 From the conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vinita Srivastava. This idea of the cult of motherhood that black women have never been welcomed into a very prestigious club for white women. We black women chip at it in terms of trying to get into this club, but we're never really welcomed. We're critiqued. We're demonized. Our race is weaponized against us. Thursday is just a few days away here in North America. It can be a complicated day. For some, it could mean a bouquet of flowers or a breakfast in bed for their mom. For others, it could mean mourning the loss of a loved one or dealing with a haunted past. And for some, like the 60% of incarcerated women who are mothers, it can mean something else entirely. In Canada, women's prisons are filling up. In fact, the fastest growing prison population in Canada is racialized women. More than one in three women in federal custody are indigenous. And the percentage of South Asian women and African Canadian women in custody is also disproportionately high. One of the reasons for this is rising poverty. Despite a reduction in crime in the last 20 years, many women attempting to make ends meet for their families end up colliding with the prison system. Amidst a financial turn down and ballooning economic inequality, criminalizing attempts at survival is all the more staggering. And the effects on families is devastating. Today we're speaking with Ray Reis. An assistant professor of sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on prisons, black feminism, and critical feminist criminology. Lorraine Pinnock is also here. She is the Ontario Coordinator for the Walls to Bridges program, which helps women with education when transitioning out of the system. It's a transition she has made herself. In 2011, Lorraine was incarcerated at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener. Thank you both so much for coming onto the podcast today. Thank you for having us. So Mother's Day is coming up. Ray, I'm wondering what you have witnessed with the women you work with in prisons and jails around Mother's Day. Oh boy. Well, let me just start by saying I want to of course give a shout out to all of the women that years ago and still share like very generously their stories with me. Most of what I learned around social justice and incarceration was from women inside. I think that was my greatest education. Okay, so Mother's Day, huh, I can tell you unequivocally from the women that I interviewed that the conception of Mother's Day is highly contested because black women have never really been considered in the creation of this day that honors women, which is very much a colonial construct. So if he kind of think about, you know, how many systems of colonial control have destroyed and annihilated continue to perpetuate genocide against indigenous and black women folks in the general society don't often think of the plight of indigenous and black women when thinking about what it means to be in the quote-unquote cult of motherhood. These are women who historically have always been ostracized and have been erased and invisibleized or demonized in terms of ideals around mothering. So I think for many women in prison that I had the opportunity to interview and also those that I worked with when I was doing frontline work, Mother's Day is very contentious. It can be very contentious for the way in which they've been treated and positioned as mothers in the carceral system. Lorraine, how about for you what was Mother's Day like for you? So I grew up as Jehovah's Witness. So we didn't celebrate any holiday whatsoever. So it was just another day for me. But I can say that you could see the visiting room and it was mostly populated with children and parents that were not indigenous or black. So the majority would be Caucasian. I think this stemmed hugely from the fact that it was sort of a code in the carceral space that black women, they're not really good parents anyways, right? And so now that they're in jail, they want to pretend as if their children meant everything to them. And so they were oftentimes denied that opportunity to actually be in close proximity to their children because of this unfound belief. So you're saying there's an assumption of how black mothers, indigenous mothers are perceived to be as parents. And so therefore they're denied time with their children. Right. They have never factored in the needs, as Lorraine is saying, of indigenous and black women. Like the waiting room was a really good analogy. Like the ideas that black women are horrible mothers, right? And to throw back to the racism, the stereotypical tropes around chattel slavery, right? Our children have never been of our own. We have been demonized away around the way in which we parent. Is that what you mean you use that term cult of motherhood? Is that what partly you're talking about too? That term actually comes, I think it was Patricia Hill Collins who wrote a really, a seminal text called Black Feminist Thought. It was kind of like the first text that I read as like, like how many years ago? I remember, yeah. I think it came out like 1990. And I read this text when I was a student and I was like, oh my gosh, like this is it. I'm seeing myself in the pages. And although it's an American text and it's grounded in the US, but she talks in that text about this idea of the cult of motherhood that black women have never been welcome into a very prestigious club for white women. We black women chip at it in terms of trying to get into this club, but we're never really welcomed. We're critiqued, we're demonized, our race is weaponized against us, our motherhood practices. Yeah, and something that I personally experienced in prisons. Randomly, they can just come to your cell or your unit and decide that they want to do a search. So personally, I have never invited my children to come to jail to visit me. I had a couple of their pictures in my unit. And I remember in one search and the guards picked up the pictures and they said, you know, all these black women, they have all these kids, but they don't know who their dads are. That, again, is just stereotypical of people just throwing all black women in this bucket and say all of them, like these black women, like meaning all of them, right? Lorraine, you mentioned that you decided not to invite your children. