‘Picking up the pieces’: Female significant others in the lives of young (ex)incarcerated males

Introduction

The aim of this article is to contribute to the growing body of research that recognizes imprisonment as a (gendered) family ordeal as opposed to an individual experience (Christian, 2005; Christian et al., 2006; Comfort, 2007; Hairston, 1991; Light and Campbell, 2006; Loucks, 2004; Martinez, 2009; Mills, 2004; Naser and Visher, 2006; Visher et al., 2004). More specifically, we aim to explicate the array of burdens carried by women when ‘their’ men (husbands, boyfriends, sons, grandsons) go to, and exit from, prison. Much, of course, has been written about the problems encountered by incarcerated parents, the effects of parental imprisonment on children and obstacles preventing the resumption of relationships with children post-release (see, for example, Foster and Hagan, 2009; Travis and Waul, 2003). However, the particular experiences of (ex)prisoners’ female significant others (mothers, grandmothers, partners, sisters and the like) remain under-researched (but see Carlson and Cervera, 1992; Codd, 2008; Comfort, 2003; Fishman, 1988, 1990; Girshick, 1996; Lowenstein, 1984; Schwartz and Weintraub, 1974). Certainly, the visibility of women in the context of crime, victimization and post-release support, has been bolstered by the pioneering work of Carlen (1988) and Smart (1976, 1989). Similarly, Edwards (1981, 1984) has offered a detailed account of the treatment of women as defendants, offenders and witnesses. Nonetheless, women remain the ‘hidden’, ‘forgotten’ and ‘collateral’ victims of incarceration (Light and Campbell, 2006) and, we would contend, of criminal justice processes more generally (at policing, court and post-release stages).

Peelo et al. (1991: 313) insightfully remind that female intimates of (ex)prisoners inhabit a vexed world. Where they remain silent – where women shy away from voicing the myriad difficulties attending the support of a convicted/incarcerated loved one – they risk the ongoing marginalization of their needs and experiences. One the other hand, the decision to ‘speak up’ carries with it the very real risk of public condemnation for failing, at key moments, to ‘be a “pacifier”, a “civilizer”, a “good mother” [and] to provide the appropriate, non-criminal home atmosphere’ (Peelo et al., 1991: 313). We find this to be an entirely fitting description of the key social and existential challenges faced, as evidenced below, by the female significant others in our research. At the same time – and given the impressive body of evidence linking pro-social family members with post-release success – we know the state ‘assigns’ these women a good measure of ‘responsibility for increasing the effectiveness of the criminal justice system’ (especially in terms of post-release life and protection against further offending) (Light and Campbell, 2006: 298). This responsibility – one that (ex)prisoners’ female significant others rarely if ever actually ‘ask for’ – exposes such persons to an array of potential problems (stigma, financial ruin, chronic fatigue, mental collapse, violence, neglect of other family members and the like).

Our view is that (ex)prisoners’ female significant others (and/or the family ‘unit’ more generally) should not be used as proxies for chronically under-funded rehabilitation programmes and/or post-release transitional arrangements (see Loucks, 2004: 3). Indeed, the phrase ‘prisoners’ families’ is itself problematic since it implies that the costs of being forcibly separated from incarcerated loved one(s) are shouldered by individuals of equal capacity and means. The reality, of course, is that ‘the burdens of caring for prisoners from the outside’ (Codd, 2007: 260) are carried overwhelmingly by women (Aungles, 1993; Codd, 2002; Girshick, 1996; Naser and Visher, 2006). ¹ Indeed, explorations of the ‘gendered nature of imprisonment’ (Codd, 2000: 63) reveal ‘almost universally, [that] it is women who must cope with men’s problems’ (Fishman, 1990: 262, emphases in original) – a situation far less likely to be reciprocated when females are imprisoned (Pollock, 1998 in Codd, 2000). Our primary objective, therefore, is to explicate the emotional and other labour expended by females with regard to (ex)incarcerated males. We suggest that female significant others can and do play centrally important roles in the lives of their male (ex)prisoners. Moreover, and on very rare occasions, they even stand as the chief ‘change agent’ through which desistance is entertained and enacted. But such efforts, we find, most frequently come at substantive personal and social (not to mention psychological) cost to these females who, as a group, are themselves in urgent need of support.

Research Context and Approach

Data for this article stem from the project Generativity in Young Male (Ex)Prisoners: Caring for Self, Other and Future within Prison and Beyond. ² At the centre of the study are 14 males aged, at the time of writing, 24 to 29 years (half of whom are incarcerated). The majority of these young men have been interviewed repeatedly since 2003 (commencing under the auspices of the lead author’s previous research project). ³ Since 2009 – in keeping with the focus on generative and degenerative dimensions of prison and post-prison life – we have interviewed various persons nominated by each young male (ex)prisoner as playing ongoing significant roles in their lives. Each of the 14 males nominated at least one female as a significant other (N = 27 female participants). Conversations with these women – their struggles and their views regarding what is working well and not so well for them and their (ex)incarcerated loved one(s) – form the basis of the current piece. ⁴ In the context of caring for their (ex)incarcerated loved ones, these women have themselves had to battle their own major adversities including depression, chronic drug dependence (illicit and prescription medication), attempted suicide, domestic violence, incest, rape, alcoholism, incarceration and poverty. We revisit the significance of these challenges towards the end of our discussion.

The article is divided into nine key themes emerging from a grounded analysis of interview transcripts (see Dey, 2007). These themes include: logics of blame; desire for proper punishment; facing the ‘monster child’; becoming stranded; confronting the criminal justice system; incarceration as brief reprieve; suspicion of maternal insights; sublimation of self; and dealing with own trauma. Following an elaboration of these themes, we briefly draw out some of the key implications of the women’s narratives, focusing, in particular, on the interplay between gender and (ex)prisoner support.

