Pregnancy and childbirth in English prisons
Institutional Ignominy and the Pains of Imprisonment
Bibliographic Data
With a prison population of approximately 9000 women in England, it is estimated that approximately 600 pregnancies and 100 births occur annually. Despite an extensive literature on the sociology of reproduction, pregnancy and childbirth among women prisoners is under-researched. This article reports an ethnographic study in three English prisons undertaken in 2015-2016, including interviews with 22 prisoners, six women released from prison and 10 staff members. Pregnant prisoners experience numerous additional difficulties in prison including the ambiguous status of a pregnant prisoner, physical aspects of pregnancy and the degradation of the handcuffed or chained prisoner during visits to the more public setting of hospital. This article draws on Erving Goffman's concepts of closed institutions, dramaturgy and mortification of self, Crewe et al.'s work on the gendered pains of imprisonment and Crawley's notion of 'institutional thoughtlessness', and proposes a new concept of institutional ignominy to understand the embodied situation of the pregnant prisoner
Childbirth · Criminology · Embodied cognition · Ethnography · Imprisonment · Population · Pregnancy · Prison · Sociology · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Demography · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Prenatal Substance Exposure Effects · Psychology
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Ethnography
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Asylums
Autoethnography and Emotion as Intellectual Resources
The sociology of childbirth
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,4 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2026 (6) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |