminist criminologists have noted how women’s victimization and traumatization via their intimate relationships contributes to their offending (Richie, 1996). From the outset, incarcerated women are six to 10 times more likely to have been involved in an abusive intimate relationship compared with women in the general population (Pollock, 2002). The process through which victimized incarcerated women become situated in contexts that facilitate their criminalization is often studied through a conceptual framework known as “pathways to crime” (see Gilfus, 1992). On release, previously incarcerated women often have to engage in illegal activities either by choice or necessity to deal with partner abuse and/or economic instability. Even if partners are not overtly abusive, women’s criminal involvement, and in particular, drug-related activities, may be “an uninvited and often unforeseen repercussion of choosing an intimate relationship” (Gaskins, 2004, p. 1535). Often disconnecting from the male partner’s criminal enterprise would entail a willingness to break up the family—something many women are economically unable and personally unwilling to do depending on the perceived importance of the relationship. Thus, women may share in this criminal activity as a means to maintain the relationship or for economic survival (Gaskins, 2004).

Intergenerational Patterns

In addition to intimate relationships, other family relationships are of central importance with respect to women’s lives and have a bearing on their pathways to criminality and reentry. Such information is important with regard to better understanding the dynamics of relational vulnerability and developing interventions to break recurring cycles of incarceration. Evidence suggests that mothers in prison are disproportionately victimized as children and have suffered an array of traumatic experiences during childhood. These experiences include emotional, physical, and or sexual abuse, as well as witnessing violence at home (Chesney-Lind, 1997; Enos, 2001; Greene et al., 2000). Such family histories contribute to mothers’ distress in prison and upon release (Poehlman, 2005). For example, Hanlon et al. (2005) found that the family background of his sample of 167, primarily African American, incarcerated, drug-abusing mothers was the primary risk factor for psychological distress and psychiatric disorders.

Furthermore, drugs and alcohol are often a feature of female inmates’ family of origin environment (Arditti & Few, 2008; Hanlon et al., 2005). Of interest here is how childhood histories of trauma, loss, drug, and alcohol use may be recreated by women, contributing to the conditions and behaviors that lead to their involvement in the criminal justice system (Greene et al., 2000). Furthermore, the replication of family of origin difficulties creates the same vulnerabilities in the offender mothers’ children, enhancing the likelihood of intergenerational patterns of risk and incarceration (Murray, Janson, & Farrington, 2007). That is, due to mothers’ own incarceration (and, in many cases, drug-using behaviors), mothers have in effect recreated the family circumstances of their own childhood—their children are now vulnerable to negative influences outside the home, with the family’s ability to protect children from such risk seriously compromised (Hanlon et al., 2005). For example, Greene et al. (2000) noted that the parallels between offender mothers’ social histories of trauma and abuse and their children’s lives “were dramatic and disturbing” (p. 13).

In sum, given the prominence of family and intimate relationships in women’s lives, it is useful to apply the VCM to better understand the meaning and implications of these relationships relative to the situational vulnerability that characterizes criminal justice involvement. Relational vulnerabilities potentially have great bearing when considering women’s reentry trajectories; thus, interventions that are gender specific and simultaneously situate women within the context of family and close relationships over the life course are necessary. The VCM suggests that due to cumulative disadvantage, mothers in the criminal justice system will also be “relationally disadvantaged.” Subsequently, points of intervention can be identified with a focused observance of how women respond to vulnerabilities and opportunities for resiliency over the course of their lives.

Method

Sample

This study represents a secondary analysis of data from 10 of 28 reentry mothers (Arditti & Few, 2008) that were collected in rural Southwest and Central Virginia. Given that we conceptualized reentry as a process rather than a singular event (Arditti & Few, 2006), we attempted to re-interview all 28 original participants a year later. The original sample was a convenience sample in that women were identified from a list of potential probationers, who were readily accessible, met inclusion criteria, and agreed to participate. The original sample of 28 mothers was drawn from a population of women with children from two probation districts in Southwest Virginia. Our pooled response rate was approximately 65% (see Arditti & Few, 2006, for more details regarding sample recruitment). As common with doing research with justice-involved families, we experienced difficulty in locating all of the original participants from the 2006 to 2008 study. The compliance rate for this follow-up interview was 53% (i.e., the number of participants, 10, divided by the number of invited participants, 19, who we could actually locate). At the time of the follow-up interview in 2008, seven women were still on probation and three were reincarcerated in either a state prison or local jail. Seven women were Caucasian and three were African American. The average age was 36 years (range = 25-46 years of age). Most were divorced (n = 5), while others reported being single (n = 3), married (n = 1), and widowed (n = 1). Most women had either a high school diploma or General Educational Development (GED) diploma (n = 7). Mothers in the study had an average of two children with a mean age of 13 (range = 18 months to 27 years). Younger children resided with four of the mothers. The average sentence for our participants was 11.45 months. However, five women entered the criminal justice system as juveniles and became intermittent adult offenders for 14 years. Offenses included first-degree larceny, driving under the influence (DUI), embezzlement, possession, and distribution of illegal substances, shoplifting, forgery, harmful wounding, and resisting arrest. The violation of probation and distribution of illegal substances were the most common recurrent offenses. Nearly all of reentry women interviewed experienced some constellations of intimate violence, addiction, and depression in their lives.

Although external generalizability is not the aim of our qualitative study, our sample does reflect demographics of prisons and jails in rural Appalachian regions such as Southwest Virginia. The underrepresentation of African American mothers in our study parallels state demographics in rural regions whereby the White to African American female ratio is nearly 1:1, with more White women being incarcerated and fewer White women on probation (Virginia Department of Corrections, 2012). As of June 2011, the confined population of women prisoners consisted of 1,458 White women and 1,124 African American women, and there were 6,088 White women and 6,414 African American women on probation in Virginia. Rural reentry women are a population often overlooked and deserving of attention due to their unique challenges experienced once they are released back into their communities (e.g., lack of therapeutic resources, lack of employment opportunities, transportation issues), but also because they face similar relational and situational vulnerabilities that have been reported by women offenders in urban settings and larger samples (Arditti, 2012).

