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Prison Nurseries

Prison nurseries are residential units within prisons in which young children of inmates reside, usually with their mothers. Although they are rare in the United States, prison nurseries are commonplace in women's prisons elsewhere throughout the world. A 1987 survey of 70 nations found that only four—Suriname, Liberia, the Bahamas, and the United States—did not allow pregnant inmates to keep their babies with them after they were born in prison. All but 14 nations permitted young children born before their mothers' incarceration to accompany them to prison.

History

Prior to the 1950s, prison nurseries existed in many states, including California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Maine, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, and Wyoming. Some nurseries welcomed babies born prior to their mothers' incarceration as well as those born during imprisonment. For example, inmates at the Connecticut Women's Prison in Niantic gave birth to 47 infants in 1937. They joined 56 babies in the nursery who had come to prison with their mothers. The Niantic nursery remained full until the end of the 1940s, with almost as many babies at the prison as inmates, no doubt reflecting the criminalization of nonmarital sex by women. At the State Industrial Farm for Women in Lansing, Kansas, where children could remain with their mothers up to age two, children sometimes outnumbered the inmates.

Even states that did not have formal nurseries often allowed mothers to keep infants born at the prison who had no relatives to take them. These babies lived amid the general prison population, where many women vied for the chance to play surrogate mother.

Attitudes toward incarcerated mothers and their children changed in the United States after World War II. During the following decades, every state except New York closed its prison nurseries. Most prisoners were required to surrender their babies to relatives or child welfare agencies as soon as they gave birth. Legislators and prison administrators judged prison nurseries to be too expensive and the prison environment too bleak for young children, even babies. In any case, mothers in prison were deemed to be unsuited to the task of rearing the next generation.

Nurseries outside the United States

Most other prison systems throughout the world, meanwhile, continued to sustain the mother–child bond despite maternal incarceration. In some prisons in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia, entire families reside in prisons where a parent is incarcerated. In others, like the women's prison in Córdoba, Argentina, young children may live with their mothers amid the general prison population or, as in the prison outside Buenos Aires, may reside in a separate wing for mothers and babies. Separate wings for mothers and young children can also be found within traditional prisons in Europe, such as the mother–child unit at Holloway, a large, high-security women's prison in London. Perhaps the only Western European nation that does not allow young children to reside in prison is Norway, which bans incarceration of mothers with young children altogether.

Perhaps the best-known prison nursery can be found in Frankfurt, Germany. At the women's prison in Preungesheim, mothers and babies under the age of 18 months reside in a separate building within the walls of the maximum-security prison. Children older than that but too young to attend school live with their mothers in a special campus-style unit built just beyond the prison's walls. Certified child care workers tend the children while their mothers work during the day at the prison or in the city. Mothers are responsible for their own children at all other times, and may take their children out into the community during specified hours. School-aged children are not allowed to live at the prison, but still the mother–child bond can be maintained. Mothers of children who reside in Frankfurt with relatives can be approved for the work-release job of being mother and homemaker for their own families, performing the myriad tasks of motherhood in their children's home during the day, but sleeping at the prison at night.

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