The maternal subject in contemporary popular discourses of Correction: Reading Amanda Brown’s Prison Doctor Memoirs

Abstract

This paper adds to the limited research on representations of incarcerated mothers by analysing Amanda Brown’s best-selling memoirs, The Prison Doctor (2019) and The Prison Doctor: Women Inside (2020). These works detail her experience working in various British prisons, including at Bronzefield Women’s Prison from 2006 to the present. We argue that Brown’s portrayal of the maternal subject is influenced by “a middle-class gaze”. We show that from the prologue of the first book, Brown highlights her own “good” middle-class maternal identity, contrasting it with the negative portrayal of incarcerated mothers. She presents herself as a loving, caring, yet firm and pragmatic middle-class mother. For incarcerated mothers, Brown implies that prison can be a transformative space where they might become, like her, “good” mothers by adopting middle-class neoliberal attitudes, behaviours, and practices.

Introduction

This paper examines the maternal subject’s role in contemporary discourses of correction through an analysis of two recent memoirs by British medical practitioner Amanda Brown: The Prison Doctor (2019) and The Prison Doctor: Women Inside (2020). These texts are part of a “memoir boom” where such works are becoming increasingly popular and also serve as a form of “critical rhetorical work” in what Mack and Alexander (2019: 50) describe as a “post-truth” landscape, where “personal experience” increasingly “trumps other grounds for truth claims.” Works like Brown’s have the potential to shape public understandings of imprisonment and its connection to motherhood both in Britain, where she practices, and beyond. This influence is particularly significant given the popularity of these texts.

Notably, The Prison Doctor (2019) and Prison Doctor: Women Inside (2020) received a largely positive reception from the British press, with the former title spending 9 weeks on The Sunday Times Bestseller List (Wood, 2019). As a result, the publisher announced the release of a third instalment: The Prison Doctor: The Final Sentence – Stories Inside a Foreign National Prison, which was published in 2021. Readers of the previous books were assured that it would be written “in true Prison Doctor style” with Brown telling “heartbreaking stories with warmth and compassion” (Harper Collins Publishers UK, 2021). This description of the books suggests that they represent a departure from the type of punitive media texts that have dominated the UK media landscape and been instrumental in the growth of the industrial prison complex (Mason, 2006a, 2006b). In contrast, this article argues that the prison-industrial complex is legitimised in the books through a narrative that suggests incarceration can strengthen the capacity of mothers to fulfil their social roles as defined by dominant discourses of “good” middle-class mothering. To do so, we draw on Lyle’s (2008) conceptual notion of the “middle-class gaze,” which we outline below. In making this argument, we contribute to the scholarly literature on the representational politics of incarcerated mothers, demonstrating how these memoirs, which have been received as both factual and compassionate, nonetheless serve to reinforce classed and raced assumptions about what constitutes a good mother. In particular, Brown’s memoirs offer a compelling demonstration of how a white, middle-class narrator can, whether intentionally or otherwise, serve as a standard of “good” motherhood that the incarcerated subjects of her narration cannot meet.

The representational politics of imprisoned mothers

We take the maternal subject as our focus because, as reviewers of Brown’s books note, this is given particular attention by the author (e.g. Smith, 2020). Furthermore, as prison populations have increased across the world, so too has the number of incarcerated mothers (Barnes and Stringer, 2014; Easterling et al., 2019), yet there is a dearth of research on how this group is depicted in popular culture (Cecil, 2015). We know that being imprisoned is deeply stigmatising for mothers and causes them and their children extraordinary emotional and material harm, not only while in custody but also after release (Baldwin, 2018; Lockwood, 2020). We also know that the specific needs of incarcerated mothers often go unmet, even in prison programmes which purport to offer them parenting support and skills (Aiello, 2016; Brown, 2012). However, as mediatised scholarship on prisons has primarily focussed on men (Cecil, 2007), we know little about how cultural texts depict imprisoned mothers.

In an early exploration of depictions of incarcerated mothers in documentaries, televised news magazines, and talk shows, Cecil (2007) acknowledged that the frame of motherhood has the potential to humanise imprisoned women and foster connections between them and the audience. At the same time, Cecil (2007) highlighted the need to focus on representational omissions such as the tendency to under-report the number of mothers in prison and downplay their histories of physical and sexual abuse and addiction, so the challenges they have faced in their lives are not fully captured. As such, while the programmes create some sympathy for incarcerated mothers, they ultimately position them as failures for being imprisoned. In a similar respect, researchers have commended the television series Orange is the New Black for conveying how a woman’s capacity to be a “good” mother is circumvented by prison, while also noting that the program fails to represent some of the harm experienced by mothers in the US prison system, such as the violent shackling of pregnant and postnatal women (Garcia-Hallett, 2018: 97).