Interview Process

The follow-up interview was designed to investigate relational histories, family processes during reentry, and social reintegration. Examples from the interview protocol that provided data for the present analysis include the following: (a) Tell me about your relationship with the father of your children or your boyfriend/husband; (b) tell me about what it was like growing up in your family; and (c) how are you coping with challenges after incarceration or while being incarcerated? Seven interviews were audiotaped. Jail and prison regulations prohibited the audiotaping of interviews with two incarcerated participants, and one participant declined to be audiotaped. Interviews’ duration ranged from 90 to 120 minutes, prompting 10 participants to share their personal narrative or “life story” (Atkinson, 1998). Field notes and an unsolicited photocopy of one participant’s diary entry were retained.

Data Analysis and Study Trustworthiness

Modified analytic induction (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007), which incorporates the use of sensitizing concepts to guide study design and frame coding, was used. Toward this end, as recommended by Yin (2003), the analytic strategy relied on theoretical propositions, informed by the previous findings, the extant empirical literature, and relational and situational vulnerability concepts per the VCM. During the open coding phase, the first author and a peer debriefer (i.e., peer debriefing; Bogdan & Biklen, 2007) analyzed the transcripts independently, identified concepts using Nudist (NVivo) 6 software (QSR International, 2002), and found overlap in our line-by-line coding. Peer debriefing involves consulting with colleagues who are experienced in qualitative methodology but not involved in the project development or initial research design (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). The peer debriefer and first author’s sessions provided a risk-free forum to test ideas about emerging codes and themes in the data. In an iterative process of open coding, the coauthors’ notes on concepts and categories were compared and contrasted and differences were resolved through extensive discussion and interpretation with the peer debriefer (LaRossa, 2005). Examples of open codes included family of origin incarceration, substance abuse, and loss of significant other. During axial coding, axial codes were identified with consideration of conditions, categories were linked, and interpretations about the concept relationships were refined (LaRossa, 2005). Examples of axial codes included familial estrangement, chronic relational abuse, and intergenerational substance abuse. The collapse of categories was grounded within the framework of the VCM. Selective coding entailed a process of identifying the “main story” of our coding and analysis (LaRossa, 2005)—the influence of intersecting relational vulnerabilities in the fragile context of incarceration and reentry. The selective codes are presented in the results. The final labeling of codes and emerging themes had to survive the test of the peer debriefer’s examination. The peer debriefer assisted the coauthors in becoming cognizant of any personal biases in the interpretation of the data (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). We constructed a coding grid (see Table 1) to identify major coding categories, themes, and patterns across participants, or cases.

Table 1.

Case Study Coding Grid.

	Participants
	Besieged mothers (high-density vulnerability)			Survivor mothers (moderate-density vulnerability)				Survivor mothers (low-density vulnerability)
Characteristics	Terra	Gina	Katie	Lee	Nyla	Chloe	Gwin	Tamara	Cari	Lori
Situational vulnerability
Currently incarcerated	X	X	X
Juvenile/young adult record	X	X	X		X	X
Recidivism record, number of times	4	7	3	1	2	2	1	2	2	2
Relational vulnerability
Intrapsychic factors
Chronic mental health issues	X	X	X	X
Chronic addiction	X	X	X	X			X		X
Elevated depression	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X
Interpersonal factors
Chronic intimate violence	X	X	X	X	X	X	X
Death of child, parent, partner, sibling	X	X	X				X	X	X	X
Estrangement, caregivers	X	X	X		X
Estrangement, children	X	X	X
Estrangement, partner	X	X	X	X		X
FOO addiction	X	X	X	X	X	X	X
FOO incarceration	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X
FOO intimate violence	X	X	X	X	X	X	X
Incarceration of child/children	X	X				X	X
Incarceration of partner		X	X	X	X	X	X
Mansharing, knowingly	X	X			X			X
Relational resiliency
Counseling attendance				X	X		X	X	X	X
FOO support				X	X	X	X	X	X	X
Friends as support					X	X		X	X	X
Partner and/or partner’s family support				X	X	X	X	X
Sobriety maintenance (mandatory)	(X)	(X)	(X)	X	X	X	X	X	X	X
Situational resiliency
Employment				X	X	X	X	WC	X	X

Note. FOO = family of origin; WC = workman’s compensation/disability benefits. African American participant names are italicized.

A variety of strategies were utilized to ensure the trustworthiness of our methodology. We created a database that consisted of all narratives, family genealogies, and tabular materials (Yin, 2003) as well as a case study grid with findings that mapped onto concepts identified by the VCM model. Trustworthiness involved the development of a secondary coding scheme that relied on previous research and theoretical propositions about vulnerability and resilience (Yin, 2003). Triangulation was conducted with verbatim transcripts of interviews, detailed field notes, and the refinement of categories and themes after repeated readings of the data by both authors and a peer debriefer. In addition, participants were readministered the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) of the National Institute of Mental Health (Radloff, 1977) to further contextualize women’s situational vulnerability in terms of deteriorating mental health status.

Study Limitations

While the study extends the existing literature pertaining to women and reentry, it is important to consider our findings within the limitations of our convenience sample, which comprised only women whom we could locate and who chose to participate in the follow-up study. Accounting for the time lapse since the initial data collection from the total population of 28 mothers in our descriptive study to follow-up, it does not appear that the 10 women represented by the current analysis differed demographically from the larger group of 28 (see Arditti & Few, 2008). Although demographically similar, it is unknown whether the reentry experiences of the 10 women represented here are somehow distinct from those of women who we could not include in this study. It may be that the experiences of women who were in our analysis are not generalizable to a nonrural population of incarcerated and reentry women.

Results

Participant Demographics

Table 1 represents an account of 10 participants’ relational and situational vulnerabilities and resiliencies that emerged in the interview data. Participants were assigned pseudonyms and the names of those identifying as African American were italicized to distinguish them from White participants. Table 1 also denotes our theorization, which is grounded in an assessment of the extent and interplay of relational and situational vulnerabilities, regarding two types of reentry scenarios for mothers. Situational vulnerabilities included currently being reincarcerated, having recurrent patterns of reincarceration, and living in a persistent environment of economic instability as a result of their incarceration. The CES-D scores for all of the women indicated an escalation in clinical depression symptomatology over time. Five women ranged in scores from 25 to 47, indicating severe clinical depression. Means and standard deviations of the CES-D for the 10 women were on average clinically significant (indicative of clinical psychological distress) at the first interview (2006; M = 19.9, SD = 15.2) and again the second time they were interviewed (2008; M = 25; SD = 14.6); the scores significantly correlated (r = .84, p = .003).