Logics of Blame

Consistent with the process of ‘gendered stigmatization’ (Condry, 2006), the women in our research reported being enmeshed in a lengthy and unresolved cycle or ‘logics’ of blame (blame of self, other and system). Blame arose from a variety of intra- and extra-familial sources and served largely to entrench the sense of disdain experienced by prisoners’ families through the wider (media driven) popular discourse about crime and punishment. Underpinning these ‘attacks’ was the implied (but sometimes explicit) message that inadequate, defective or bad mothering was the key correlate to the anti-social and offending behaviour of their offspring (Condry, 2007 in Codd, 2008: 17–18; Gavazzi et al., 2003):

[T]hey said that [my son] was ‘controllable’ in [detention]. They didn’t have an issue dealing with him – that they could control him. They couldn’t understand why we had so many issues with him when he came out [of lock-up], and it’s like, ‘Well, if I could drag my son down the hallway by his hair and throw him in a room the size of my toilet, naked, I’m sure I could control my son as well as you[ ] do.’ (A, mother)

The pall of suspicion under which mothers of offenders are cast is not new. As Condry (2006: 108) remarks, ‘Mother-blaming has a long history. Until relatively recently psychiatric discourse blamed autism on mothers rejecting their children; schizophrenia was blamed on maternal rejection; and … juvenile delinquency [has been] blamed on working mothers.’ In our research, mothers described blame as manifesting in mainly oblique fashion such as that rendered through sideways glances within or beyond custodial facilities at visiting time, or via comments made with sufficient ambiguity to preclude easy or formal recourse. However, perhaps the most hurtful attacks were those stemming directly from incarcerated sons towards their mothers:

[W]hen he has his bad days, I’m the blame of everything … I’m the blame for him just being here. I’m the blame for his life. I’m the blame for everything that’s happened in it … I’m all the names under the sun. And … it hurts when you hear it from your own kid. (B, mother)

Yesterday he called me from [the remand centre] and the way he talked about his mother, there wasn’t one word that didn’t start with an ‘F’. (C, grandmother)

Mothers were also criticized by fathers for failing to keep ‘bad’ influences at bay, or for not sufficiently steering their sons through the myriad challenges associated with schooling, becoming a teenager and the like. Typically such criticism was levelled by fathers who were themselves absent during the formative years of their son(s) – an absence usually associated with repeat periods of incarceration. One father commented,

[T]hat’s why [my son] is where he is – [in prison] – because he went to his mum’s … [W]hen I was locked up … all my mates were there [at his mum’s] – and they were young too, drinking – they’d brag about me to [my son. They’d say], ‘Should have seen your dad fucking bash this cunt …’ So who does [my son] want to be like? … That’s why … the only thing I said to [my ex-partner] is, ‘Why did you let them talk?’ (D, father)

Our previous work on fathers and their (ex)incarcerated sons showed fathers’ general reluctance to view their ‘own life-course’ as probably having had ‘a profound impact on [their] sons’ li[ves]’ (Halsey and Deegan, 2012: 344). And just as fathers blamed mothers, mothers spoke extensively of the extent to which fathers’ failings became those of their sons:

They’ve had a hard life, the boys … They’ve seen a lot of bad things. And all they ever knew was what they were shown, and that’s what [their] dad did, went in and out of gaol, and all the time I was pregnant, like, he’d come out and go back, come out and go back. So that’s all they’ve ever known. And now they’re like that … They’re only [doing] what they were taught. (E, mother)

The displacement of blame onto fathers was, ultimately, overshadowed by the narrative of self-blame characterizing most of the interviews with mothers. In this sense, blame came full circle through the tendency to take personal responsibility for what were – from an ‘outsider’s’ standpoint – patently extra-personal (indeed structural) factors underpinning their sons’ predicaments:

[I blame myself] … because of the partners I had … [One partner] wouldn’t let me have anything to do with [my incarcerated son] … He didn’t want me having anything to do with my kids cos he reckons they were all trouble … He controlled me … and I needed help and I’m spewing now because I ended up walking out on him because he was bashing me … Why couldn’t I have done it to stick up for my own child … [As] a mother [I] let [my] son down [didn’t I]? Not being supportive [of] him. (F, mother)

I cried for three days … over and over. And the kids didn’t know what to do, when to approach me, … because I knew I had to make … that final decision. And I put him into care. And it was a three-month order, and then it was another three-month order, then I think it was 18 months, and then we come to the end of that, and we had to decide, ‘Okay, what happens from here?’ Because he still wasn’t ready to be returned to my care. I wasn’t ready to have him, and he wasn’t ready to come back so, you know, we had to make that final decision in court that … he was going to be ward of the state. (B, mother)

In the majority of instances, mothers managed their grief loss alone. Life-changing decisions fell on their shoulders and with this, the sense that they themselves had ‘failed’ their child(ren), came to the fore.

Desire for Proper Punishment

An equally prominent theme to emerge from interviews – and one which can be seen as tied to the psycho-social dimensions of blame – was mothers’ contention that the most influential factor in the persistence of sons’ serious offending as adults was the lenience showed them by the juvenile justice system: ‘I don’t think he’d be where he is now … if he was seriously punished’ (G, mother). And, in more extensive fashion:

He’s been in and out since he was, like, 13, 14 … And he never did big stints … [I]n the beginning, I believed he should have had hard-core big stints … I strongly believe that their sentencing should be stronger … from an early age. Because I believe [my son’s] just been slapped on the wrist so many times … And if he hadn’t have been slapped on the wrist so many times, you know, maybe he wouldn’t be where he is today … I strongly believe that. (H, mother)

