Mothering from the Inside: Parenting in a Women's Prison (review)

Mothering from the Inside: Parenting in a Women's Prison. By Sandra Enos. State University of New York Press, 2001. 176 pp. Cloth, $48.50; paper, $15.95.

Within the broader concern for exploring frequently overlooked female experiences of child care, Sandra Enos provides a descriptive treatment of parenting issues that women inmates confront during prison confinement. Her review of previous studies of the impact of incarceration on inmate mothers and their families is thorough and quite useful in laying the groundwork for the focus of her ethnographic study of twenty-five women inmates who participated in a parenting program in a correctional institution in the northeast. Mothering from the Inside begins with a clear statement of the research goal of exploring ethnic and race differences in (1) paths to crime, (2) options for child care during imprisonment, (3) management of parental self-identity, (4) expectations in shared family responsibilities for childcare, and (5) maintaining parental influence during imprisonment.

To examine race and ethnic differences in the above concerns, Enos relies on anecdotal descriptions drawn from participate observational fieldwork and in-depth interviews with women inmates. Using a grounded theory methodological approach in her field observations, Enos subsequently formulates interview questions that are particularly relevant to her general research purposes. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, she relies on the inmate mothers' description of how they each conceptualize and deal with managing motherhood without their children.

In chapter 3, Enos focuses on race and ethnic differences in the pathways to crime and the type of child-care crises those inmate mothers immediately face upon incarceration. She concludes that white women are more likely to enter criminal activity by being a runaway adolescent. African American women are more likely to report entering criminal careers via a family member, while Hispanic women entered crime via the use of drugs. Enos reports that among African American and Hispanic inmate mothers, family members were often a viable option for child care during the mother's incarceration. However, among white inmate mothers, child placement was more likely to be in a foster home or with the child's father.

Chapter 4 details the inmate mother's experiences with attempts to convince others of their fitness as mothers in light of their criminal activity and absence from the home due to incarceration. Enos notes that success in these attempts is important to negotiations over child placement and continued contacts with their children. Enos describes the strategies inmate mothers use to prove their fitness as mothers. In this chapter, Enos does not attempt to identify race and ethnic differences in these strategies of self-identity. She points out the apparent incongruency in claims to being a fit mother and the use of drugs and involvement in criminal activity.

In chapter 5, Enos describes how inmate mothers construct priorities between drug use, criminal activity, and motherhood. She indicates that most inmate mothers view their identity as mothers as having the highest priority. Their attempts to manage and negotiate their identities around motherhood, crime, and drugs presented substantial strain and became a preoccupation for many of them.

The strength of the book is in the descriptive details of how inmate mothers attempt to hold on to their motherhood identity and to maintain a parental role in their children's lives. However, there are some troubling weaknesses. For example, the promise to examine race and ethnic differences is not systematically followed in chapters 4 and 5. Since the study is based on only twenty-five self-selected inmates, the generalizability of the conclusions to a population of inmate mothers is questionable. Generalizations even to the inmate mothers within the same correctional institution is cautioned against, given the nonrepresentative sample. The sample overrepresents Hispanic inmate mothers and underrepresents their white counterparts. Finally, although Enos gathered data on the inmate mother's age and length of imprisonment, these variables are not systematically included in any...