Relational Vulnerabilities

The interview data offered a thick description about women’s relational difficulties. Women’s overall situational vulnerability (e.g., stigma, social isolation, poverty) during the reentry process seemed to magnify their cumulative and chronic relational vulnerabilities. Our data analysis was sensitized by the extent literature and the tenets of the VCM. Relational vulnerabilities included (a) disempowerment due to family and intimate relationships characterized by violence, trauma, and substance abuse; (b) the presence of ambiguous and ambivalent relationships; and (c) unresolved loss and grief due to relationship dissolution or the death of a parent, sibling, child, or intimate partner. Women’s disempowerment in abusive intergenerational family and intimate relationship contexts already have been identified as barriers to successful social reintegration in the extent literature (Arditti, 2012). However, the salient emergence of ambiguous and ambivalent relationships and their resulting unresolved loss and grief over the life course deserves attention and provides an opportunity to uniquely contribute to the literature in terms of exploring possibilities for boundary work in gender-specific therapeutic interventions.

Ambivalence and Ambiguity Characterize Family and Intimate Relationships

All of the mothers described parental, maternal, and intimate relationships that were ambivalent and ambiguous in nature over the course of their lives and incarceration. Ambivalence is the simultaneous and conflicting coexistence within an individual of positive and negative feelings toward the same person, object, or action (Boss, 2006). Family ambivalence was particularly reflected in terms of relationship triangles involving the child’s primary caretaker, the mother, and her children and/or intimate partners. Ambiguity is defined as a feeling of uncertainty about boundaries, roles, and acceptance (Boss, 2006). The mothers’ family and intimate relationships were characterized by stories of regret, frustration, and longing for connection to physically and emotionally absent parents and partners, and angry and emotionally distant children while juggling awkward relations with their children’s caregivers.

Ambivalent Relationships With Parents

Eight of the women had either family of origin members or children with intermittent incarceration histories. For many of the women, those family of origin members were their mothers, fathers, brothers, and male cousins. Of particular interest were those women whose fathers were emotionally inaccessible or physically absent from their lives. Their estranged relationship with their fathers was due to their father’s addiction, intermittent incarcerations, relationship problems with their mothers, or abandonment. For instance, Gina, an African American mother, spoke with anger about her relationship with her father and how she attributed his absence the disintegration of her family of origin:

My dad ain’t worth a dime. I hate him . . . he should still act as the role of my father. Been in [jail] for 9 months . . . he hasn’t done anything for me or my [siblings] . . . my brother is in jail because of him and he won’t even help him.

Yet, over the course of the interview, Gina also talked about her father in terms of admiration. She described him as an “old G,” one who could manage his illegal businesses (e.g., pimping). Other women also spoke of caring for their fathers, making efforts to reconnect with them after years of noncommunication, painful interactions, or abandonment. Lee, aged 27, talked about her struggle to detox her father who eventually abandoned the family due to multiple incarcerations and life-long addiction. Lee attributed her problems with alcohol to watching her father drinking. She recognized her father as a negative influence yet still felt obligated to help him out of unhealthy situations and relationships. Lee shared:

Alcoholism runs strong in my family real bad. I love my daddy . . . I spent my life detoxing my father . . . he’s been in and out of my life my whole life . . . we have that connection. And now I gave him a choice. It’s either her or me. He chose her . . . I’m okay with it. I’m good at blocking things out.

Lee’s tolerance for her father’s “bad behavior” was also extended to the father of her own children, a cocaine addict and drug dealer, who inhibited her sobriety and successful probation. Like Gina and Lee, other participants reported that their fathers and (step)fathers verbally abused their mothers on a regular basis. Having witnessed their mothers’ poor relationships with men, the majority of participants tolerated disappointment, violence, and infidelity.

Ambivalent and Ambiguous Intimate Relationships

Many women told us that they were worried about the men who were rotating in and out of their lives—often one of their children’s fathers. These concerns reflected patterns consistent with the dynamics of intimate partner violence, cycles of abuse, and men’s attempts to control women, in and out of prison. Many women expressed ambivalence about their relationship with their children’s father in terms of men’s inability or disinterest in being a “good husband” and/or “good father.” In addition, financial inadequacies typically were not alleviated by intimate partners or the fathers of their children. For the most part, the children’s biological fathers were not reliable helpmates during their mothers’ reentry. Partners were either currently incarcerated (n = 3), incapacitated by disability (n = 1), deceased (n = 3), no longer legally required to care for children (n = 2), or no longer taking care of children, in another relationship (n = 2), or they relied on their family members (e.g., his mother or aunt, his oldest child) to take care of their children (n = 5). Only three women (Gwin, Lee, and Chloe) reported that their partners had consistently taken care of one or more of their children. Partners’ physical absence and/or failure as a source of viable economic support served to not only intensify women’s situational vulnerability but also women’s grief over their absence. Partner inadequacies sometimes led to mothers’ strained, awkward relationships with the men’s mothers, often primary caretakers.

Mansharing

Women’s intimate relationships seemed to be more fluid and fragile than mother–child relationships. The women talked about being involved with several men, mostly serially and sometimes simultaneously. One woman divorced before incarceration, two were divorced during incarceration, and two divorced immediately following incarceration. Four women were involved in relationships with married men or men dating other women simultaneously. Ambiguity, for the majority of reentry women, meant a lack of certainty about the emotional status of and mutual exclusivity in their intimate relationships as they lingered in prisons, receiving little contact from intimate partners. Four women (Terra, Nyla, Gina, and Tamara) reported being involved with one or more male intimate partners who was/were partnered with another woman simultaneously; one woman reported being involved with multiple male partners who were married or a boyfriend to another woman. The women did not describe these relationships as being emotionally supportive but rather as a means to pay the rent, utilities, or court fines. They talked about their experiences interacting with the “other” women in their intimate partners’ lives. Nyla noted that one of her boyfriends was “good to her” but that “he’s also good to all of the other women, too.” Although these “shared” relationships created some distress in the lives of these women, none of the women actively sought to leave their nonmonogamous intimate partners. Mansharing was tolerated by the women as long as their partners provided the women with some financial stability (e.g., paying for rent, childcare costs) and emotional comfort. By having children with men who were not married to them and who were limited in terms of their availability and support, these participants created relationships with men that could be described as fragile, ambiguous, codependent, and chaotic. The ambiguous nature of mansharing relationships amplified the women’s distrust of men and relational insecurities. It is also worth noting that these relationships with married men or men who were maintaining relationships with other women sometimes stretched across disruptive incarcerative periods. Two women met their “money men” (i.e., a chaplain and a guard) while incarcerated and they continued contact with these men after reentry. Six women were involved with partners who were recidivists and these tenuous relationships were mostly sustained by the women’s connection to the partners’ mothers who were also their children’s caretakers.

