The Matrix of Vulnerabilities – How Unsupported Mothering Shapes Pathways to Prison

This chapter links mothers’ criminal pathways to inequalities within the family that arise from derivative dependency of mothers and the withdrawal of state support. I introduce the concept of the matrix of vulnerabilities to consider how unsupported mothering interacts with trauma, poverty and coercive relationships to create specific pathways to prison for mothers arising from these inequalities. Drawing on interview research with formerly incarcerated mothers, the workers who support them, the lawyers who represent them and the judges who sentence them, the book presents an immersive understanding of the experiences of mothers within the criminal justice system and synthesises this with a theoretical understanding the way caretakers acquire derivative or secondary dependency and how this is exacerbated by the “intensification” of mothering practices as a care fix under neoliberal capitalism. The chapter shows how unremitting and unsupported trauma disables mothers and undermines their mothering practice and how neoliberal policy that refuses to recognise their care work and economic vulnerability traps them in poverty. Both of these factors produce secondary dependencies as a direct result of mothering that render women reliant on coercive relationships, often with criminalised men. These gendered pathways to prison for mothers are directly shaped by vulnerability that the legal system resists recognising.