While sentence length was a key grievance, the ‘soft’ environment of juvenile custodial facilities was viewed as the more significant obstacle to sons’ rehabilitation. Mothers told of their authority being steadily undermined by a system offering better access to such basic things as food, health care, television, video games and recreational facilities. More distressingly, mothers believed their sons were being lulled into a false conception of what prison (the ‘big house’) would be like if and when they progressed to such. On account of their experiences visiting sons’ incarcerated fathers, many of the mothers were keenly aware prison would not replicate the environment, or demonstrate the same ‘tolerance’, to which their sons were becoming accustomed in youth detention. The immanent weight of the adult system impressed heavily: ‘I just want him punished properly … [I]t feels like he does something really seriously bad and he gets a slap on the wrist for it … [I]t feels like he’s laughing in their faces’ (B, mother). Significantly, young males (speaking from the vantage point of prison) noted that the lived experience of juvenile facilities was likely to be very different from parents’ perceptions thereof:

[M]ost [staff] in [juvenile facilities], they’re very big men … And when the kids step out of line they have some sort of a protocol that you have to strangle the kid, choke him, make him pass out, then restrain him, then take him to a concrete cabin and put him there for like 72 hours until he cools down … I’ve been tied up with my hands behind my back … and lying on my face for three days [without] food … And when I was given food, [it was] on a plate on the ground like how I would feed my pet animal. (I, male prisoner)

Clearly, the desire for ‘proper punishment’ is connected to mothers’ attempts to isolate the discrete causal factor driving their sons’ wayward behaviour. It is, no doubt, a weighty thing to muse that the state should show greater not less punitiveness towards one’s own child(ren). To our minds, such views are reflective of exhausted and despairing parents trying to make sense – any sense – of how things went wrong.

Facing the ‘Monster Child’

Historically, women have been assumed complicit, acquiescent or at the very least a beneficiary of crime (Heindensohn, 1985). Recent work has highlighted the concepts of ‘kin culpability’ and ‘kin contamination’ (Condry, 2007 in Codd, 2008: 16–17) with women held (publicly and/or vicariously) responsible for encouraging, enabling or ‘creating’ male offenders. An important part of female significant others’ reflections on the predicament of their sons concerned mothers’ struggles to come to terms with the crimes of their children. For one mother, reconciling her own (conventional) values with the emerging criminal proclivities of her son proved incredibly painful:

[F]or three young lives to be put in danger by my son, I cry for that too, you know? I thought, ‘[Son], what are you doing? You’re going to kill somebody. What would you have done if you’d killed those kids?’ … He knows what I’m like with kids … When I found out they were only 12, three and four [years old], … I felt like I wanted to vomit … [Q]uite often [I] used to sit there and think to myself, ‘How could you come out of me? How could … this actually happen?’ (B, mother)

When all other explanatory variables failed (influence of friends, poor mental health, lack of appropriate punishment), this mother was left to wrestle with the prospect of her son being a ‘monster child’ – a damaging and inappropriate trope typically invoked by a perplexed and/or outraged public(s) to explain away heinous offending. Another mother felt compelled to move her youngest son to a remote country town to avoid the corrupting (monstering) influence of his older siblings. Here, the mother became the means by which to mitigate the ‘contagious’ nature of offending within the family:

I don’t tell [anybody anything]. Nobody really knows nothing. It’s almost like you’re leading two lives. Like we moved here for a second life, cos we didn’t want to stay in the life we had before. And to protect [my youngest son]. [He] was always the biggest concern because it was almost like, ‘You got one good one, out of all the ones you had.’ (E, mother)

The ‘inner life’ of mothers of serious repeat offenders is a much under-researched issue. But evidence drawn from our research suggests that many parents are likely to suffer in silence and for considerable periods regarding the relationship between their own actions and/or omissions as against those of their children. This, of course, is hardly surprising given that ‘Motherhood is central to how women are defined by others and to their self-perceptions’. As Condry (2006: 109) continues, ‘[A]nd in being defined through motherhood [the mothers of serious offenders come] to think [of themselves as] defined through their offending sons’.

Becoming Stranded

In addition to wrestling with blame and guilt, females (with the exception of grandmothers) consistently narrated feelings of abandonment. Schwartz and Weintraub (1974: 20–21) have drawn attention to the ‘series of shocks’ sustained by prisoners’ wives which manifest as ‘a double crisis for the family [involving the] demoralization plus dismemberment’ of persons intimately connected to prisoners. As Codd (2000: 64, 67) writes, the absence of men due to incarceration casts gender as the ‘central organizing factor in influencing the nature of role transitions experienced and the response of those women [left behind]’. The women in our study faced these transitions, for the most part, on their own. Some, to be clear, ‘outsourced’ various tasks to friends and extended family. But these ‘secondary’ sources of support tended overwhelmingly to be other females (sisters, mothers, friends) who were dealing with their own trauma and disadvantage.

In relation to our female interviewees, the most extreme example of feeling abandoned – by friends and family alike – occurred in relation to a mother whose (ex)husband and three boys were all incarcerated at the same time in different facilities. As she remarked, ‘I reckon [my ex-husband] was about 20 when he started [going to gaol] and he was 40 when he finished … I was just on me own … I never had any help, nobody, no family or nothing’ (E, mother). Others noted being abandoned by friends who could not tolerate females’ continued allegiance to a criminal partner: ‘Some of my best friends have just walked away’ (J, girlfriend). ⁵ Another actively withdrew from her peers, saying, ‘I pushed myself away from a couple of my friends, because they don’t like [my boyfriend], so I don’t have nothing to do with them now’ (K, girlfriend). Certainly, in the wider sense, women felt completely abandoned by agencies whose specific remit was to offer support:

There’s no support there for him … [Y]ou could only ring … to speak to someone between … normal work hours … [Y]ou can’t get help outside of those hours … [I]t hasn’t even been like a month and he’s back inside. And, yeah, it just really spun us out, like, the lack of support … on the outside … (L, girlfriend)