Ambivalent and Ambiguous Mothering

Three reentry mothers discussed their ambivalence about their mothering role once they returned to their communities. For instance, Gwin lamented:

If I could change one thing about my life, it would probably be not to have any kids because I might as well not because I don’t raise them. I love my kids . . . all I did was to give birth to them. I feel bad because I’m not only ruining my life by being an addict.

It is not surprising that upon release, reestablishing parenting roles and relationships with children was stressful for mothers. Physical absence from the home seemed to spark questions of reliability, love, trust, authority, and entitlement by children and caretakers of reentry mothers’ children. In particular, participants most often described experiences characterized by maternal distress (Arditti & Few, 2008). Four women talked about feelings of separation and guilt from their children as a result of their incarceration: “People say you can make up this time . . . there’s no way to make up this time.” Their comments were marked by a mixture of lament and ambivalence such as “Sometimes, I just used to sit and cry over these kids and I can’t sit and cry over it anymore.” And others, like Lori, expressed exasperation, exhausted from failed attempts to connect with older children:

[My daughter] but she’s got this hatred towards me and at first it really hurt. She called my mother and said, “Can you believe my mommy didn’t have nothing to do with me?” I said, “Momma, I’m giving her a taste of her own medicine.”

Some women reported being aware that their children were intentionally emotionally absent from them, fearful of their mother’s return to prison. In terms of the family process of reconciliation, it is important to note that the majority of the children in our sample were simultaneously estranged from their absent fathers, feeling ambiguous loss from their incarcerated fathers, or mourning the death of a father while trying to reconnect with mothers who had been absent sporadically from their lives due to incarceration, relapse, or cycling back into confinement after release. The mothers experienced children who displayed a range of contradictory emotions, from clinginess and withdrawal and anger to fearfulness and hopefulness. Mothers described achieving intimacy with children as being difficult while they sorted out being forgiven, “making up time,” stress derived from maternal distress, and ambivalence toward their own children as well as children’s caretakers. Although the mothers resumed physical residence, the family system remained fragile within the situational vulnerability (e.g., simultaneous and cumulative life-circumstance stressors such as incarceration, poverty, stigma, unemployment, addiction).

Ambiguous relationships with children sometimes co-occurred with estranged and ambivalent relationships with female caretakers (i.e., mothers, grandmothers, mothers-in-law, partners’ mothers). Ambiguity was acutely expressed in the mother–child relationship after reentry. For example, four women reported that because they had missed much of their children’s lives and/or they were not financially stable, they were fearful of taking on childcare responsibilities alone. They recognized the abilities of other women (e.g., their own mothers, grandmothers, mothers-in-law) to mother their children successfully. This recognition elicited gratitude and jealousy when children demonstrated deference to steady caretakers. Ambivalence was continually fueled by role confusion and role strain during the women’s precarious reintegration into their families as primary caretakers. The women alternated between calling themselves “good mothers” and describing instances when their abilities failed to match up with their perceptions of what a good mother does. Reestablishing relationships with caretakers often occurred on unequal footing as biological mothers struggled to establish a stable household. In addition to their conflicting emotions, ambiguity in the relationship status or in the mothering role was cocreated by the women’s own recurrent incarceration or/and that of family members and/or intimate partners.

Unresolved Loss and Grief

Family and intimate relationship difficulties contributed to women’s profound sense of abandonment, and we theorize that for many of the women, the experience of loss and grief was an important pathway for criminalized drug-related behavior and which partially contributed to their elevated depression. The participants reported being deeply affected by parental absence due to incarceration (n = 6), relationship dissolution (n = 5), or the death of a parent (n = 4), sibling (n = 1), child (n = 1), and/or intimate partner (n = 3). For example, Cari described how she spun into a deep depression and prescription drug addiction after losing her child and husband:

I was looking for a job when my daughter was killed in that car wreck. I started doing drugs all over again. And right when my husband died, a doctor prescribed me Valium. It seemed like I kept needing more and more. So finally the doctor said he was going to have to stop prescribing me . . . And then I met people who didn’t take them, and they sold them to me for half price. So I started selling them to get more.

Cari surrounded herself with individuals who did not support her sobriety and she was soon reincarcerated for a second time for illegal OxyContin distribution. Only during her incarceration did Cari have intermittent meetings with therapists to discuss her daughter’s and husband’s death.

Many of the women experienced relationship dissolution before and during their incarceration. Terra became a drug addict after her partner divorced her:

When I went through my separation, it just went crazy from there and I went to pieces. A doctor told me I was literally trying to die. But I didn’t know it. It was subconsciously.

For the majority of women, loss and grief, particularly related to the loss of a child or family member through death or estrangement, seemed to be linked with intensified levels of depression at follow-up. Depressive symptomatology, as measured by the CES-D, was elevated for nine women by the time of their second interview. We attributed the elevated status in depression scores to the escalation of unresolved relational vulnerabilities while remaining situationally vulnerable. The women who we believed were particularly dispositioned toward high and medium risk of unsuccessful reentry reported receiving intermittent and disjointed mental health services. Those who attended a few therapy sessions while in prison received various cocktails of antidepressants as they moved from one facility to another. Reentry women only received drug counseling; underlying relational difficulties were never an in-depth focus of women’s treatment on release or between their periods of reincarceration. Thus, intermittent periods of incarceration allowed women’s relational vulnerabilities to fester for years, and in most cases, dysfunctional patterns were recreated in their own families (e.g., intimate violence, family estrangement, their children becoming incarcerated or addicted to illegal substances).

Relational Vulnerabilities and Reentry Patterns

In response to our second research question and our aim of exploring how the intersection of relational vulnerability and situational vulnerability might influence women’s actions during reentry, we developed grounded theory typologies based on women’s narratives and the themes that emerged in the previous section. We consider the typologies as the first step in applying the VCM model and acknowledging the embeddedness of women’s relationships in the unique context of criminal justice involvement. The grounded theory analysis yielded two “types” of reentry scenarios that highlight how women responded to this intersection of relational and situational vulnerability. We called the women who seemed to fit certain reentry scenarios as besieged mothers and survivor mothers (see Table 1).