A sub-set of the literature on the “good” and “bad” mother in mediatised representations of incarcerated women has explicitly focussed on the very rare cases of women who have killed their children. Sandman (2022: 7–8) shows that, in the early 20th century in particular, infanticide could be represented as the “tragic actions of a despairing mother” which could be linked to the broader social problems rather than merely to personal factors. More recent frames, such as the “sad” mother or “mad” mother, reproduce essentialised assumptions which position “good motherhood” as natural and demand that violence be explained away as an aberration (e.g. Cavaglion, 2008; Easteal et al., 2015; Naylor, 2001; West and Lichtenstein, 2006).

The group of studies on mediatised representations of violent women demonstrates how discourses of “good” and “bad” mothering are inflected by race and class, with marginalised status often associated with more judgemental representations. For example, Naylor (2001) reveals that in media reports of mothers who kill or injure their children, descriptions of them as welfare-dependent and poor are used as shorthand for “bad” mothering, accentuating the normativity of the middle-class mother as the “good” mother. In other research, Deckert (2020) examines media portrayals of Māori and Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent) women who are incarcerated. Māori women are treated in a much more unsympathetic way as “bad,” with the “mad” and “sad” labels reserved more for Pakeha women.

Overall, few studies have been conducted on how imprisoned mothers are portrayed in the popular imagination. However, as Wright (2016: 330) contends, “criminology regularly engages with the good mother,” and by default, with the “bad” mother, with the former operating as the “reference point” for assessing the latter. This insight resonates with our reading of Brown’s memoirs, which we present below. We deploy the concept of the “middle-class gaze” (Lyle, 2008) to interrogate Brown’s representation of mothers in these highly popular texts, which have been positioned in media reviews as prisoner-centred and oppositional to the prison industrial complex (e.g. Roberts, 2020). We find that, through deploying her status as a “good middle-class mother” as a reference point, Brown devalues the “bad” mothers within prison and the mothers of prisoners, and legitimises imprisonment as empowering women to enact middle-class mothering practices.

Theorising mediatised representations of imprisonment, motherhood and social class: The middle-class gaze

In an analysis of how classed hierarchies have been given contemporary expression via the reality television program, Wife Swap, Lyle (2008) coined the term “middle-class/bourgeois gaze,” taking the widely known notion of the “male gaze” from film theorist Laura Mulvey and infusing it with Skeggs (2004: 5) Bourdieusian inflected conceptualisation of class as dynamic, embodied, and embedded in culture. In doing so Lyle (2008: 320) explained that the “middle-class gaze is a mode of production, (symbolic as well as material),” that entails the (mis)recognition of the working-class as “a pathological, abject other” and, simultaneously, the (mis) recognition of the middle-class as “morally good and right, and as the embodiment of propriety and good taste” The middle-class is not overtly named but coded via the types of identities, dispositions, tastes, practices, actions, and spaces it values and those that it devalues. It thereby naturalises class inclusions and exclusions and reproduces and legitimates social inequality. Integral to this process are emotions such as disgust and shame. While Lyle (2008) demonstrates that the “middle-class gaze” is hegemonic in the episode of Wife Swap she subjects to a close textual analysis, she notes that it is not “monolithic.” As she explains, the gaze incorporates interconnected, but potentially different, framings from producers, the participants, and the audience, although there will be unequal access between people in communicating their perspectives.

How the middle-class gaze legitimates class inclusions and exclusions is explored by De Benedictis et al. (2017) in an analysis of two industry-sponsored public debates about the framing, ethics, agendas, and beneficiaries of an emerging television genre labelled Factual Welfare Television (FWT). The cultural producers of a range of these programmes, which focus on the everyday lives of people living on welfare, acknowledge class difference but then seek to minimise this difference. For example, they contend their programmes are objective and authentic reportage of an existing reality and emphasise their precarious employment status, claiming commonality with their media subjects. As De Benedictis et al. (2017: 345) assert, through these processes, this “disproportionally privileged workforce” obfuscates the power of the “middle-class gaze” and the socio-political context which has given rise to a new genre of television focussed on the poor.

Of course, the “middle-class gaze” (Lyle, 2008) is not fixed nor singular. It is shifting, heterogeneous and operates with other systems of oppression, such as, for example, racism. White studies literature has shown “that whiteness functions as a racialising system by reproducing white identity as invisible and outside of race, which results in whiteness itself being left unscrutinised” (Jeyasingham, 2012: 671). Centring whiteness does not require ill intent. Indeed, as Stewart and Gachago (2022) have argued about educational spaces, disrupting the white gaze demands careful action. They suggest that:

[t]he recognition of our complicities is something we need to train: We accept that we might become better at this ‘unlearning,’ but we will only master it with continuous reflection and self-critique. One of the important lessons for us is that white antiracist work must start from a position of not-knowing and humility (Stewart and Gachago, 2022: 25).

In the absence of such humility and self-critique, the “white gaze,” operates alongside the “middle-class gaze,” and serves to marginalise and silence the experiences of Indigenous people and people of colour.

