‘I'm a f**king mum!’: Reclaiming Motherhood Behind and Beyond Prison Walls

This paper contributes to the small, yet growing, body of scholarship centering the study of the maternal in contexts of criminal ‘justice’. To do this, we critically explore the narratives of mothers directly impacted by imprisonment in England and Wales, through bringing together two comparable yet distinct research projects. The first focuses on the experiences of mothers whose sons are imprisoned under the doctrine of joint enterprise, while the second platforms the experiences of Black mothers who themselves have been imprisoned. Specifically, we analyse the narratives produced by these mothers, as they reflect on their maternal identities following either their own conviction or that of their sons. In doing so, we demonstrate how narratives extend beyond mere storytelling, serving as a means for mothers to make sense of and define their own experiences of the oppressive systems that work to legitimise enforced maternal separation and devalue motherhood. As such, we argue that both the criminalisation of mothers and that of their sons create the punitive conditions under which ‘the mother’ becomes both politicised and disillusioned, however this experience is not only retold but also reimagined and reclaimed through narrative.