Beseiged Mothers

Women who possessed cumulative chronic relational vulnerabilities (e.g., continued involvement with dangerous partners, presence of estranged or ambiguous relationships) while maintaining a volatile situational vulnerability (e.g., precarious employment status, unemployment, intermittent reincarcerations) were classified as besieged mothers because they seemed to be weighed down and overwhelmed by their vulnerabilities. The lives of these besieged mothers were distinguished from other participants by a persistent interplay of high relational and situational vulnerabilities over several years, resulting in repeated involvement in the criminal justice system and multiple incarcerations. Three besieged women (Terra, Gina, and Katie) were reincarcerated at the time of re-interview; all shared remarkably similar characteristics in that they reported having (a) a past with chronic drug addiction, violent intimate relationships, depression; (b) escalated depression scores; (c) a prolonged estrangement from their children and children’s caretakers; (d) family of origin violence, substance abuse, and incarceration histories; (e) an intimate male partner who also struggled with addiction; (f) a juvenile delinquency record; (g) an incarcerated child or partner; and (h) a debilitating loss of a child, parent, sibling, and/or partner. Two of the women were estranged from their partners while one mourned the death of her partner. None of them had steady employment other than selling drugs, and had only minimal social support and intermittent childcare. All noted that their chronic recidivism was a significant factor in their estrangement from children, partners, and their children’s caregivers. The volatility in these women’s lives hindered their ability to reflect on their pervasive feelings of ambivalence, guilt, and shame, and vulnerability.

Survivor Mothers

Participants who did not fit the besieged category seemed to vary slightly in terms of the density of their vulnerabilities. Survivor mothers had reentry trajectories that were characterized not only by certain risks for reincarceration (e.g., the presence of relational vulnerabilities) but also by some protective factors such as reliable employment and supportive interpersonal relationships to offset these risks. While survivor mothers varied in terms of how many risk factors were identified among them, they all shared a certain level of resilience—factors in their lives that would offset their vulnerability (Masten, 2001). In this manner, survivor mothers were quite distinct from besieged mothers who appeared to lack compensatory protective factors in their lives. Survivor mothers (Tamara, Cari, and Lori) with lower relational and situational vulnerability density were of particular interest because they tended to desist from criminal activity for longer periods of time than survivor mothers whose life stories revealed a higher density of relational and situational vulnerability. Desistance refers to the termination of criminal offending or “going straight” (Travis, 2005, p. 266). We theorized that survivor mothers, particularly those with less dense vulnerability profiles, would be the most likely to have a successful reentry experience for several reasons. First, many survivor women, compared with their besieged counterparts, became involved in the criminal justice system comparatively late in life (i.e., in their 30s) and experienced minimal estrangement from their children, family members, partners, and caretakers. Several survivor mothers indicated little to no presence of ambivalence or ambiguity in their close relationships. Only one reported having difficulties with addiction and having incarcerated family of origin members. None reported violent relationships with men. All reported attending and prioritizing counseling sessions weekly and having intensive social support of family and friends. They were intentional about home environments that supported their sobriety. They also tried to avoid “bad men” and decided to focus on repairing relationships with their children, family, and their children’s caregivers. Overall, survivor mothers could be considered more socially integrated than besieged mothers in that they possessed a modicum of adequate social and economic resources such as constant childcare, supportive friends and mothers, consistent counseling attendance, and stable employment. The presence of supportive social ties cannot be overstated in terms of their ability to counterbalance vulnerability (Masten, 2001).

Discussion

The findings illustrate family processes operating in the lives of 10 incarcerated and reentry women. The data suggest two types of incarcerated and reentry women, characterized by differing densities of relational and situational vulnerabilities as well as resiliencies. Mothers who were characterized as besieged were the most vulnerable in terms of their ability to successfully reenter family and community life, enact the terms of their probation, and/or desist from crime. The findings extend risk and resilience frameworks of reentry (see, for example, Bloom, 2003) by deconstructing the notion of risk to include the intersection of relational and situational vulnerability. Vulnerabilities imply a weakness of some sort—clearly evident in women’s involvement in destructive intimate relationships or difficulties associated with family members. Vulnerabilities interacted with any resiliencies in the women’s lives, sometimes resulting in negative outcomes (e.g., returning to an abusive partner) and, at other times, positive outcomes (e.g., sobriety). Thus, the severity of women’s patterns of vulnerability and assets ultimately comprised their risk during reentry. Our grounded theory approach contributes to our understanding of how relational vulnerabilities within family processes connect with reentry trajectories and are gender-sensitive to the experience of women within the criminal justice system.

In the midst of cumulative and coexisting relational vulnerabilities, participants found little psychological space to process loss and grief from dysfunctional family histories, tenuous relationships with their children, intimate relationship dissolution, the death of loved ones, the incessant pressure to achieve financial resource adequacy, and the persistent struggle to overcome physical and mental health needs and addiction. Psychological space refers to an emotional reprieve from or a prolonged period of time devoid of relational and situational pressures for these women to reassess, deconstruct, and reflect upon their life histories and personal choices. However, for some women, incarceration provided a physical space that removed them from unhealthy and/or traumatic relationships, caregiving, and financial responsibilities. The work of Henriques and Jones-Brown (2000) supports our theorization by framing prisons as temporary “safe havens” for women who have faced multiple relational and situational challenges on the outside. The majority of reentry mothers talked about low self-esteem, hopelessness, and dysfunctional communication patterns with their children and fathers of their children, and a fear of returning to the outside world without intimate partners. Underlying these issues was relational ambivalence and ambiguity, unresolved loss, and estranged close relationships. Relational vulnerabilities can undermine naturally occurring relational resiliencies such as open family systems, the utilization of formal support, sobriety, and stable employment (Henriques & Jones-Brown, 2000; Henriques & Manatu-Rupert, 2001).

