Whether you Accept it or Not: The Development of Pseudofamilies in Tutwiler Prison
Wetumpka, Alabama is just outside of Montgomery, and nothing special — growing up, I never thought much of it. It has some abandoned buildings that were fun to explore, but that was about it. I most often heard the name on the local football schedule — they consistently delivered my high school one of their many wins of the season. The thing that was never mentioned about Wetumpka, save for the occasional disappointed tsk tsk and knowing look, was that Wetumpka is also home to the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women. Tutwiler serves as one of the only women’s institutions in Alabama. Other than a few work-releases outside of Birmingham, Tutwiler holds almost every female offender in the state. Visitation is limited, and communication with loved ones on the outside is often strained at best, so within prison walls women often form complex social groups representative of family groups. Incarceration separates women from their families and undermines their ability to perform motherhood in a socially defined way, while providing little guidance towards rehabilitation or effective support upon release. In response, women who are incarcerated develop systems of othermothering and chosen families that allow for mentorship dynamics to form between the older and younger women in the facility that provide structure and drive for women trying to survive in an institution that undervalues and disenfranchises them. I interviewed two women who were incarcerated very young and served long sentences. Neither have children, but both served as mentor figures to other incarcerated women, and now serve as a mentor figure to young family members. Their experiences are representative of the experiences of many women across the institution — redefining the role of motherhood so that it is not defined by blood but can be taken on by anyone.
I grew up an hour away from one of the most notorious prisons for women in the country, and I barely even knew about it. As an upper middle-class white girl from one of the wealthier parts of Alabama, I grew up without ever having to think about the prisons. I was raised to believe that cops were my friends, that, while prisons may be flawed, they serve a purpose and keep me safe, and that if I was good, if I kept myself in line, that I would never, and should never see the inside of one. It wasn’t until, through an old family friend, I started working with the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project, and actually started interacting with and developing relationships with people who are incarcerated, that I realized how deeply flawed and cruel Alabama prisons, and prisons in general, are. My work as a tutor at Staton Correctional Facility, a medium security men’s facility in Elmore, Alabama, was brief, and I only worked with a carefully selected group of men. In the two and a half months I was going in, at least one of the men I worked with was stabbed in his dorm, and almost every single one of them feared for their safety at least once. This culture of violence is prevalent across prisons, and, even though I’ve never physically set foot in Tutwiler, as soon as I started paying attention, its reputation looms in every discussion of prison life and prison activism in the state. As the oldest prison in the state, and one of the only women’s facilities in the state, Tutwiler is known for its overcrowding, understaffing, and incredibly high rates of sexual assault. As a white woman from an upper middle-class background, there is very little chance that I will be incarcerated at Tutwiler. Like all prisons, Tutwiler preys on the poor, on people whose communities have been decimated by the opioid crisis, on people who have been historically disenfranchised by racism, colonialism, misogyny, and the suffocating power of capitalism. If I chose to, I could easily put Tutwiler out of my mind and not think about the damage that is done there every day. But I believe in abolition and I believe in a more just society, which cannot be possible while the prison industrial complex and places like Tutwiler still exist.
At any given moment, 80% of women who are incarcerated are mothers (Prison Policy Initiative, 2018), and Tutwiler consistently has around 50 pregnant women serving time (APBP, 2020). For most women, idealized parenting is often defined in contexts outside of incarceration, so they are forced to redefine their understandings of motherhood while incarcerated (Gregson and Luther, 2011). By encouraging an intensive form of mothering dependent on time and physical connection, and demonizing the women’s own separation from their children, the prison is able to even use motherhood as its own form of punishment (Aiello, 2018). In response, women in prison often form “pseudofamilies” with other inmates, generally recreating a traditional nuclear family, with different women acting as the mother, grandmother, child, and other extended family members as well. An industry professional I spoke to told me that the thing that surprised her the most in her tenure as a teacher inside was the intensity of the relationships that formed, and how easily they mapped onto the traditional family structures on the outside.
When I started teaching classes I thought the ladies are playing. And then it dawned on me that, oh, this is what it looks like… they’ll have this one particular older female who they call the grandma and she treats the girls under her wing as her grandchildren, and she talks to them as if they are her grandchildren usually scolding or fussing, you know, ‘don’t do that’ or ‘don’t do this’, you can see the age difference, because they’re usually younger. And that person would be about the age of an average grandmother. (AIM, 2020)
S, a former inmate, described the women in Tutwiler as her family — specifically defining the relationships as something more than friendship. She says that while “you might find one or two friendships, but when you leave there, you realize that those people are your family.” They are the people who “know you the most, because you’ve been around them, you know, the longest and you know, whether you accept it or not and they are like your family.” (S, 2021). She described the relationships forming as almost as an inevitability, that just due to the amount of time spent together, even if you don’t want to, you become a family, and “it hurts not to be around them” (S, 2021).