The operations of the “white gaze” have been demonstrated in Pilossof’s (2009) research on memoirs written by white farmers of Zimbabwe, produced in response to a radical land reform programme in 2000, which led to the demise of this group. The memoirs, he suggests, could be described as “white writing,” addressed to a European rather than African audience (Pilossof, 2009: 622). While these works differed in the extent to which they sought to understand the land reforms and the cultural and political context in which they occurred, as a group they eschewed any consideration of the role that the isolated lives of white farmers, their wealth, or their actual or perceived racial prejudices may have played in contributing to the animosity directed towards them. Pilossof (2009: 626–628) highlights how white farmers position themselves as hard-working and deserving of their success, having reclaimed poor-quality land and made it profitable. Historical policies which benefitted white farmers are ignored, as is the work of exploited black farm workers. The “white gaze” operates to smooth out and romanticise relationships between white and black farmers, allowing the white Zimbabwean writers to eschew description of the injustice and inequalities of a past to which they wish to return because, Pilossof (2009: 636) suggests, “they have conveniently chosen to forgive themselves and their forefathers for their actions and history in ‘Africa’.”

The “white gaze” also operates in representations of motherhood: both “good” and “bad.” As Guillem and Barnes (2018) observe, the 2010s saw an explosion of media representing and indeed often celebrating “bad” motherhood – that is, motherhood that does not meet exacting and sometimes totalising social expectations. While “bad” motherhood as a concept has been represented as unifying mothers in solidarity, Guillem and Barnes (2018: 287) note that “a closer look at the figures that embody the different depictions [of bad motherhood] reveals that these are not just ‘bad’ mothers: they are also overwhelmingly white mothers.” They suggest that the apparent solidarity emerging from celebrations of “bad” mothering therefore excludes Indigenous women and women of colour “who are always already read along racial(izing) lines, and therefore cannot embrace ‘bad’ mothering as a form of generalised gender liberation.” Their analysis of Mad Men character Betty Draper – a white, privileged, character whose “bad” motherhood is not valorised – highlights how Betty’s potential status as a “good” mother “allows her to transgress these expectations with her consistent bad behaviour,” while her interactions with Black characters, like the celebration of “bad” mothering itself, fail “to acknowledge the ideological and material constraints that limit Black women’s ability to mother” (Guillem and Barnes, 2018: 294). These constraints, equally, limit Black women’s ability to be seen to mother, as Morgan (2018) makes clear when she asks: “What does it mean to inhabit both maternity and Blackness, where one sphere is meant to imply safety while at the same time the other is racialized into existential crisis?” (p. 858).

Methodology

According to Hunter (2015: 5), “within criminology, autobiographical accounts represent something of an under-developed resource.” In terms of our specific area of inquiry, a small body of research has utilised women’s prison memoirs as data, noting that motherhood is a key subject in the texts; however, its representation has not received central analytical attention (Bordt, 2012; Karlsson, 2013).

In the analysis, we engaged not only with the two memoirs but also with para-texts such as publishers’ statements, media reports, and book reviews. This decision recognises the importance of placing memoirs in a broader socio-cultural context examining their promotion and consumption (Gray, 2003: 144; Whitlock, 2005: 61). We searched for these materials over the period 2019–2023 using the author’s name and/or the book titles using both Google News and Factiva, which are digital archives of global news content incorporating newspapers, journals, podcasts, magazines, blogs, websites, and multimedia. Using both archives was a means of circumventing the potential for news databases to be incomplete due to the volume and dynamism of the contemporary news environment (Blatchford, 2020). In total, our search elicited 16 results. These results included two press releases from the publisher’s website as well as eight feature articles (using media databases in the search period 2019–2021) and six book reviews.

As with other studies of prison life narratives (Karlsson, 2013), we conducted a thematic analysis of the memoirs. We did the same with the 16 paratexts. Thematic analysis is “concerned with the identification and analysis of patterns of meaning” or themes in data (Herzog et al., 2019: 385). Following Bazeley (2020), we initiated our analysis through an immersion phase, which involved repeated reading of the texts, annotating them, and writing memos. During this phase, we also began coding, working individually using a hybrid approach (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006). The deductive element was informed by the concept of the “white/middle-class gaze” as well as the widely circulating mediatised dichotomy of “good/bad” mothers. Descriptive codes were also noted, such as “medical emergency,” “prison management,” “prison death,” “Brown’s partner,” “homelessness,” and “obese.” Further, we remained attentive to change, nuance and ambivalence around the deductive framing concepts such as, for example, newly emergent ideologies of “good” mothering tied to positivity, silences about social class and race, the engagement of signifiers of class, and the role of affect in definitions of the incarcerated maternal subject. Still, we also coded inductively as unexpected codes emerged (e.g. “positivity,” “humour,” “spatiality”). As Swain (2018: 7) explains, deductive and inductive approaches are often positioned as epistemologically distinct and incompatible; however, adopting a hybrid mode of coding enables a process that is iterative, reflexive, and flexible. Following individual coding we collaborated, reviewed, and reflected on each other’s preliminary conclusions, making joint decisions on the final themes (Nowell et al., 2007). At this stage, we also created data tables and maps, organising codes into hierarchies and clusters (Terry and Hayfield, 2021). For example, we prepared comparative tables on how Brown described herself as a mother and how she described the women prisoners as mothers. Similarly, we summarised and compared class-based references in Brown’s books and the paratexts.