Pervasive Family Ambivalence and Ambiguous Loss

The study’s findings indicate that relational vulnerabilities are clearly manifested by women’s ambivalent and ambiguous close relationships. In particular, they discussed feelings of ambivalence about (re)engaging the mothering role after release, either completely losing confidence in being a mother (Arditti & Few, 2008), being in constant grief over feelings of not being a good mother, or taking it one day at a time. Yet, the women also strongly professed to love their children and were concerned about exposing them to harmful people or drugs. Incarcerated and reentry mothers were ambivalent about returning to intimate partners while balancing childcare and financial worries. Some women deliberately placed physical and psychological boundaries between themselves and “bad men” who instigated and prolonged feelings of anxiety or guilt. The mothers who we characterized as survivors were able to enforce boundaries with intimate partners who threatened their livelihood, their children’s well-being, or their sobriety than besieged mothers. The women who engaged in mansharing were ambivalent about this behavior, but tolerated it as long as male partners ameliorated resource inadequacies (i.e., situational vulnerability). Typically, these intimate relationships were built on a foundation of distrust, suspicions of infidelity, and emotional manipulation. The relational uncertainty and emotional volatility of these women’s lives kept them in an anxious, precarious state. As a result, some of these women were susceptible to making bad decisions—quick, illegal solutions as evidenced by their offenses—embezzlement, larceny, shoplifting, drug abuse, and distribution. Further compromising women’s ability to successfully negotiate their lives on the outside was the ambiguous loss in their close relationships. The premise of ambiguous loss is that uncertainty or a lack of information about the physical location or status of a loved one as absent or present, dead or alive, is traumatizing for most individuals, couples, or families (Boss, 2006). Ambiguous loss is an underlying condition of women’s estranged relationships. Such losses can incapacitate and hinder decision making; the person essentially becomes paralyzed from the ambiguity and cannot move on with his or her life (Boss, 2006). The uncertainty of women’s close relationships may prolong grieving, amplify vulnerability, and siphon off the psychological and emotional energy needed for women to invest in their present circumstances.

Therapeutic Implications: The VCM in Practice

Interventions that focus on alleviating stress from unhealthy romantic relationships and resource inadequacy seem to be empirically grounded. For example, female offenders persistently score higher than male offenders on emotional/personal (Holtfreter & Cupp, 2007) and finance scales (Raynor, 2007) of the Level of Service Inventory–Revised (LSI-R; Andrews & Bonta, 1995) suggesting the need for relational and resource-related interventions that focus on addressing the effects of victimization and abusive relationships as well as strengthening women’s financial and social support networks to improve mental health outcomes and foster women’s economic independence (Manchak, Skeem, Douglas, & Siranosian, 2009). Similar to the assumptions proposed by the VCM, the Risk–Need–Responsivity (RNR; Andrews & Bonta, 2003) model assesses the density of risk factors and compares it with the density of resiliencies. Such an approach is the basis for a “responsivity principle” and gender-specific programming whereby offender treatment therapies align with women offender’s learning style, motivation level, and cultural and relational backgrounds (Andrews, Bonta, & Wormith, 2011). Specifically, Dowden and Andrews (1999) found that the focus on interpersonal criminogenic needs such as family processes or antisocial associate variables was most strongly associated with reduced reoffending. Similarly, recent efforts in the state of Virginia reflect a growing recognition that effective reentry programming for women must address parenting and relational skills as well as transitional services (i.e., employment, housing, transportation) back into the community. For example, a pilot program aimed at reentering mothers funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance and implemented by the Virginia Department of Corrections (2010) not only focused on relational and resource components, but also actually delivered these services through a highly responsive client advocate relationship. The client advocate connects the offender with the criminal justice system, treatment services, family, employer, and other support agencies, which ensures a seamless continuity from prison to community. The client advocate operates as strength-based coach and mentor helping the female offender negotiate the myriad of challenges and opportunities to be met during a successful transition to the free world and reintegration with children and family. Delivering reentry programming through a client advocate relationship is highly effective and consistent with female psychosocial developmental theory (Arditti, 2013).

By using the VCM, those working on the front lines (e.g., mental health practitioners, client advocates, probation officers) can assist justice-involved women to assess the ways in which their prolonged relational vulnerabilities intersect with their situational vulnerabilities and influence their chances for successful reintegration into the family and community. In addition to allowing women to plot on a diagram those factors that place them at risk, the VCM is a visual representation of identified and possibly overlooked protective factors that could assist them in deconstructing family processes and building a relational framework that is conducive to successful reentry. In other words, therapists can guide women to understand how risk and protective factors in their lives have interacted to foster resilience and vulnerability. The VCM can be used as a discussion tool to spark conversation to explore the resulting dynamics of family processes now partially shaped and defined by maternal incarceration. The VCM can also be used to help women identify what Greene et al. (2000) described as criminogenic conditions, those environments and experiences to which when people are exposed increase the likelihood that they will engage in criminal behavior. We refer to criminogenic conditions as situational vulnerabilities that may permeate a woman’s life (high situational vulnerability) or are episodic and may not persist over a woman’s lifetime (low situational vulnerability). We suspect that given the importance of relationships in women’s lives, criminogenic risk assessment focused solely on situational markers (such as employment status, housing), is inadequate, and must be extended to more fully embrace women’s experience with significant others.

In addition, inspired by Nelson’s (2006) work on single mothers with nuclear and extended kin ties, we propose that boundary work be included in therapeutic programming with reentry women and relevant parties (e.g., children, caretakers). Boundary work involves helping women and their children with decisions on who counts as family and who does not and what rights and obligations are accorded to those who do. Practitioners can expect reentry women to disclose family boundary ambiguity, which includes conflicted feelings, indecision, and uncertainty in reconstructing maternal and family roles and membership (see Boss, 1987). Role ambiguity is particularly pertinent in the lives of reentry women because it constitutes a lack of clear expectations and norms for reinstituted roles (Landry-Meyer & Newman, 2004) and interpersonal relationships. Specifically, therapists can guide women to unpack boundary ambiguity and to develop interpersonal boundaries that protect the process of self-esteem building and sobriety, create safe spaces to reconnect to and dissipate ambivalence in their relationships with their children, and establish clear expectations of their children’s caregivers that allow women to participate more effectively in the mothering role.