For some women, the relationships they form become equally as important as their “real” or “blood” families. Even with the most supportive of family members, strict visitation guidelines and communication difficulties can lead to strained relationships. Both women I spoke to mentioned difficulty relating to their families, both while they were incarcerated and afterwards, and, when women come from less supportive family structures, the pseudofamilies they form in prison can be even more impactful:
And for some of the girls, I’ve heard them say that the best family they’ve ever had, like their family outside of prison is nothing like the pseudo family that they’ve made inside the prison. Because inside the prison, they look out for each other, and they take care of each other. And they help each other encourage each other versus outside their families. They don’t do that (AIM, 2020)
Inmates have to take care of each other because the institution will not. Most women in Tutwiler sleep in dormitories with beds so close they can touch each other. There’s no AC, and shoddy heat so the hot Alabama summers are miserable — women have to endure extra hot summers and extra cold winters. Meals are poor quality and limited in nutrition, and I’ve heard tales of rocks or even toenails found in the meat and beans. There was a common understanding that the conditions were not going to be good, “but those conditions are horrible” (S, 2021). Prisoners are some of the most vulnerable to profit-making measure that encourage packing beds and cutting costs, and their isolation from the outside world means that poor conditions often go unaddressed. Without a community structure, the institution overwhelms and destroys people.
As women redefine the nature of family, they confront the nature of the state’s control. Through the labor of care, represented by the formation of pseudofamilies, black women are able to resist the state that seeks their destruction. Patricia Hill Collins describes the actions of black women, specifically their power through nurturing and group survival as “just as important as confrontations with institutional power” (Hill Collins, 2000). Because the white supremacist state relies on the subjugation and death of black bodies, any space for the development of black joy is a direct rebuke of state power. J was incarcerated very young, and basically grew up within the prison environment. She told me that she recognized that, while men’s prisons were violent physically, women’s prisons were more violent emotionally, “they would, you would hear people tear other people down. And, you know, they already tore down, they don’t need your help. But you will see that a lot.” (J, 2021) In response, she took it upon herself to become a source of motivation and guidance for the younger women around her. She took on the mothering roles that she felt was lacking. In describing the work she would do with one of the younger inmates, she described the creation of a daily structure and consistent encouragement of the younger woman’s pursuit of education:
So I would get her and she was like, to go school, and she doesn’t want to go to school, he wanted to be. And so I would go there and I would go to her door, make her do that. And eventually, you know, doing that she got to the point where she was like okay, I might want to get out because she’s gonna come in here and get away. (J, 2021)
By encouraging her to stay on track, and keeping focus, the young woman was able to keep hold of herself while she was incarcerated, and when she was released she expressed her gratitude to J. I do not know this unnamed girl; only what J has told me about her. I cannot speak to what she felt or where she is now, but J was such a warm and compassionate presence when I spoke to her that I could imagine that having a person like her on your side in an institution like Tutwiler would be life changing.
Both of the women I interviewed are no longer incarcerated and haven’t been for the past few years. Neither have children, a fact that they each blame at least partially on their incarceration. They mention the time and effort it takes to raise kids, time they both felt had passed them by on the inside, and the lack of support and structure for rehabilitated felons. However, both have now taken on a nurturing role within their family — J as a caretaker for her young nephew, and S as a mentor towards her younger siblings and their children. Through forming the close-knit family bonds, each woman was exposed to an environment of care within an institution of pain, and were able to translate that to their relationships outside.
People do not end up in prisons because of an inherent flaw or damage to their soul. Criminality is defined through complicated racialized and gendered conceptions that ascribe a moral failing onto the bodies of the condemned. Black and poor women are punished and incarcerated at much higher rates than wealthy white women, and Prisons work through separation — by removing an individual from their family and community they develop their control over the body. Through regulating the bodies of mostly poor and black people, prisons help reify racial hierarchies that fuel the white supremacist capitalism of the United States. Through associations of blackness and black bodies with criminality, the state is able to create a population that is targetable and exploitable. Tutwiler is full. It is over its designed capacity by almost double. Almost every woman inside is marked by something, whether it is skin color, association with drugs, or mental health issues. Every one of them, by virtue of their incarceration, have been deemed by the state as disposable, worthy of removal from society, and forced to earn their way back in. An inmate released from an Alabama prison is given ten dollars and a bus ticket back to wherever they were arrested, alongside a host of rules and regulations they must follow. The lack of support leads to high recidivism rates, and a cyclical relationship to the prison industrial complex that is incredibly difficult to break out of. By forming networks of support within prison, women are able to create family structures that encourage growth and development, and that represent a revolutionary rebuke of state necropolitics.
Citations:
Hill Collins, Patricia. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge: New York.
LUTHER, K., & GREGSON, J. (2011). RESTRICTED MOTHERHOOD: Parenting in a Prison Nursery. International Journal of Sociology of the Family, 37(1), 85–103. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23029788
Aiello, Brittnie and Mcqueeny, Krista. 2019. “I Always Thought I was a Good Mother”: Intensive Mothering in a Women’s Jail. Sociological Imaginations.
Davis, Angela. “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” The Massachusetts Review 13, no. 1/2 (1972): 81–100. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25088201
J (former inmate), personal interview with the author, March 2021
S (former inmate), personal interview with the author, March 2021