In the following sections, we report on three key themes related to our research question: what role does the maternal subject play in contemporary discourses of correction, as advanced through the Prison Doctor memoirs? We show how, through a middle-class gaze (Lyle, 2008), Brown presents herself as an ideal middle-class mother. In contrast to the mothers of prisoners and imprisoned mothers, she is firstly loving and caring, and secondly, firm and no-nonsense. Finally, despite acknowledging the pain of incarceration, Brown’s gaze positions prison as a necessary means through which predominantly working-class women can be “reformed” and develop a more middle-class maternal disposition. Before discussing each of these three themes in separate sections, we begin by examining the prologue of the author’s first memoir, which we argue serves as a framing device for the book, establishing motherhood and the “good/bad” mother dichotomy as key themes.

The tale of two mothers: Reading the prologue

Brown’s position as a skilled, caring, middle-class mother is central to both the memoirs and the media coverage surrounding them (e.g. Garvey, 2020), with one example suggesting that Brown’s status as a mother meant she believed she could be “some sort of motherly figure” to her juvenile patients (Brown and Jones, 2019). In the first book, Brown charts her 2004 decision to leave her 20-year career as a General Practitioner (GP) serving a middle-class constituency in Buckinghamshire. She takes a temporary position as a doctor at a juvenile detention centre for young men before moving to Wormwood Scrubs, a men’s prison in London. After 7 years, she moves to Bronzefield, a purpose-built private prison for women in Surrey. While the first of Brown’s memoirs details the author’s experience working across the three sites, the second focuses exclusively on her time at Bronzefield. In both books, as she recounts short vignettes of the incarcerated people in her care, Brown shares anecdotes from her biography. Thus, stories of her childhood, medical training, work as a GP, marriage to a property developer, and motherhood to two young men intersperse the central narrative of her employment as a prison doctor. Yet the book begins with a prologue that not only signals the thematic importance of motherhood across the texts but also demonstrates how readers are encouraged to read the author’s maternal subjectivity against the maternal subjectivities of prisoners and understand it as superior.

In the prologue, Brown recounts a story of the unexpected birth of a baby to a prisoner addicted to heroin in a cell at Bronzefield. The mother has ripped her umbilical cord apart and is yelling repeatedly in a state of distress, asking for the placenta to be removed. Brown says she shows no interest in her new baby, instead abandoning the infant in a cold prison cell in a pool of blood. Outside the cell, other prisoners are shouting, swearing, and banging on the doors. Brown re-creates the birthing environment as one of mayhem, bodily waste, noise, and odorous smells. Readers are provided with gratuitous descriptions of “stained walls,” “bloodied footprints,” “violent red sprays of blood on the walls,” and the “claustrophobic grimness of the cell” (Brown, 2019: 2–3, 5). The scene she creates is gory and visceral.

It is no mistake that this prominently located story draws on senses such as hearing, sight, and smell, talks of bodily fluids like pus, blood, and sweat, and uses animalistic metaphors. These are what Miller (1998: 107) says are the “grammar” and “lexicon” of disgust and are bound to our constructions of revulsion and, in turn, to immorality. Building on this conceptualisation of the socio-political force of disgust, Ahmed (2004) argues that disgust is an emotion that establishes boundaries and hierarchies between people and groups, thereby creating an “Other.”

Readers are counselled that the baby is premature and very small, barely alive and may be suffering from neonatal abstinence syndrome, where heroin passes through the placenta to the foetus during pregnancy, causing the baby to become dependent on the drug. Furthermore, when the new mother is handcuffed to a prison guard to be escorted to the hospital, Brown (2019: 4) states that this is “necessary” and recites a story which “still does the rounds” about “a new mum who jumped from the first-floor window of a hospital maternity ward.” This new mother, who is likely to be separated from her child, is thus dangerous, to both her child and to herself, uncaring, and irresponsible.

This vignette also serves as the introduction for Brown’s positioning of her motherhood. She describes summoning her own maternal identity to care for the baby for whom the mother shows “no interest at all,” reporting:

I scooped her up into my arms, wrapped the prison sheets around her and held her close, desperately trying to warm up her fragile body. What a way to come into the world. She nestled into my chest, and her crying settled a little (Brown, 2019: 3).

Brown (2019: 5) continues this theme as she hands the baby over to the paramedics, explaining that she first gives “the little girl one last cuddle, gently stroking her cheek” and saying a “little prayer.”

