NCJ Number
200667
Journal
The Prison Journal Volume: 83 Issue: 2 Dated: June 2003 Pages: 206-220
Date Published
June 2003
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This article highlights the ways in which drug-involved female inmates changed their attitudes toward parenting following a parenting skills program.
Abstract
The proportion of women in State and Federal correctional institutions increased from 2.9 percent to 6 percent from the 1970’s to the 1990’s.Nearly 45 percent of these women were serving time for drug or drug-related charges, and presently 80 percent of female inmates are mothers of over 130,000 minor children. Discussing the parenting difficulties faced by substance-abusing women, the author describes the 44-bed, prison based, therapeutic community called Key Village that served as the research site in this study. Key Village, a substance-abuse treatment program in the Baylor Women’s Correctional Institution in New Castle, DE, implemented a parenting education program for drug-involved women offenders in the late 1990’s. Interviews with 59 female inmates at Key Village indicated that for the women enrolled in or who had already completed the parenting program there were no significant differences in these women’s parenting attitudes than for the women who were not enrolled in the parenting program. However, program participants did not exhibit overly controlling or punitive attitudes with regard to children, suggesting that parenting education does produce positive parenting attitudes among substance abusing women inmates. Table, references