[Parents] have nobody [to turn to] … And the parent help-line … they’re not really much [help]. I mean they’re more for, you know, ‘My kids got a runny nose, what do I do?’ [Well], [y]ou know, ‘My kid’s trying to set fire to his bedroom, what do I do?’ (A, mother)

Women consistently lamented the lack of effective means for turning a potentially bad situation into a socially safe scenario. As Schwartz and Weintraub (1974: 25) remind, although ‘[s]ociety has set up supportive rituals for death in which loved ones bring food, comfort and help[,] [t]here is no similar ritual for the loss of a man to prison, although the needs are very similar’. In such a circumstance, women were the last line of defence between further condemnation of their loved one and the belief in their capacity for ‘making good’ (Maruna, 2001):

He’s still my grandson. He’s my first one. And you don’t forget that … He’s the only black sheep … And [the family] they all look down on [him] and he knows that too. All my other daughters, they say, ‘Mum whatever you do, don’t bring [that grandchild] home for Christmas.’ But that doesn’t work for me … We’re the only ones who accept him. (C, grandmother)

I love him, and I always will. No matter what he’s done, I will still be with him, like he will still be my brother. Like there’s some even in my family that will just rub him off … Whereas, me – yes, he’s done the wrong thing, but he needs help. (M, sister)

I really had a lot of faith in him, that he wasn’t going to go to gaol, and I’m very disappointed in him because a lot of promises were made. But I feel, like, obliged to stick by him … because I know that I’m all he’s got. (N, girlfriend)

Condry (2006: 104) again has summed up this situation writing that, ‘The women [in prisoners’ lives] … [are] … “women in the middle”, caught between competing demands and often in the middle emotionally between the offender and other family members’. This was certainly the case in our cohort and is further evidence of the invidious and endless series of decisions (small and large) which such persons must make when a loved one is incarcerated.

Confronting the Criminal Justice System

In spite of frequent contact with the criminal justice system, women reported genuine anxiety surrounding the status/fate of their loved one. This anxiety was intensified by the alienating environments of both the courtroom and prison:

When I walked into that court house today, I actually thought I was going to have a panic attack … [W]hen it comes to sentencing, I don’t know how I am going to go … [My] big fear is that [he’s going to get a long time]. (F, mother)

I walked into that prison with legs like jelly and a heart beating … faster than what a race car goes … And … I sat down in the little waiting area … [I]t feels like … they’re just glaring at you. The eyes and the beaks are just like right at you. That’s what it feels like. (L, girlfriend)

Sentencing, far from providing closure, compounded women’s angst to the point where each came ‘to the day … [of the] … sentence[ ] completely drained of both financial resources and emotional energy’ (Schwartz and Weintraub, 1974: 21). One elderly female commented: ‘They led him away in cuffs. I saw that little boy standing in court and he kept looking at me. He kept looking at me. And I tried to smile. But I was dead on the inside’ (C, grandmother). While court proved an onerous (if all-too-familiar) experience, women remarked that dealing with correctional institutions was by far the most difficult task. The world of the prisoner’s wife has been described as ‘Kafkaesque’, in that important events take place in the absence of ‘the facts necessary to interpret these occurrences’ (Schwartz and Weintraub, 1974: 21). Inefficient and unclear promulgation of rules concerning telephone calls, visits, drug detection, prison commissary accounts and prisoner mail, all served to heighten the frustration and sense of disempowerment of female significant others (see Christian, 2005; Comfort, 2003). Even the basic ritual of sending a birthday card was not immune from regulation:

[My son] turned 21 when he was in gaol … [W]e sent him a 21st birthday card … with glitter all over the card … and they sent it back … to [my son’s little] brother … [A]s I said to them when I rang them up, … ‘If my son had … opened that he would have been shattered. He would have thought his [older] brother sent back the birthday card that we had sent him.’ (A, mother)

A related issue to emerge during interviews with female significant others was their inability to contact a prisoner in times of crisis. Women in our study tended overwhelmingly to be always already ensconced in the management of serious personal issues sometimes separate (but more often than not related) to their incarcerated loved one (see further below, ‘Dealing with Own Trauma’). Against this backdrop, they were forced to rely on the goodwill of officers to pass messages on, with very mixed results: ‘When I had [the baby], they were supposed to let [my boyfriend] know that I had had her. They didn’t even tell him … that his daughter had been born’ (O, girlfriend). Comfort (2003: 83) has written of the ‘contemptuous neglect’ associated with prison visitor facilities. This phrase also neatly describes the attitude displayed by many correctional staff in the face of known trauma being experienced by prisoners’ female significant others. The following excerpt relays how one facility ‘dealt’ with news of a prisoner’s girlfriend surviving her father’s attempt to kill her (he had reacted violently towards her upon learning that the prisoner was the father of her unborn baby):

All I wanted to do was just tell [him] what had happened. I got [my friend] to ring up twice, the … Remand Centre, [but] they just would not pass the message on – even though my friend had told them what had happened. So I had to go into the visits [room] … in front of people, and tell him … ‘I’ve just nearly been killed. My dad’s hung himself, and I lost your baby’ … I had the glass [screen between us], I was on the phone to him … I couldn’t even hug him, and he [couldn’t] hug me. And he cried. And I don’t hardly ever see him cry, so that’s when I know that he’s upset … [He was so upset] he put himself in the infirmary. Apparently he tried to kill himself … which I don’t need … I think he feels responsible … because he knows that dad was angry about him … But I told him, ‘It’s not your fault.’ (N, girlfriend)

On other occasions, the correctional system threw up ‘smaller’ but no less complicated issues for women and their children. One such issue involved mothers trying to keep their incarcerated loved one in touch with their children but also having to guard against the intrusion/normalization of prison procedures within the home:

One time, my youngest daughter was on the phone to somebody else and she had finished talking to them, so she just turned around and goes, ‘Beep’, and I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And then I realized, at the end of the phone calls … to [her incarcerated step-father], when she’s finished talking, it beeps three times before it cuts out, so she was like beeping to basically say, ‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore.’ (P, wife)

Incarceration as Brief Reprieve

While (ex)prisoners’ stocks of emotional capital tend to increase with familial contact, the same relationship often results in the depletion of the ‘long term social capital of the family’ (Christian et al., 2006: 444). Invariably, mothers in our study reached an impasse where concerted efforts to rescue sons were no longer justifiable against the harm caused to the wider family unit (see further below, ‘Sublimation of Self’). Prison as a ‘known’ quantity afforded mothers and partners, in particular, an immediate means to halt the (escalating) chaos in and around their lives. At particular junctures, incarceration was recognized as the ‘necessary evil’ in the life-course of their loved one – indeed it was the institution affording at least some kind of life:

I was relieved … that he wasn’t getting himself into trouble anymore cos he was in a safe place and he was getting fed … [and] I knew where he was and I knew that the police wouldn’t be handling him. (F, mother)

[When he’s incarcerated], I know where he is … I used to not want to answer the phone for the pure and simple fact [that] I didn’t want to hear my boy was on a cement slab somewhere. (B, mother)

The sense of singular relief associated with incarceration tended to follow years of working with doctors, psychologists, social workers, teachers, case-workers and the like to resolve the behaviour of their child/partner. As one mother commented,

[H]is paediatrician … said to us that we were extremely lucky. He said a lot of kids that have ADD, ADHD, he said … ‘They can either be perfect angels at home and absolute little arseholes at school or they can be the opposite way round – absolute little arseholes at home and perfect angels at school’ … He said, ‘You’re lucky. Your son’s an absolute arsehole everywhere.’ It’s like, ‘Cheers.’ (A, mother)

This kind of deep despair led to the curious ‘embrace’ of the correctional system as the means for short-circuiting cycles of harm. In the main, women in our cohort told, tragically, of the prison as ‘the one state agency on which [they could] rely’ (Codd, 2008: 164). On rare occasions, the prison even functioned as a vehicle through which intimate relationships could emerge:

[Having my partner in lock-up at the beginning of our relationship] actually … worked very well for me, because … I’ve had a lot of issues with my ex. And so I’ve stayed away from men in general and I’ve been very uncomfortable around [them] and so for me to get to know another bloke, it was just about impossible because in the back of my head, I’m thinking, ‘There’s all these expectations and all this pressure and all that.’ Whereas with him in lock-up, there is not much you can do but talk and get to know each other. So it worked a lot better for me and that’s what helped us. (P, wife)

We do not pretend that all or even many (potential) partners will find advantage in restrictions imposed by incarceration. But provided women can ‘reorganise … [the family’s] internal structure and functions … to overcome the loss … and to regain functional equilibrium’ (Lowenstein, 1984: 700), imprisonment of male partners may result in positive outcomes. Ostensibly, the absence of a chronic drug user, for example, has distinct implications for family stability, child rearing and access to resources (Eddy and Reid, 2003 in Codd, 2008). Similarly, in cases of domestic violence, the lives of its members also stand to be ‘substantially enriched’ by the perpetrator’s removal (Codd, 2008: 47). Such removal, though, does not fix all problems always. Indeed, women also reported having to deal with disgruntled ex-partners who, on release from prison, would try to harm them psychologically (threats via ‘anonymous’ phone calls) or physically.

Suspicion of Maternal Insights

As mentioned at the outset, families can function as a ‘buffering agent’ against further offending (Irwin, 1970, quoted in Naser and Visher, 2006: 21). This much is recognized by legislation requiring that ‘family relationships between a youth, the youth’s parents and other members of the youth’s family should be preserved and strengthened’ (Young Offenders Act 1993: s. 3b). As primary care givers and/or key support persons to their sons, mothers placed a particular premium on their personal experiences and insights when it came to ‘knowing’ their boy(s). As such, considerable frustration arose from trying to work with a ‘system’ that appeared wedded to standardized programmatic responses as opposed to collaborative and nuanced approaches to rehabilitation:

[I]t always seems … that I can make [the best] judgement on whether or not [a programme is] going to work … because I know who [my son] is … So … I feel like an idiot when they look at me and go, ‘Oh, well, we’re going to try it anyway.’ And I … look at them and say, ‘It’s not going to work’ … And it doesn’t work. And it’s like, ‘Well, listen to me.’ (B, mother)

They all say, ‘Oh, he should do anger management classes’ … I mean, he has done that many anger management courses he could bloody well run one. They don’t work on him. (A, mother)

The experience of ‘maternal lock-out’ extended to other contexts. While the mother quoted below was candid about her parental shortcomings, she knew that something was amiss with the ‘care’ her sons were receiving in state homes:

They weren’t listening to me and I felt like … our government was doing me and my family wrong … [I had a] real bad reaction … when I found big handprints across [my son’s] backside … and [also] when I put [my other son] in the bath and he started freaking out – [he was] thinking I was going to dunk him under the water. When I asked him why, he says, ‘That’s because [it’s] what [my] carer … did’ … So I ended up in the office again that day in tears … [And] they continued to pick [my children] up and take them back [to their foster parents], even after my reports of concern. (Q, ex-girlfriend)

The merits of working with offenders’ families are well known (Adams and Fischer, 1976; Carlson and Cervera, 1992; Gavazzi et al., 2003; Hairston, 1991; Holt and Miller, 1972; Klein et al., 2002; Light and Campbell, 2006; Martinez, 2009; Naser and Visher, 2006). However, striking the right balance between professional (expert) and familial (‘lay’) knowledge of how best to assist those in lock-up, remained a key issue for participants in our study. This was especially so where mothers (and fathers) learn, through repeated experience, to perceive the criminal justice system as an alienating and judgemental force – a force that frequently does ‘little more than point fingers of blame at them as parents’ (Gavazzi et al., 2003: 295).