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, so I envisioned that experience being painful and traumatizing. And I didn't want my children going through that, especially because from me personally, my family, my parents were not a support system for me because they thought that I brought shame to the family. So knowing that my children would have to come to that space and leave without a space that they could actually debrief, I didn't want to put them through that. Can you tell us a little bit about your story and how you ended up in the prison system? Sure. So I was working at hospital in Toronto. There was some criminal activity going on within the hospital people's credit card or debit cards or checks were going missing. Upon investigating that, the image that they showed me had black women withdrawing money and they said, well, that's you. I think there was maybe three or four of us on the floor. And they said, you are the only one that that has a longish hair and would sort of fit that image, like even though it was sort of a grainy, but they just took the hair and say you were the only one with long hair. And so based on that, I was let go from my job and then charged with that crime. So after losing my job to pay for lawyers fee to help maintain the apartment that my kids and I were living at just for daily living, I actually thought I knew that it was now I know that it was irrational of me, but I just thought, well, if they're going to accuse me of doing this crime, why not just do the same crime that they're accusing me of doing? And so that's exactly what I started to do. So it's it's almost as if they sort of like planted a seed. I've never like excused myself because I do know that lots of people are in similar position, but didn't succumb to that need. But for me, that was that was my thought on how to cope at that time. Thank you. So Ray, we're hearing from Lorraine some of the reasons that, you know, took her to that path. What are some of the reasons that we are seeing an uptick of women and racialized women behind bars right now? Yeah, Lorraine's story is deeply troubling, first and foremost, because of the way in which she was criminalized, racialized as a black woman. If we look at the recorded stats, particularly around black women who are incarcerated at the federal level, that we're looking at mostly scheduled to offenses, which are drug offenses or offenses related to poverty. So we're not seeing it's not violent crimes. It's poverty related offenses as defined by the Criminal Code, which then, of course, is connected to the social conditions and the feminization of poverty. You are going to find a very high disproportionate number of indigenous women who are in those spaces for, again, poverty related crimes as defined. I keep saying as defined by the Criminal Code because these are not these are social. They're social. They're social crimes, so to speak, right? They're not even crimes. They're social responses to dispossession. There's a disproportionate number of black women in federal spaces, again, related to poverty. There's been a little bit of a decline in the number of black women who have been who are incarcerated at the federal level. And while that's a good thing, I don't want to mislead the listeners to think, OK, let's start cheering because that still does not necessarily solve the problems of social inequality that are specific to black women's lives. So there's still systemic issues that are very much, very much still burgeoning, right? When we think about like who's housed in carceral spaces, right? What are some of the other issues? I mean, you talk about poverty, how much of that is has to do with some of the other issues that we were talking about, like mental health issues or you mentioned drugs, I think. When we talk about drug offenses, we're talking about women who may move weight or who are mulling drugs, right? So they're carrying drugs on their person or it or in their person, like swallowing and moving that those drugs across like geographical borders, right? I see. The women, quite a few of the women that I interviewed at GVI when I was doing my dissertation were women who were incarcerated for those very same crimes for moving for moving weights, as we'd say, or for moving drugs across. Yeah. So they're part of the underground economy, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So Lorraine, how did the incarceration that you experience affect you? I thought that my incarceration would break me, but surprisingly enough, it did not do that. And so it sort of had the reverse for me. I'm a tall person, five, 10, almost five, 11. And so I walk around and I think my back is straight and my head is held up. I was under constant criticism from the guards because of that, because I think they sort of expected me to be walking around slumped over. But it was just a natural part of my physique. And so when I sort of hear these, I sort of straighten my shoulders a little more, hold my head up a little bit higher. So these were things that I used to sort of strengthen my actual resolve to be that better person, to be that role