We are thus given an image of two mothers in this opening chapter – the “bad” mother as the drug-afflicted, blood-drenched, screaming and sweating incarcerated women who has just given birth and the “good” mother as the white, middle-class Dr Brown who cradles and soothes the child. The juxtaposition, supported by the absence of comment or questioning about the fact that a woman was left in a position to give birth in prison at all – let alone by herself in a cell – arouses further disgust. This is perhaps the most extreme illustration, but the texts consistently provide examples which align with Naylor’s (2001) observation that media representations of criminally offending mothers associate economic disadvantage with “bad” mothering and normalise the representation of “good” mothers as middle-class and financially secure.

Brown as a loving middle-class mother

The book’s style, which introduces incarcerated people in brief vignettes and rarely revisits them, does not lend itself to more complex representations of the women Brown encounters. Their voices – when they are given voices – are filtered through Brown’s own. Unlike the incarcerated mothers she describes, Brown has repeated opportunities to reflect upon her maternal role and mothering practices. She frequently draws on these reflections in her framing of prisoners. For example, in The Prison Doctor: Women Inside, Brown (2020) devotes focussed attention to her role as a mother in Chapter Two, as she observes a new mother leaving her clinic. She reminisces about her emotional state upon returning to work after the birth of her first son, Rob. It was a particularly anxious time, she says, as she was “struggling to imagine a future for my beloved little boy” (Brown, 2020). We learn that Rob was born with a very short, bent right tibia, no fibula, and he only had three little toes on his right foot. He required major surgery and uses a prosthetic leg. She writes:

It is impossible to know when our children are babies what the future will hold for them. I shed so many tears in those first few weeks that I began to wonder if I would ever get through a day without crying. Little did I know then that he would turn out to be one of the happiest and most positive people I have ever met. He loves life with a passion and after leaving school travelled all over the world with a spare leg in his rucksack while on his travels he skydived and did the biggest bungee jump in the world with his one leg strapped for safety (Brown, 2020).

What is left unsaid in these recollections is the classed advantages that allowed Rob to have access to the appropriate support services and contributed to other forms of social and cultural capital, which have facilitated his positivity and confidence. Instead, these are depicted as innate emotional dispositions strengthened by Brown’s “good” mothering. Implicit in commending him for successfully overcoming the adversity of his disability through demonstrating determination, optimism, and passion is the idea that a successful life is a matter of choice. This is a theme which appears elsewhere in the book, as in the first chapter, where she says that women who appeared at Bronzefield with drug addictions “had to want to stop using and conquer their addictions,” and that “it was up to them to make that choice and see it through” (Brown, 2020: 47). Here, Brown’s self-representation as a caring middle-class mother sits alongside another self-portrayal as a mother who offers “tough love.”

Brown’s positioning not only as a good middle-class mother to her children, but also to the prisoners, is an essential theme of the memoirs, appearing in the publisher’s summary, which refers to “the drug addicts who call Amanda ‘the mother I never had’” (Harper Collins Publishers, 2020). While the referent is made explicit here, it is more often implicit with the “bad” working-class mother of prisoners positioned as potentially contributing to the criminality of their offspring. In representing herself as a mother to the prisoners, she offers a point of contrast against which the practices of incarcerated mothers can be compared. She also judges and finds wanting the practices of inmates’ mothers, constructing them as potentially contributing to the criminality of their offspring.

This positioning comes to the fore in her first book, where she tells the story of Jared Keane, a young man incarcerated in the juvenile detention institution of Huntercombe, who comes to see her due to lower back pain that is preventing him from sleeping. Brown thinks that the problem is caused by an inferior mattress – one of the few too fleeting moments when there is a link made between incarceration and poor prisoner health. She asks Jared if he likes to read as a potential solution to his sleep problem, and he tells her he prefers to write. She explains that this was something seldom expressed by the clients at Huntercombe, who often “couldn’t even read or write” (Brown, 2019: 65) and something she wanted to encourage. On a further visit, Jared shows her a poem about his childhood, which she thought showed he had some talent, although she highlights that he had problems with spelling. She decides to buy him a dictionary and thesaurus because she saw he “struggled a bit with vocabulary and the mother in me wanted to help him improve it” (Brown, 2019: 70), but is disappointed when she finds that this is not permitted, as it is viewed as conditioning. She frames this narrative about her own family, contrasting the roles she and her husband fill, as loving parents, to the parenting received by the incarcerated youth with whom she works.

Since arriving at Huntercombe, I’d treated a number of boys who had been brought up in care homes, and some of their stories broke my heart. Their stories of physical abuse – and sometimes worse – emotional abuse, and trauma were harrowing. How could poor Jared get to 18 and not have anyone on this earth who cared about him? I thought about my two sons, and how lucky they were to have a mum and dad who loved them (Brown, 2019: 65).