Sublimation of Self

The view that punishment is something ‘imposed directly on the family’ (Fishman, 1988: 56) tends to put the focus on material issues such as financial hardship, unstable accommodation, lack of help with child-rearing and so forth (Lowenstein, 1984). For our women, it was the state of uncertainty stemming from repeat cycles of offending and incarceration that most pointedly impacted their lives. Life for them was divided into two distinct yet interrelated phases: ‘waiting’ for males to be released from custody, and ‘living in the moment’ or making the most of time spent between custodial events. ‘Waiting’ entailed women ‘doing time’ in their own home experiencing, in large degree, the same ‘isolation, lack of stimulation, continuous pressure from others, boredom and monotony’ as their incarcerated loved one (Fishman, 1988: 59). Devoid of any real or stable sense of future, the women also became attuned to taking things one day at a time. Each spoke of continually having to lower or abandon their expectations concerning how life could be ‘next time around’:

I don’t plan anything because you just never know. You always start off with the hopes and dreams and all that stuff, but it gets thrown out the window. (J, girlfriend)

[We don’t] really discuss the future, because we don’t know what the future brings with our boy, so we don’t even go there. We don’t even, you know, sort of try and plan anything. It’s all living in the moment. (B, mother)

Phone calls, visits, letter writing, correspondence with various agencies such as lawyers, emergency housing, prospective employers and the like, all intruded on the ‘natural’ rhythms typically associated with life beyond bars. It was not uncommon, for instance, for a female and her small children to make an eight hour round trip for a 40 minute visit once a week for several years. ‘Going to [the prison] is four hours away. … I’ve had my daughter throwing up on the bus on the way there from the heat … [I]t’s just ridiculous’ (J, girlfriend). Failure to advise families ahead of time that visits were cancelled occurred with alarming frequency, adding further stress to an already difficult situation.

The organizational dimensions surrounding prison visits were just one of the ways in which women’s sense of self came under fire. Some found themselves assuming the role of ‘personal assistant’. This occurred especially during the remand stage and/or where there were ongoing battles concerning child custody from a previous relationship:

[E]verything evolves into [him]. Like, my pay, which is a big thing, because that’s what I live on. [He] is a part of that. Visits. Every day I have to go see [him]. Or I’ve got to go home because [he’s] calling. Or I’ve got to send this letter [for him]. I’ve got to go to [his] court. I’ve got to call his lawyer. Whatever. It’s just his life is my life, pretty much. (N, girlfriend)

The sublimation of the women’s capacity and willingness to privilege their own needs over those of their incarcerated loved ones – was not infrequently countered by a conscious decision to withdraw support. This tended to be an agonizing process insofar as each knew they were in the unenviable position of having to choose between their own psycho-social health and the emotional stability of the prisoner. The following demonstrate the strength and resoluteness of these females:

We’d like to have been able to keep him at home but, like I said, I’m the mother of six, not one … We don’t want this … car wreck of a person to be coming back into our lives. We love him dearly but, you know, we don’t want that back. (B, mother)

[W]hen he came home, a couple of days after his 18th, I said he wasn’t to live with me and my ex-partner because he’d let me down so many times before. I’ve tried putting a wall up between us, having nothing to do with him, to show him that I really need to see a change. (H, mother)

I’m like, ‘You can’t just expect me to just drop my shit any more. I have to live a life. And I’m starting to get my shit together.’ I’ve got my house now, and once that starts going good, then I’m going to start doing something else. (N, girlfriend)

Drawing a line around the limits of care enabled these women partially to ‘flatten’ the peaks and troughs accompanying life within and beyond custody (or what O’Keefe, (2000: 6) calls the challenges of "domestic violence by remote control"). But these decisions, as indicated, did not come easy. Only in rare instances did the investment of time and self(lessness) in their (ex)incarcerated loved ones pay real dividends. Mothers, especially, did not think twice regarding the personal sacrifices and emotional energy expended in relation to their sons’ struggles to desist from crime (a struggle spanning upwards of 15 years). The same can be said of the female partners of the two young men who have demonstrated a serious commitment to the desistance process (each with around four years of virtually continuous non-offending). We suspect that these ‘successes’ had important implications for the women’s own torrid journeys from feeling captured by an internal (and external) narrative of condemnation towards being ‘set free’ by (long awaited) redemptive outcomes (Maruna, 2001). The precise nature of such transformations among (ex)prisoners’ female significant others would be well suited to further investigation.

Dealing with Own Trauma

Just as each female significant other (particularly, mothers and partners) strove to continue their relationships with (ex)prisoners, they did so overwhelmingly against a backdrop of serious personal issues (mentioned briefly at the outset). One female commented, ‘[M]y ex, … he beat me up all the time’ (P, wife). For many, the genesis of abuse was rooted in relationships with unstable, controlling and violent fathers. While the threat of emotional and physical abuse was widespread, it was also amplified by fathers’ resentment towards their daughters for becoming intimately involved with a ‘criminal’:

I don’t speak to my father to this very day because of [my ex-boyfriend]. He has never liked [my ex], and my dad’s pretty harsh on me. He expected me to make some pretty grown-up choices in life at a pretty young age, which was to choose between friends and parents and things like that. And, basically, it was, ‘If you want to be friends with him, then you need to leave my house’ … And [I thought], ‘You might be my dad, and he might just be my friend, but my friend seems to care a hell of a lot more about me than you do. He doesn’t sit there and lay the boot into me whenever he feels like it.’ (Q, ex-girlfriend)

