TY - JOUR
T1 - Pregnancy and childbirth in English prisons
T2 - institutional ignominy and the pains of imprisonment
AU - Abbott, Laura
AU - Thomas, Hilary
AU - Scott, Patricia
AU - Weston, Kathy
N1 - © 2020 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for SHIL.
PY - 2020/1/10
Y1 - 2020/1/10
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - pregnancy
KW - institutions
KW - Goffman
KW - childbirth
KW - prisons
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85077845178&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/1467-9566.13052
DO - 10.1111/1467-9566.13052
M3 - Article
C2 - 31922273
SN - 0141-9889
VL - 42
SP - 660
EP - 675
JO - Sociology of Health and Illness
JF - Sociology of Health and Illness
IS - 3
M1 - SHIL13052
ER -