This study examines the mothering practices and identities of incarcerated women in Mexico. Data gathered from repeated life-story interviews with 12 women, were analyzed to describe mothering practices in the different phases of incarcerated women’s’ lives. We argue that knowledge of the Latin American context is crucial to understand their experiences of motherhood. In a society based on familism and marianismo identities that suffers from a lack of welfare institutions, motherhood provided a way for socially and economically excluded women to escape destructive family environments and gain autonomy. Motherhood also provided a way to cope with the stigma of delinquency. Using the framework of Southern Criminology, we explore the importance of marginalized motherhood in this tradition. The results reveal the tragic paradox of motherhood for incarcerated women and the importance of studying marginalized mothering beyond the Global North.
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EXPLORING LIFE COURSES AND LIFE STORIES
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Updated: Apr 12
The relationship between adverse childhood experiences and criminality has been amply explored in criminology and the social sciences. A plethora of scholarly theories has focused on the impact of abandonment by one’s parents, among other events, in the development of criminal careers. Originating in the Global North, where it has been much promoted, this hypothesis has turned into a doxa overriding the need to account for sociocultural contexts. Drawing upon narrative criminology, this paper analyses how the life stories of people in prison change with their institutional trajectories, being shaped by official penal discourses. Based on the analysis of 30 life stories with inmates in Argentinean prisons, this paper argues that prison narratives guide explanations of crime towards family dynamics and, consequently, decontextualize life histories. Nonetheless, interviewees contested mainstream expert theories – while skillfully using them to navigate the system – as a response to the attempted institutional alienation of their biographies. In contesting dominant theories, participants are resisting not just local prison culture but also transnational colonial networks of knowledge production. Revisiting dominant frameworks that mechanically take for granted the impact of childhood experiences constitutes a path of inquiry that contributes to an understanding of prison narratives.
The relationship between war and crime is complex and multifaceted. Still, insurgents, armed rebels, and paramilitary groups and the violence they perpetrate are often understood within either a framework of war or of crime. Based on repeat interviews with former members of Colombian paramilitary groups, we describe the role of economic motivations, security concerns, social relations, as well as identity and feelings of power in motivating people’s involvement in these groups. A life-course analysis demonstrates the many possible confluences of war and crime leading to involvement in paramilitary groups and emphasizes how these change over time.
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