A degree of conflict over boyfriends is standard fare for most father/daughter relationships. However, for families already deep in crisis, the outcomes of such conflict could be particularly tragic:

Dad just went crazy… [H]e hit me [and] he goes, ‘What are you doing pregnant?’ [He knew whose baby it was.] And he had me by my hair, and punched me twice in the face, and then I just lost it with him … I told him I was going to call the police, and then that’s when he started strangling me, and put me through my bedroom window. I cut my hand … and my wrists, and then he must have just stopped and realized that … I had my arms up in the air, and I was like, ‘Dad, I’m sorry. I won’t call the police.’ And I thought he went to hug me, but he … started choking me again … It was full on, and so that’s when I panicked and tried to throw myself out the window. And he just let go and ran outside and hung himself. And I just ran out. I was so scared of him. And I just ran outside and called the police because I actually heard the noise of him jumping, and the shed just doing that noise, like someone had hit the door … And then I knew that he had done it. (N, girlfriend)

It is difficult to conceive of a more extreme chain of events than that narrated by the teenager above. In the space of just a few hours, she was almost strangled to death, sustained severe injuries from broken glass, reported the suicide of her father and, shortly thereafter, suffered a miscarriage. On top of all this, she needed to break this news ⁶ to her incarcerated boyfriend (who was father to the deceased unborn). The extent to which females lacking positive father figures might seek out relationships with equally ‘damaged’ men remains a valid line of enquiry, although we do not pursue such here. Instead, we make the point that, for most of the female significant others in our study, damage had been sustained on multiple fronts prior to their relationships with (ex)prisoners. Around half were long-term illicit drug users and/or self-confessed alcoholics. With only one or two exceptions, all had experienced serious physical violence by a male perpetrator (partner or stranger). Several had spent time in juvenile facilities and/or prison. Horrifically, one mother was recently bashed and repeatedly raped by several youths during a home invasion designed, reportedly, to steal her supply of illicit drugs and to settle a long-standing criminal debt. The levels of despair experienced by the women concerning their lot as well as the lot of their sons and/or partners led several to attempt suicide:

I was taking medication and trying to commit suicide in the house … [Whenever my mum and nanna visited] I’d go through [my nanna’s] [hand]bag and [steal her medication]. I’d try and pop pills and just wanted to end my life. My two young boys were with me … Anyway, it got pretty sad, and I said to my mother, ‘I’m ready to go to hospital.’ But I had pre-worked out what I was going to do on the way to hospital … [W]e were driving down [the road] and I jumped out of my mother’s car doing 80 kilometres [per hour], hoping to just do away with myself … I [now] class myself as an alcoholic. Every day I go to work, come home. I have a cask of wine under the fridge – under the kitchen cupboard, and I have a drink. I may have one, I might have two, I might knock myself out. (H, mother)

It was also not uncommon for female significant others to be ensconced in court or correctional proceedings of their own. This, of course, added to the already significant burden of supporting (financially and/or emotionally) their incarcerated loved one. One female – on a lengthy period of parole – nearly lost everything (including her house) on account of what could only be described as an overzealous attempt to eliminate any and all risk associated with her plans to travel interstate to visit her grandchild:

In virtually all our interviews, the collateral damage associated with crime and imprisonment was front and centre for each female. The greatest trauma, though, was the kind of pain which only prison can levy. One mother succinctly captured this by commenting, ‘You know what I miss about [my son]? … His hugs … I haven’t been able to have one for so long and it’s like, “Oh god, I just want to hold him”’ (F, mother).

Concluding Remarks

The excerpts relayed above offer a small but significant glimpse of the challenges faced by women who offer various levels of support to their (ex)incarcerated loved ones. Perhaps most striking was that the issues confronted by these non-incarcerated women so closely resembled the problems confronting incarcerated women (see McIvor et al., 2009). Female participants’ lives seemed imbued by extreme frugality, uncertainty and emotional exhaustion. But in spite of such, and particularly in the case of mothers and grandmothers, their love and support proved – in the majority of instances – steadfast. Each was prepared to be, literally, the last woman standing. Having said as much, girlfriends were less resolute in terms of their commitment and bore the brunt of the emotional and psychological turmoil typically surrounding the incarceration of a loved one. Issues of infidelity (even unsubstantiated rumours thereof) and the subsequent controlling behaviours exhibited by males (even from behind bars) were of chief concern. Broken promises of ‘leaving the life’ – of things being very different ‘next time’ – caused some females to shut down their support and to take proactive steps to protect their children from a life based on ongoing uncertainty and anguish (many of the children, we note, were not the progeny of the incarcerated males).

Where relationships remained strong – and even in those that eventually took a turn for the worse – the greatest gift bestowed by females upon males was affirmation of efforts (however small) to desist from crime. This, perhaps more than provision of money or shelter, was the prime commodity put into circulation by the women in our research: ‘[W]hen he is good, … we lay it on thick and encourage him in a lot of ways’ (B, mother). The sister of one prisoner also remarked on this dimension:

[My brother has been in and out of prison] most of his life … To be quite honest, I think he’s insecure … because he hasn’t had that person … to connect with him, [like his] dad [or] mum. They haven’t been there for him as much as he wants, which is … really hard … He needs praise. That’s what it is. He needs praise, because he doesn’t get enough of that. Dad never did any of that. Mum never did any of that. He just wants praise. (M, sister)