model for my children. Even though incarceration occurred, I didn't let that define me. I mean, that is one part of my life, but it's not who I am. That's why getting involved with the Walls to Bridges program for me was so, so empowering. I had done post-secondary education before going into prison. But this model of teaching was something that sort of gave you that confidence and that empowerment. And even though I was broken down when I got there knowing that my parents didn't support me, I sort of had no support going in. But then these are like, these are people that would be there for me. And that would know me on sort of like, like another level that even if I was to tell my family, they would not get. And so these people became my family. This was a very empowering space for me. And this was one of the real reasons how I coped within that space as well, was to sort of realize that my body was confined, but my mind was living outside of those spaces. And I got through it and I lived to tell the tale. You're saying a few things that I want to pick up on, and I want to get to the Walls to Bridges program for sure. I want to stick with that moment for a minute, because one of the things that you talked about when we when we spoke earlier was this idea of the expectation of how black women are treated compared to other women. I'm going to ask Ray, what do you see as some of the differences and the effects and the impacts that you see on, for example, black, indigenous or South Asian women and families? Yeah, that's a gosh, that's such a great question. I'm going to think about what what I've been told for women shared with me, not only when I was doing research and I I want to trouble the term research because I actually find it a little uncomfortable. I don't like referring to women that shared, generously shared their stories with me as research because they're not data, right? People are not data. So I'm going to borrow here from the work of Dr. Kathy Absalon, who is an indigenous teacher and knowledge keeper and also a professor at Angoria University. And she talks about how we make meaning. But the women that I work with are not research, right? They're not. Lorraine was talking about like how her physical presence, how she carried herself, that in and of itself is a form of resistance. And that in and of itself will be a threat to the state and the way in which the guards in the institutions deal with and address black women in particular, right? It is because of the way our bodies are read that will be read as an angry black woman, as aggressive, as defiant, as non-compliant. Like it will be tagged onto her body and black women's bodies simply by walking down the hall because how dare she walk down the hall with her head up in her shoulder's high and challenge, right? This carceral space. So I think modes of resistance are really important to understand and they're enacted in in a number of ways by black women inside, right? I know of black women that, you know, they'll shave their head because of the fact that black hair products are not available for black women inside. That's seen as some sort of luxury or not a necessity, right? So one of the ways in which women resist and fight against that is to be like, you know what, screw you. I'm going to just I'm going to shave my head. Let me let you know, kind of, you know, type of thing. So there are different ways in which resistance is inactive. Sorry, I forgot the question. Well, we were taught. I mean, in some ways, we're we're we're having a really interesting conversation about how both women feel inside, but also how you observe it. You know, things like resistance, things like resilience, all the things that you are talking about, Lorraine, I think what you were saying is a black woman, you're expected to be a certain way. Then one of them is, I think, I guess you said, kind of, sort of physically broken. There's the idea that you're meant to be physically broken. But when we spoke earlier, you also said there's this idea that as a black woman, I'm expected to be stronger or tougher or more resilient. Like that double-edged complexity, right? Like you're it's like you're it's like you're despised and revered at the same time is weird, right? It's kind of like another stereotypical colonial trope, right? Yeah, I know it's true. For instance, you know, if you were if you were going up for an ETA, but there was only say one driver or two or two driver that could make that trip. Most of the times the white person would get to go on that trip instead of you because, oh, she can handle it, right? She's tough so she can handle it. So it's that that sort of mixed message. It's just stereotypes that that they sort of label you with. She doesn't know who her kid or her baby dads are. She can do without seeing her kids. She can do without going on an ETA. But yet you're not supposed to to walk around showing strength. It was sort of like they were playing with you just to see how far they could go before you sort of, you know, get completely broken. I'm sorry, what's an ETA? So it's a temporary absence where you where you where you can apply to go to church, go to see your family for a day, go to the halfway house. So just anything escorted outside of the prison's ground. ETAs are really important when you come up to boards like the parole board. So there are ETAs, as Lorraine mentioned, and there are UTAs which are unescorted temporary absences. And so in order to get to a UTA, you have to have successful in quotations as defined by the prison ETAs, right? So if you don't have and I don't know if there's a certain number, but if you don't have successful ETAs, you're not going to get to UTAs, which you need to demonstrate UTAs and that you are