Write to Motherhood: A Writing Exchange Program for Justice-Involved Mothers & Their Children (RPA Pilot/ Seed Project)

The "Write to Motherhood: A Writing Exchange Program for Justice-Involved Mothers & Their Children" project aims to intervene in the epidemic of maternal incarceration by providing justice-involved mothers with resources and models to expand their literacy learning experiences and to participate in those of their adult and minor children's. As of current, 80% of women in jail and 60% of women in prisons are mothers to minor children, leaving millions of children separated from their primary caretakers (The Sentencing Project). Though facilities implement programing such as parenting classes and letter-writing workshops to foster bonds between mothers and their children, research confirms many of these programs fail to consider the lower literacy levels, racial disparities, and financial crisis these mothers are facing (Haney 2013; Sparks et al. 2017; Kennedy 2020). Neglecting these barriers can prevent mothers from participating in these programs and/or implementing suggested practices post-incarceration. The“Write to Motherhood" project takes heed to the overcriminalization of Black mothers to develop a gender and race responsive writing exchange program to be implemented in correctional and reentry facilities. Using the Folsom Art's Writing Exchange Program curriculum (Plemons 2019) as a model, this project will create a multi-part series of non-sequential lessons to position justice-involved mothers as literacy mentors. The curriculum will include reading and writing materials on topics ranging from writing principles to incarceration and models for discussing these materials with adult and minor children via writing. Data collected from focus groups conducted with formerly incarcerated mothers will be applied to ensure materials support justice-involved mothers' unique literacy and mothering goals. By creating a writing exchange program for justice-involved mothers, this project provides these mothers with resources to perform motherhood, agency to create literacy learning experiences for their children, and tools to prevent intergenerational incarceration.