Seminar on prison motherhood

Milford Daily News
Jon Brodkin
November 8, 2006

Monica Ghosh Driggers, director of the Gender and Justice Project at the Wellesley Centers for Women, gave a lecture on November 9 entitled, “Women in Prison and Children in Peril: What We’ve Learned in Massachusetts.” The talk was a part of the Wellesley Centers for Women’s Lunchtime Lecture Series. It is estimated that 9,000 women are incarcerated at Massachusetts Correctional Institution (MCI)-Framingham and other correctional facilities in Massachusetts; of those, about 6,900 are mothers to 16,000 children. According to Driggers, although there are programs at MCI-Framingham that support mothers, “there are too many barriers preventing connections between children and women imprisoned at MCI-Framingham.” Better connections with their children may prevent women from becoming “more criminal” while in prison. “The goal is not to have these women go through the (prison) system over and over again,” said Driggers.