Maternal incarceration in a provincial prison in Canada: A qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: To explore the experiences of provincially incarcerated mothers in Nova Scotia, Canada; and to make recommendations with respect to improving the experiences of mothers facing criminalization and their children. DESIGN: This qualitative study is rooted in feminist standpoint theory, community-based research methodologies and prison abolition. METHODS: Mothers who were currently or previously incarcerated were recruited by community partners. Between Fall 2021 and Winter 2022, 14 individual interviews and one focus group were conducted, for a total of 18 study participants. Data were analysed collaboratively using thematic analysis. RESULTS: Three key themes were developed through the data analysis: Maintaining Connection, Broken Bonds and The Damage. Mothers shared experiences of trying to maintain connections with their children through numerous challenges, including emotional distress caused by the separation and significant logistical and financial barriers. Mothers felt their children unfairly bore the burden of their incarceration. They experienced a lack of or outright denial of services while incarcerated, and a lack of transitional support on release, making working towards parenting again difficult and discouraging. CONCLUSION: For participants in our study, separation from their children during incarceration caused severe emotional distress and had serious implications on their right to parent and their relationships with their children. Incarceration for even brief periods has detrimental social impacts, and release planning does not prepare people for the challenges of repairing that damage. Conditions of maternal incarceration are in violation of international human rights laws. IMPACT: Although we make some recommendations for reform (e.g. free phone calls), we focus on alternatives to incarceration for mothers experiencing criminalization. Findings will be shared with relevant institutional partners with the goal of impacting sentencing and incarceration practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".