This is one of numerous occasions in the memoirs where Brown (2019: 41) positions the parents of the incarcerated as uncaring and dysfunctional and often violent, while, at the same time, not referring to the economic violence they may have suffered as a result of factors such as welfare reform and austerity measures. She simultaneously cites her own family as the standard bearer of care and functionality. In this respect, her books examine how, in contemporary Britain, the issue of social and economic disadvantage has become increasingly associated with notions of “bad parenting” (Jensen, 2010). It is a theme she returns to towards the end of her first memoir as she reflects on Trudy, one of her patients, who witnessed domestic violence as a child:

What can you say to something like that? It was so far removed from the happy family life I’d grown up with. It’s horrible to think that while you’re getting hugs from your mum and your dad, someone somewhere else is watching their mum being beaten within a breath of her life. But that is life. And thanks to working in prisons, I finally had my eyes opened to what really goes on out there (Brown, 2019: 256).

We are, of course, not discounting the traumatic family backgrounds of the incarcerated residents treated by Brown (2019, 2020). However, what we are highlighting is that there is no connection made in the narratives between structural inequality and the descriptions of the parents of prisoners as variously chaotic, violent and absent. We are asked to read about Brown and the prisoner, Trudy, as equivalent subjects – one of whom is hugged by her mother while another watches her mother be beaten.

Brown’s “middle-class gaze” (Lyle, 2008) obscures any discussion of structural inequality, including not just serious conversations about class but also other systems of oppression, such as racism. Since 2004, just over a quarter of the prison population in the UK has consisted of members of minority ethnic groups. Black people are particularly overrepresented in UK prisons: as of 2024, this group made up 4% of the general population but 12% of prisoners (Sturge, 2024: 15). In this context, it is notable that media reports about Brown refer to her as “middle-class” with a Daily Mail headline questioning: “How did a middle-class mother end up working in Britain’s most notorious jails?” (Garvey, 2020) but make no explicit reference to Brown’s race. Further, there are very few references in her books to the race of the prisoners with whom she interacts. For example, in Women Inside (Brown, 2020), she explicitly identifies two women as belonging to a racial minority group. One is a visiting speaker and former alcoholic who has come to Bronzefield to speak to women about becoming sober. Brown (2020) notes that the speaker said that her Asian background made her feel more ashamed of her drinking and less able to speak about it during her active addiction (p. 197). Another instance in that book is Gloria, an older Black prisoner, who is described in grotesque terms as “very overweight, with rolls of flesh sagging over the side of her chair” (Brown, 2020: 27). Gloria’s race is mentioned only as a physical descriptor.

Brown’s reluctance to engage with, or even name, race as a factor in the lives of imprisoned women enables her whiteness working within a prison system where around a quarter of the population belongs to a minority ethnic group, to remain unmarked. Like her privileged class status, her whiteness forms part of the “gaze” through which she naturalises her own maternal experiences and instructs women on the benefits of incarceration for “good” motherhood.

Brown as a firm, middle-class mother

While Brown presents herself as a “good” middle-class mother due to her care, she also highlights her capacity for firmness as a dimension of “good” mothering. On accepting the offer to take up her first placement as a prison doctor at Huntercombe, Brown (2019: 27) wonders what to expect, noting that as her own two sons were the same age as the inmates and that they would “perhaps view me as a mother figure.” She foreshadows what is to come in the memoir, reflecting that her thought at the time – “How bad could 15-18 year olds be?” – was “naïve” (Brown, 2019: 27). In this type of rhetorical move, Brown “others” the young male prison population, setting them apart not just as different but as abject from the middle-class norm as represented by her sons. This characterisation of the incarcerated young men is solidified as Brown (2019) uncritically repeats warnings from staff as to the dangerousness, duplicity, and cunning of her new charges. Brown (2019: 53) is reminded by colleagues and reminds herself that “the boys were criminals.”

The first prisoner she recounts treating on her first day at Huntercombe is Jerome, who complains about his feet hurting from wearing the prison-allocated shoes. When Brown realises that the young men are only permitted to wear footwear of their choosing if there are medical reasons for doing so, she again invokes her own sons observing “I thought about what I would say to my boys if they were trying to get their own way” (Brown, 2019: 51). She states that she does not yield to Jerome’s request despite what she says is his sulking and attempts at manipulation. She thus demonstrates firm “parenting.”

She adopts a similar mode soon after, when, one after another, boys come to see her at the prison health clinic, complaining of lumps or spots on their genitals. Hearing the boys’ guffaws of laughter in the waiting area as each rotates through the treatment room soon alerts her to the fact that they are playing a crude joke at her expense. She finishes the clinic nonchalantly, addressing each of the complaints, but argues that the behaviour was indicative of the boys’ sinister biographies and again marks them as distinctly different from her own morally upright middle-class sons. Brown (2019: 59) comments:

It was horrible to think that boys the same age as my sons could act in such a threatening manner. But in a way I was glad; their behaviour had removed any illusions. These were not just any teenagers, these were not just any patients.

The behaviour of incarcerated boys whose backgrounds are not described but who are likely to have experienced multiple forms of disadvantage is therefore pathologised in comparison with the disposition of Brown’s children, who enjoy the economic and social benefits associated with having parents who are a doctor and a property developer, respectively. Brown’s middle-class maternal gaze obscures not only disadvantage but also context, leaving no space to consider the boys’ behaviour as a response, albeit a distasteful one, to the boredom of imprisonment.

Imprisonment as a pathway to “good” motherhood for working-class women

While Brown’s middle-class motherhood is deployed to enable negative judgements of incarcerated mothers, there are repeated occasions throughout the books where she challenges the idea that incarcerated mothers are “bad.” There is no explicit recognition of the role social class or race plays in the lives of incarcerated mothers, but there is some limited acknowledgement of structural problems which contribute to women’s imprisonment, particularly homelessness, drug addiction, and physical violence and abuse. In this respect, Brown’s memoirs represent a slight destabilisation of the immediate conflation of imprisonment and “bad” mothering. For example, she records the story of Rebecca, who had killed her partner after years of abuse and who tells Brown she believed her life and the life of her 5-year-old son were at risk. Relatedly, the story gives insight into the trauma of incarceration for mothers, with Brown (2020: 26) commenting on Rebecca’s separation from her son with the statement: “For most mothers, being apart from their children must cause the most indescribable pain.” Elsewhere, she tells readers that the walls of cells in Bronzefield are typically covered with children’s photographs and drawings and restates her observation that separating women from their children causes incarcerated mothers’ incredible pain.

Despite acknowledging the negative consequences of imprisoning mothers, Brown’s texts nevertheless demonstrate an investment in the idea of imprisoned women as “bad” mothers who can be “reformed” through the carceral system. However, this transformation is highly circumscribed. Neoliberal imperatives of self-improvement inflect Brown’s characterisation of “good” and “bad” mothers. This is communicated as she introduces new mother Megan in The Prison Doctor: Women Inside (Brown, 2020), who visits her consulting room to complain of mastitis. Brown congratulates Megan on the birth and tells us that Megan’s little boy, Dylan, who accompanies his mother to the clinic, is carefully and lovingly tucked into a soft grey blanket patterned with ducks. Megan tells Brown (2020) “Dylan has made me want to be a better person, to do better, you know” to which Brown nods adding, “As a mother, of course I knew. There is something about having children that makes most people determined to be the best versions of themselves they can possibly be.”

At this point, Brown (2020) reminds readers that her clinic does not “discriminate” and so, along with drug and alcohol addictions and a myriad of other medical problems, she also treats new mothers and their babies. She emphasises the similarities between imprisoned new mothers and their counterparts beyond prison walls, noting that, like the latter, the former typically present as exhausted, but also “completely in love with their babies” (Brown, 2020). Megan thus serves as a vehicle for sharing a more positive representation of incarcerated mothers than is conveyed in the opening of The Prison Doctor (Brown, 2019), as described above. However, importantly, the affirmative positioning of Megan as a mother is tied to her adopting the neoliberal, redemptive, and transformative narratives Brown (2019, 2020) associates with being a “good” prisoner. This involves Megan admitting guilt, taking responsibility for her incarceration and committing to personal change and transformation. Brown emphasises the significance of this disposition in our understanding of Megan’s motherhood by opening the chapter with a quotation from her, which reads: “I know I am being punished but I don’t want my child to be punished” (Brown, 2020). As part of this conversation, she tells Brown (2020): “I feel guilty him being born while I’m here but I’m going to make it up to him. I’m going to do better.” Much to Brown’s (2020) delight, Megan, who was charged with supplying Class A drugs, has demonstrated her redemption by attending meetings in the lead-up to the birth with representatives from an organisation called Birth Companions, which is one of the many volunteer organisations Brown (2020) name checks in terms of “helping” prisoners, particularly incarcerated mothers.

Megan is also a “good” prisoner in that she has the correct type of affective disposition demanded of the neoliberal era (Binkley, 2011). According to Brown, she is “very strong and determined” and is also positive about her environment, speaking brightly about the benefits of the Mothers and Babies Unit at Bronzefield, which Brown (2020) explains allows women who give birth while in prison to stay with their child until they are 18 months old. Megan is undertaking the requisite training in catering with the hopes of starting her own business selling sandwiches in offices once she is released from prison. In prison, she consequently begins the work of becoming the type of aspirational, optimistic, self-managing neoliberal self that is so highly valued socially and culturally today.

Brown reports on their joint conversation as they share stories of the purportedly excellent facilities available to new mothers at Bronzefield, with the helpful support team teaching the mothers new skills and knowledge in areas such as budgeting, shopping, and cooking but also expecting the mothers to “be fully responsible for the welfare of their children” (Brown, 2020). In these types of asides, the author reveals her investment in the neoliberal project of reconfiguring the relationship between citizens and the state through a focus on mothers, most particularly the welfare-dependent and morally suspect “single mother.” In prison, she can learn to become self-managing, making no demands on the state. Writing further about the opportunities prison provides to set working-class mothers on the “right” neoliberal path to “good” motherhood, Brown (2020) states:

The Mother and Babies Unit (MBU) also provided a therapeutic environment and sessions focused on parenting, as well as practical support. The very regime of prison, the rules, the regularity of food being provided, no drugs, no domestic violence, promotes bonding with children and is ideal for young women like Megan who need the support.

The above quotation recognises how the lives of imprisoned mothers may have been impacted by drug addiction and domestic violence, but omits a focus on economic oppression. Individual interventions that train them in the “right” (i.e. middle-class) mode of mothering are the necessary solutions to the problem of “bad” mothering, as Brown (2019, 2020) constructs it.

Brown’s endorsement of individual, often work-based, solutions to the problems facing incarcerated mothers is again evident in her description of another mother, Chelsea, who works in the prison café, has a positive outlook, and positions paid employment and training as central to her plans for citizenship and motherhood post-imprisonment:

The other girls and I have a laugh. It just makes me feel more normal, like a proper member of society. I’m doing a catering qualification. I want to be able to hold down a proper job when I get out of here and fight to get my daughter back (Brown, 2020: 220).

Dispositions such as self-responsibility and long-term planning, as well as practices like further education and training, are not named by Brown (2019, 2020) as middle-class but are presented as normative, thereby devaluing and demeaning other ways of being. Depending on welfare, living day-to-day or experiencing a sense of despair are not understood as results of systemic and widening economic inequality, but personal failure.

Conclusion

Brown’s Prison Doctor memoirs are popular texts that purport to offer readers an insight into the lives of incarcerated people, including mothers, in Britain. They demonstrate a destabilising potential and, perhaps, a genuine effort to avoid casting incarcerated mothers as necessarily “bad.” However, as Umamaheswar (2013: 296) reported, muted or even absent discourses of “bad” mothering in popular culture are not necessarily indicative of a “more lenient, informed and sensitive stance towards the issue of incarcerated mothers.”

As we have shown, Brown’s memoirs are written from the perspective of the “middle-class gaze” (Lyle, 2008). The Prison Doctor memoirs reference the broader social circumstances of childhood trauma, sexual assault, domestic violence and addiction, which may lead to the criminalisation of mothers but omit the central role played by the brutality of economic inequality in this process. Similarly, they also omit any discussion of race or racism. At the same time, Brown’s (2019, 2020) self-referencing of her own “good” middle-class motherhood in the texts operates as an ideal through which the reader is invited to judge the imprisoned mothers she narrativises. Ultimately, the deployment of the maternal subject in the texts serves to legitimise the prison-industrial complex through vignettes that suggest incarceration can strengthen the capacity of mothers to fulfil their social roles as defined by dominant discourses of “good” middle-class mothering. Prison is thus presented as a positive space where a range of quality services and supports are available to assist “bad” mothers in transforming into “good” mothers by adopting the neoliberal logics of self-responsibility, individualism, and optimism.

Our reading of Brown’s (2019, 2020) memoirs as texts which are ultimately punitive in their positioning of incarcerated mothers sits in contrast to the unilateral laudatory reception the media gave them as compassionate and caring. We are unsure how to explain this disjuncture or whether it is possible to do so in a definitive way. A significant issue is that memoirs are increasingly commodified and embedded in networks of capital (Rak, 2013) so, for example, it is relevant that the books were not only supported by a public relations campaign but that the campaign itself was phenomenally successful winning industry plaudits (Thomas, 2019) and coming at a time when British journalists are increasingly reliant upon publicity materials for news content (Lewis et al., 2008). We also suspect that the indiscriminate media response to the books is indicative of the fact that being an imprisoned mother continues to be a deeply stigmatised identity and that neoliberalism and its orthodoxies of choice and self-management have so permeated our lives that they are taken for granted. Notably, the life narratives also emerged in the aftermath of a “moment of crisis” for prisons “marked by increasing evidence of their ineffectiveness and a string of high-profile scandals” (Peacock, 2019: 90). Indeed, the publication of the first title occurred just months before the death of a new baby to an 18-year-old mother who gave birth alone in her cell in Bronzefield (see Prisons and Probation Ombusdmen, 2021). In this light, middle-class liberal media could alleviate anxiety they might feel about the inhumanity of prisons and be comforted by Brown’s claims that incarceration offers mothers a path to redemption.

This analysis highlights the limitations of the representational possibilities for incarcerated mothers, particularly when their stories are told through the lens of a middle-class narrator who may share physical spaces with them, as Brown does, but not their life experiences. Brown’s adherence to conventional ideas of “good” motherhood and her tendency to draw on her maternal subjectivity in narrating the stories of incarcerated people almost inevitably generate a juxtaposition wherein incarcerated mothers are found to be lacking.