Clearly, we recognize the importance of life course theory (Elder, 1998) and relational theory (Kaplan, 1984) in fostering relational resilience, and because of this, we believe that the VCM can be used as a part of existing gender-specific programs such as Moving On (Van Dieten, 1998), Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Program (Hormann, 1995), and Helping Women Recover (Covington, 1999). These programs utilize a holistic, integrative approach to address the needs of women and are recommended for gender-specific reentry programming that incorporates a variety of interventions with behavioral, cognitive, affective, relational, and systemic components (Covington & Bloom, 2006). For example, Helping Women Recover attempts to help prevent women’s recidivism via an integrated curriculum and therapeutic strategies that are organized into four modules: self, relationships, sexuality, and spirituality based on areas that reentry women have identified as triggers for relapse and necessary for recovery (Covington & Bloom, 2006). An integrated life course and relational theory framework posits that relationships are a vital source for women’s psychological health over her lifetime and are essential in helping them capitalize on and form relational resiliencies, such as establishing healthy interpersonal boundaries. Existing gender-specific programming also operates on the understanding that isolation and disconnection from others is a major source of psychological distress for women (Pollack, 2007) and that prolonged feelings of disconnection and/or unhealthy relationships lead women to crime (Blanchette & Brown, 2006). Although gender-specific programming has been utilized by battered women’s shelters and prison programs and is a common recommendation for women prisoners, it is often provided piecemeal and intermittently, without enough focus on how individuals build relational systems over their lifetime intergenerationally (i.e., linked lives, a life course theory concept) and negotiate transitions and turning points that either alleviate or exacerbate family ambivalence and ambiguity. The VCM has the potential to contribute to existing programming by assisting women to deconstruct their lifetime patterns of relating to their children, intimate partners, caregivers, and others while enabling them to redefine their roles in these close relationships. The “others” who deserve mentioning, and who are often ignored by practitioners, are the relationships that reentry women make while in prison, for these relationship patterns are often extended and reconstructed outside of prison.

Finally, as a narrative therapeutic tool, the VCM restores agency for women who exist at the intersection of vulnerability and resiliency. Journaling, free writing, and creating vignettes are externally expressive means of helping individuals to identify, record, and explore relationships and boundaries from multiple perspectives, including aspects of the self, views of the “problem,” and views of others (Keeling & Bermudez, 2006). In finding ways to increase protective factors, individuals can imagine practical possibilities for future change in self and others as well as a means to adapt to currently challenging obstacles. Individuals can place themselves outside of identified risk factors to deconstruct the “problem” safely and reconstruct solutions that assign or embody accountability and agency. The VCM is not a model to assign blame; it is a framework that can be manipulated in a way to build untapped resiliencies within incarcerated and reentry women who may feel overwhelmed when reconnecting with positive social supports and/or disengaging from relationships that hinder positive social reintegration and promote habitual reincarceration.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Small Grants Program, Virginia Tech.

References

Andrews

D. A.

Bonta

J. L.

(1995). The Level of Service Inventory–Revised. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Multi-Health Systems.

Andrews

D. A.

Bonta

J.L.

(2003). The psychology of criminal conduct (3rd ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson.

Andrews

D. A.

Bonta

J. L.

Wormith

J. S.

(2011). The Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) model: Does adding the good lives model contribute to effective crime prevention? Criminal Justice and Behavior, 38, 735-755. doi:10.1177/0093854811406356

Arditti

J. A.

(2012). Parental incarceration and the family: Psychological and social effects of imprisonment on children, parents, and care-givers. New York: New York University Press.

Arditti

J. A.

(2013). Process evaluation of the family reintegration and reentry pilot program (Unpublished report submitted to the Virginia Department of Corrections). Department of Human Development, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg.

Arditti

J. A.

Few

A. L.

(2006). Mothers’ reentry into family life following incarceration. Criminal Justice Policy Review, 17, 103-123. doi:10.1177/0887403405282450

Arditti

Few

A. L.

(2008). Maternal distress and women’s reentry into family and community life. Family Process, 47, 303-321. doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.2008.00255.x

Atkinson

(1998). The life story interview. London, England: Sage.

Bahr

S. J.

Harris

Fisher

J. K.

Armstrong

A. H.

(2010). Successful reentry: What differentiates successful and unsuccessful parolees? International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 54, 667-692. doi:10.1177/0306624X09342435

10.

Blanchette

Brown

S. L.

(2006). Assessment and treatment of women offenders: An integrative perspective. Chichester, UK: Wiley.

11.

Bloom

B. E.

(2003). A new vision: Gender-responsive principles, policy, and practice. In Bloom

(Ed.), Gendered justice: Addressing female offenders (pp. 267-288). Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

12.

Bloom

Owen

Covington

(2003). Gender responsive strategies: Research, practice, and guiding principles for women offenders (Report No. 018017). Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, National Institute of Corrections.

13.

Bogdan

R. C.

Biklen

S. K.

(2007). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theories and methods (5th ed.). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

14.

Boss

(1987). Family stress. In Sussman

M. B.

Steinmetz

S. K.

(Eds.), Handbook of marriage and family (pp. 695-723). New York, NY: Plenum Press.

15.

Boss

(2006). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

16.

Brownsberger

W. N.

Love

C. T.

Doherty

P. L.

Shaffer

H. J.

(2004). Potential demand for substance abuse treatment in the criminal justice system. Criminal Justice Policy Review, 15, 37-61. doi:10.1177/0887403403256379

17.

Chesney-Lind

(1997). The female offender. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

18.

Covington

(1999). Helping women recover: A program for treating addiction (with a special edition for the criminal justice system). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

19.

Covington

Bloom

(2006). Gender-responsive treatment and services in correctional settings. Women & Therapy, 29, 9-33.

20.

Dowden

Andrews

D. A.

(1999). What works for female offenders: A meta-analytic review. Crime & Delinquency, 45, 438-452. doi:10.1177/0011128799045004002

21.

Elder

(1998). Life course as developmental theory. Child Development, 69, 1-12. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1998.tb06128.x

22.

Enos

(2001). Mothering from the inside: Parenting in a women’s prison. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

23.

Few

A. L.

Rosen

(2005). Victims of chronic dating violence: How women’s vulnerabilities link to their decisions to stay. Family Relations, 54, 265-279. doi:10.1111/j.0197-6664.2005.00021.x

24.

Gaskins

(2004). “Women of circumstance”: The effects of mandatory minimum sentencing on women minimally involved in drug crimes. American Criminal Law Review, 41, 1533-2004.

25.

Giddens

(1992). The transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love, and eroticism in modern societies. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

26.

Gilfus

M. E.

(1992). From victims to survivors to offenders: Women’s routes of entry and immersion into street crime. Women & Criminal Justice, 4, 63-89.

27.

Glaze

L. E.

Bonczar

T. P.

(2011). Probation and parole in the United States, 2010 (NCJ 231674). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Retrieved from bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ppus10.pdf

28.

Grall

T. S.

(2006). Custodial mothers and fathers and their child support: 2003 (U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-230). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

29.

