What is it about?

Mothers who give birth while incarcerated are usually separated from their newborns right away, which threatens their ability to form a bond during a critical early period. This study examined interviews with 27 mothers in Georgia and Pennsylvania shortly after their release to understand how they tried to stay connected with their infants and what got in the way. We found that prison policies, technology failures, and high communication costs made bonding extremely difficult, yet mothers persisted through creative efforts to connect. Many still came home to children who didn't recognize them, facing grief and a long road to reunification. These findings show that the U.S. prison system needs family-centered reforms to support incarcerated mothers and their children.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This is among the first studies to center the voices of mothers themselves in understanding contact with infants born during incarceration, rather than relying solely on caregiver or system-level data. It comes at a critical time, as U.S. women's incarceration rates continue to climb and policymakers increasingly debate reforms to prison visitation, communication access, and family separation practices. Our findings reveal that current carceral systems are structurally unprepared to support infant-mother bonding, offering evidence to inform policy efforts around community-based alternatives to incarceration and family-centered practices.

Perspectives

Reading interviews with mothers shortly after their release and hearing how they described trying to hold onto a relationship with their infant made the stakes of this work that much more important. I hope this study does more than document a broken system and gives these mothers' voices weight in conversations that often leave them out entirely.

Kimberly Piontkowski
Brown University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: “Will they know who I am?”: Contact between incarcerated mothers and their infants., Journal of Family Psychology, July 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/fam0001520.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page