Write to Motherhood: Restoring Harms with Justice-Involved Mothers

This talk offers “Write to Motherhood,”a writing exchange program for justice-involved mothers and their children, as a tool to restore harms. Jane Crow, or the criminalization of Black and brown mothers’ childrearing practices, forces children into fostercare and mothers into the criminal justice system (Jessica Silver & Greenberg 2017). Taking heed to this forced separation and overcriminalization of Black mothers, this talk demonstrates how designing programming for Black mothers benefits all justice-involved mothers. Additionally, this talk discusses how taking a feminist approach to exploring prison literacies (Jacobi 2012, Berry 2017) can position literacy-learning as resource for meeting marginalized mothers’ needs.