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This article is a welcome effort to inform child care practice, from the viewpoint of psychoanalytic and psychological understanding, in that most underprivileged of environments—the prison. It is therefore an attempt to mobilise preventive action against mental ill-health and the recurring cycle of crime, which may have its causal roots, in some cases, in the very arrangements constructed by society to prevent it; namely, arrangements for the care of the children of women in prison.
The presence of the baby or young child with his mother in prison should, argues the author, be regarded not as a privilege for the mother bestowed by the governor, as at present, but rather as a right of the child based on awareness of his needs and well-being. The decision to separate a child from his mother should be made only by a court of law and should be based ‘on expert evidence’ about ‘the quality of the woman prisoner's mothering’.
Furthermore, the present practice is for babies and toddlers not to be allowed to stay in prison beyond the ages of nine or eighteen months, on the grounds that it would be harmful to them. Referring to the research findings amassed by Bowlby on the damage caused to an infant by early separation from his mother, the author suggests that it would be less damaging to the child's psychological development for separation, if really necessary, to take place either before six months or after two years. He points to the harm done to the child who is removed from the natural mother to form an attachment to a surrogate mother, only to suffer the consequent long-term damage stemming from the loss of his psychological mother, on restoration to his natural mother when she is released from prison.
He suggests that if mother and baby units were improved, a child could stay in prison with his mother until approaching school age without harmful effects.
Attention is drawn to the inadequacies of short-term studies, and the many years taken before sufficient cohesive evi