Features
Mothers in Prison
Sociologist studies what compels moms to commit crime — or not
BY TERESA PITMAN
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| Prof. Carolyn Yule digs at the roots of women’s criminal behaviour. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
For four years, Prof. Carolyn Yule, Sociology and Anthropology, met with women in jail — more than 150 in total — sitting side-by-side with them in locked rooms with a guard outside the door as they shared the stories of their lives.
“It was honestly life-changing for me,” says Yule, who joined U of G this month. “I learned so much — not just about crime but also about human nature and the human spirit.”
Her interviews — conducted primarily at the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton — were part of a larger project involving researchers in Ontario, Baltimore and Minneapolis who interviewed women in correctional institutions.
Yule says crime was a common topic around the dinner table when she was growing up because her father was a lawyer. In fact, she considered going to law school but realized she was more interested in understanding the causes of criminal behaviour.
That interest led her to study sociology at the University of British Columbia — she was born and raised in Vancouver — then to head east for graduate work at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral thesis is based on those interviews of incarcerated women but looks specifically at whether women are more or less likely to commit crimes when they’re responsible for the care of their children.
“If you read the literature or talk to women in custody, you learn that being separated from their children is a huge source of pain for them,” she says.
Knowing that led her to wonder whether mothers would try to avoid offending so they wouldn’t be taken away from their kids. Previous research had studied the feelings and perceptions of mothers, but none had sought to track their actual behaviour when they were caring for their children.
Yule says the larger study’s overall focus on violence and victimization in the lives of incarcerated women offered a good opportunity to get the information she needed.
“The focus wasn’t on being a mother, so the women weren’t inclined to hedge on the truth to make themselves look like better mothers.”
She found that having children to take care of reduced drug use and property crimes among the women in her study, but it had no effect on whether the women dealt drugs or used violence against their intimate partners.
The crimes that decreased — drug use and property crimes — were ones where the women had more autonomy, says Yule. Many women said they wanted to avoid using drugs for the sake of their children and were well aware of the harmful effects of drug use during pregnancy and while caring for young children. Property crimes seemed to have often been for “extras” such as fancier shoes or stylish clothes, and stealing for those items didn’t seem to be worth the risk of separation from children, she says.
So why were rates of drug dealing and domestic partner violence unaffected? Both of these are more complex, she says.
In many cases, the woman’s partner is dealing drugs in the home, and it’s easiest for the woman to participate even if she doesn’t use the drugs herself, says Yule. In terms of domestic violence, some incidents involved both partners fighting and others were cases of self-defence.
“Usually, despite engaging in violence themselves, the women ended up more severely injured than their male partners,” she adds.
This experience has confirmed for Yule just how complex the roots of criminal behaviour are.
The data collected during these extensive interviews will provide material for many future studies, says Yule, but she continues to be interested in issues surrounding motherhood and incarceration.
“I’d like to look at what these women would consider an ideal situation in terms of their children and what would help them achieve it. Not all of them want to parent or raise their children, and they may believe that what’s in the best interest of the child is to give him or her to someone else.”
Yule adds that her interest in these topics may be fuelled, in part, by the arrival of her now 10- month-old daughter, Olivia. But she says being a mother herself will change her experience of in-jail interviews.
“Now that I have my own daughter, I will relate to the women in a different way, especially when I’m talking to a mother who’s crying because she hasn’t seen her child in months and doesn’t even know where he is.”
Although Yule is new to U of G, she’s not new to the city. She’s been living here for the past 10 years while commuting to Toronto for school.
“It’s wonderful to be working just five minutes from home now,” she says, “and my husband and I love Guelph. It feels like home.”