Affirmation is a critically important part of the desistance process. Our suggestion is that the role of female significant others as key affirmers of ‘good intentions’ and ‘good conduct’ in that process should not be overlooked (since praise for changing one’s lot is unlikely to emanate from officers or other prisoners and is in fact most likely to be looked on as a sign of ‘weakness’ or as connected to an ulterior motive such as obtaining a lower security rating, more privileges or early parole). As Maruna and colleagues (2004: 274) write, ‘[D]esistance may be best facilitated when the desisting person’s change in behavior is recognized by others and reflected back to [her/]him in a “delabeling process”.’ Clearly, the emotional, financial and other support received by (ex)prisoners from loved ones can play a vital role here. We acknowledge, though, that the journey from ‘spoiled’ to ‘legitimate’ identity ideally requires help from persons situated beyond the family sphere (the rarity of ‘making good’ in our study is testimony to this). Employers, teachers, parole officers, politicians, the popular media and even or especially, victims, can play monumentally important roles in ‘certifying’ pathways out of crime. But consistent with the knowledge that the home is a pivotal location for modelling desired behaviour, we would argue that female significant others could – if properly and consistently supported in their efforts – provide a spark of hope and encouragement to (ex)prisoners in circumstances where such affirmation might otherwise occur infrequently or not at all. Of the two (ex)prisoners who have managed – excepting very minor breaches of parole conditions – to desist from serious offending for several years, it is telling that both acknowledged their respective female partner as central to them staying out of prison:

I always say … to her, … ‘Well, you know I’ve been in gaol. You know I’ve got a bad criminal record. Why did you go for me? Like, you stayed single for two years. Like, why?’ She goes, ‘It’s different with you. I don’t know. There’s something there.’ (S, ex-prisoner)

Meeting her done it. If I hadn’t got with [my girlfriend] I would have got back in trouble … I would have got bored … Because we used to live in the country doing nothing … No one wants to give you a job because you’re a bad crim and you’ve got a bad past and no one wants to give you a go. But then when I got with [her] it’s all just changed everything … The kids started calling me Dad and if I got locked up it would break their hearts. They’d be shattered … Me and [my girlfriend], we’ll stay together now and we’ll get married eventually. (T, ex-prisoner)

Among the research participants, such ‘successes’ were rare. But some analytical weight attaches to the fact that each young male participant nominated at least one female (and frequently, more than one) as a significant other in their lives. Indeed, two in three of all nominated persons in the research were female. This raises, in central fashion, the question of gender and, more squarely, how males consciously or unconsciously envisage the connection between ‘support’ and ‘femininity’. In our view, a highly conservative (archetypal ‘blue-collar’) conception of female-hood pervaded the interviews with male (ex)prisoners. Due to their incarceration, males chiefly conceived of themselves as ‘protectors’ (via reputational violence) of whatever semblance of family remained beyond the prison (Anderson, 1999). This self-concept superseded their role of (illicit) economic provider and permitted them to ‘do’ masculinity while doing time. Prison itself, of course, was seen from within and without as a hyper-masculinized sign of strength as opposed to a place constituted by the weak-willed, the under-educated, the victimized or like.

Females, on the other hand, were viewed in opposition to ‘maleness’. Overwhelmingly, in picking up the pieces, women adopted the role(s) of carer (of children), home-maker, communicator (letter writer, phone-caller, visitor), peacemaker (in relation to ongoing family disputes or troubles with ex-partner(s)) and absolver (the person who repeatedly forgives, up to a point, the transgressions of their loved one). The exception to this, were those women who – in trying to provide some additional stability on the home-front – attempted to generate an income. In these few instances, the women were careful to frame their work as complementing rather than fully replacing males’ contributions in their lives.

In closing, we should emphasize that the emotional and other labour undertaken by the women was not entirely lost on the male (ex)prisoners – although most were unable to comprehend the true extent of energy and time devoted by women ‘behind the scenes’ towards dealing with ‘prison related stuff’. Still, when young men spoke of people who supported them through ‘thick and thin’, they spoke overwhelmingly of the females in (and out) of their lives. As one young man put it, ‘If I didn’t have [my girlfriend] … I reckon I’d be straight back into crime again … It’s good … to have your own place and have a missus’ (S, ex-prisoner). This brings us back to a point made at the outset of the present work: namely, the role played by female significant others is potentially of great import for holding together – perhaps even improving on – social relations in particular households and neighbourhoods in the wake of incarceration. But – and this is the key point – the struggles engaged by such women go largely unacknowledged at the public and political level. There are few ‘groups’ for such women to turn to, to confide in, to vent their frustrations, to seek improvements to the ‘system’ – a system which could not do without their work yet which often puts them under suspicion or expects them to function with the most meagre of resources. The demise of South Australia’s “Partners of Prisoners Program” (spanning 1993 to 2000) is to be particularly lamented in this context. There is a real need for such groups/initiatives through which a female’s singular (atomized) struggle might be reflected in and empowered through the common struggles of those in attendance . From such might grow an appreciation of the very human costs and needs bound up with assisting (ex)incarcerates.

Finally, and in an attempt to ground our work in the very real and tumultuous nature of the lives investing this study, we relay two excerpts (narrated one year apart) from the same prisoner. These speak directly, we believe, to the intensity and fragility of relationships which straddle the prison and the world beyond:

Ever since I was with ‘dog-face’ [my ex-girlfriend], … I really thought that I’m never going to find the real me … She’s a criminal. I’m a criminal. We’re a match, you know … But now I haven’t had that contact with her … I can finally find out who I really am. (W, prisoner)

In such light, we do not suggest that female significant others provide a sure-fire means for young males to cope with incarceration or to do well upon release. Frequently, relationships will prove untenable. However, our research flags the notion that there are real if too-often forgone opportunities for government and non-government agencies to work with prisoners’ female significant others, not against them, to achieve good social outcomes. This much is key to overcoming the secondary stigmatization experienced by such persons, and, critically, for igniting and sustaining a major force for prisoner well-being.