Green

Miranda

Daroowalla

Siddique

(2005). Trauma, exposure, mental health functioning, and program needs of women in jail. Crime & Delinquency, 51, 133-151.

30.

Greene

Haney

Hurtado

(2000). Cycles of pain: Risk factors in the lives of incarcerated mothers and their children. Prison Journal, 80, 3-23. doi:10.1177/0032885500080001001

31.

Hagan

Coleman

J. P.

(2001). Returning captives of the American war on drugs: Issues of community and family reentry. Crime & Delinquency, 47, 352-367. doi:10.1177/0011128701047003004

32.

Hanlon

T. E.

O’Grady

K. E.

Bennett-Sears

Callaman

J. M.

(2005). Incarcerated drug-abusing mothers: Their characteristics and vulnerability. American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 31, 59-77. doi:10.1081/ADA-37564

33.

Henriques

Jones-Brown

D. D.

(2000). Prisons as “safe” havens for African American women. In Markowitz

M. W.

Jones-Brown

D. D.

(Eds.), The system in black and white: Exploring the connections between race, crime, and justice (pp. 267-273). Westport, CT: Praeger.

34.

Henriques

Manatu-Rupert

(2001). Living on the outside: African American women before, during, and after imprisonment. Prison Journal, 81, 6-19. doi:10.1177/0032885501081001002

35.

Holtfreter

Cupp

(2007). Gender and risk assessment: The empirical status of the LSI-R for women. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 23, 363-382. doi:10.1177/1043986207309436

36.

Hormann

(1995). Turning point alcohol and drug program. Portland, OR: Columbia River Correctional Institution.

37.

Kaplan

(1984). The self-in-relation: Implications for depression in women (Work in Progress No. 14, Working Paper Series). Wellesley, MA: Stone Center.

38.

Keeling

M. L.

Bermudez

(2006). Externalizing problems through art and writing: Experience of process and helpfulness. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 32, 405-419. doi:10.1111/j.1752-0606.2006.tb01617.x

39.

Landry-Meyer

Newman

(2004). An exploration of the grandparent caregiver role. Journal of Family Issues, 25, 1005-1025. doi:10.1177/0192513X0426595

40.

LaRossa

(2005). Grounded theory methods and qualitative family research. Journal of Marriage and Family, 67, 838-857. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2005.00179.x

41.

Manchak

S. M.

Skeem

J. L.

Douglas

K. S.

Siranosian

(2009). Does gender moderate the predictive utility of the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) for serious violent offenders? Criminal Justice and Behavior, 36 425-442. doi:10.1177/0093854809333058

42.

Masten

(2001). Ordinary magic: Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist, 56, 227-238. doi:10.1037//0003-066X.56.3.227

43.

Murray

Janson

C. G.

Farrington

D. P.

(2007). Crime in adult offspring of prisoners. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 34, 133-149.

44.

Nelson

M. K.

(2006). Single mothers “do” family. Journal of Marriage and Family, 68, 781-795. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2006.00292.x

45.

Petersilia

(2003). When prisoners come home: Parole and prisoner reentry. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

46.

Poehlman

(2005). Incarcerated mothers’ contact with children, perceived family relationships, and depressive symptoms. Journal of Family Psychology, 19, 350-357. doi:10.1037/0893-3200.19.3.350

47.

Pollack

(2007). “I’m just not good in relationships”: Victimization discourses and the gendered regulation of criminalized women. Feminist Criminology, 2, 158-174. doi:10.1177/1557085106297521

48.

Pollock

(2002). Women, prison, and crime (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Thomson.

49.

QSR International. (2002). QSR N6: Software for qualitative data analysis. Doncaster, Australia: Author.

50.

Radloff

(1977). The CES-D scale: A self-report depression scale for research in the general population. Applied Psychological Measurement, 1, 385-401. doi:10.1177/014662167700100306

51.

Raynor

(2007). Risk and need assessment in British probation: The contribution of LSI-R. Psychology, Crime & Law, 13, 125-138. doi:10.1080/10683160500337592

52.

Richie

B. E.

(1996). Compelled to crime: The gender entrapment of battered Black women. New York, NY: Routledge.

53.

Richie

B. E.

(2003). Gender entrapment and African-American women: An analysis of race, ethnicity, gender, and intimate violence. In Hawkins

D. F.

(Ed.), Violent crime: Assessing race and ethnicity (pp. 198-210). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

54.

Staton

Leukefeld

Webster

J. M.

(2003). Substance use, health, and mental health: Problems and service utilization among incarcerated women. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 47, 224-240. doi:10.1177/0306624X03251120

55.

Travis

(2005). But they all come back: Facing the challenges of prisoner reentry. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.

56.

Travis

Visher

(Eds.). (2005). Prisoner reentry and crime in America. New York, NY: Cambridge Univ. Press.

57.

Uggen

Wakefield

(2005). Young adults reentering the community from the criminal justice system: The challenge of becoming an adult. In Osgood

D. W.

Foster

E. M.

Flanagan

Ruth

(Eds.), On your own without a net: The transition to adulthood for vulnerable populations (pp. 114-144). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

58.

U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2009). Probation and parole statistics. U.S. Department of Justice. Retrieved from http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ppus09.pdf

59.

Van Dieten

. (1998). Moving on: A facilitator’s guide and program manual for counselors working with women in conflict with the criminal justice system. Toronto, ON: Orbis Partners.

60.

Virginia Department of Corrections. (2010). Virginia adult re-entry initiative: The four year strategic plan—Executive summary (July 2010–June 2014). Retrieved from http://www.vadoc.state.va.us/documents/reentryInitiativeExecSummary.pdf

61.

Virginia Department of Corrections, Research & Forecast Unit. (2012). State responsible offender trends report FY2007-FY2011. Retrieved from http://vadoc.virginia.gov/about/facts/research/new-statsum/offenderpopulationtrends_fy07-fy11.pdf

62.

Visher

Travis

(2003). Transitions from prison to community: Understanding individual pathways. Annual Review of Sociology, 29, 89-113. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.29.010202.095931

63.

Warren

(2007). Evidence-based practice to reduce recidivism: Implications for state judiciaries. The Crime and Justice Institute. Retrieved from http://www.ncsconline.org/csi/analysis.html

64.

Yin

(2003). Case study research: Design and methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

65.

Young

Reviere

(2006). Women behind bars: Gender and race in U.S. prisons. Boulder, CO: Reinnar.