trustworthy of the language. I'm using the language of the state, right? That you can be trusted, you are trustworthy and that's going to go into your review when you get to boards and they're going to pull up your correctional plan and see if you've been compliant. And oh, my goodness, look Lorraine's had how many UTAs? So she must be whatever, whatever, right? And so the point here is that a lot of indigenous and black women don't get access to ETAs. And so if they're not given that access for the reasons that Lorraine mentioned as well as other reasons that are stereotypically grounded in the way in which their bodies are viewed or their security concerns, then they're not going to have a success, potentially won't have a successful run when they get to boards. So these are all some of the challenges that women face in attempting to maintain connections with their children or mothers, parents face while attempting to maintain a connection with their children. Are there other challenges that you want to talk about? One of the things that I experienced was that sometimes they would send you out with people who are, for instance, a guard. And it's almost as if everywhere that you go in the house or in the space, they're there with you. And sometimes if you're having a conversation with your children, then sometimes they also feel the need to jump in and say, like, well, don't you think this is a bad thing that she went to jail? So they're sort of intervening in your conversation with your children. Like sometimes I wasn't quite sure why that was needed. I remember asking for an ETA to go to my parents at home and the guard that was taking me, she made it a point to tell my parents, well, you know, she won't be allowed to come here after like when she is on parole because her crime is defrauding elderly people. And there's a lot of elderly people that lives in this building. And so while you are trying to build a relationship, they are trying to instill in them that this person is just bad. One of the things that we wanted to get to is the idea of the transitioning out. If that's OK, if we can move on to that part of the conversation. I hear what you're saying, Lorraine, that some of the challenges are deep. You mentioned the walls to bridges program. What do those challenges look like upon release? Lorraine, when we talked earlier, you described the transition almost as a second death. What did you mean by that? During that whole court process and that trial process, that is sort of like your first death, right? Especially in my case, people weren't there to actually support me on my journey going away from my family. And then the second that when I'm reentering society, they weren't there to sort of support me either. One of the main reasons were that my family were so keen on what society had to say about an incarcerated person reentering society. That, you know, it was almost like that social death. You're not celebrated as doing a good job as surviving prisoners and coming back outside to make them think of your lives. The media sensationalized people going away to such big extent that it's almost like, yeah, let's have a party. She's getting locked up. She's going away. But yet that sort of party is not there for you when you've done the time. I completely agree, Lorraine. And I think the biggest, well, one of the biggest things in addition to everything that Lorraine has said is there is so much shame that black women hold around incarceration. Because as Lorraine mentioned, I think it was so poignant rainy when you said, you know, this notion that you had shamed your family, right? Like you had disappointed your family, right? There's social pressure that often is put on families, the children of families who have immigrated to this country. There's a lot of expectation, right? That expectation is not grounded in an understanding because it's not maybe not available of what it actually means to come to a colonial country as a racialized immigrant person and try and raise your kids here, right? So it's this, you know, I worked my ass off, I worked hard to get from the islands to come here to give you a better life. And here it is now you effed up, right? It's very simple and black and white. And I do not mean that in a pejorative way. It isn't an OG understanding of how many older immigrant families understand, you know, when you leave home, right? The idea is that you're coming to the US or Canada or England for a better life. So when something happens within the context of your family that contravenes the ideas that you've had for your children, it comes with an enormous amount of weight and shame. You don't want to have to pick up the phone and tell your people back home. Oh, my goodness, this is what our family is going through. I think that's a piece that often gets left out of, you know, when why women carry so much shame, why black women carry so much shame, because it's almost like you've let down your entire family, your cousins, your aunties, your nieces and nephews, everybody who has been banking on you to come to foreign and get paper and try and remit, you know, names like seriously, right? It's it's a lot for a woman to carry, right? It's a lot for women to carry when they leave their children back home and they come here. It's a lot for women to carry when they are here and they have children here and they still are carrying that. So the shame is huge, right? The secrecy around being incarcerated, having a criminal record, the fear of losing your children if the school system finds out that you are a mother who was once incarcerated. So there's so much fear around all these pieces. And that makes it hard for you to navigate and negotiate, right? So you're kind of always thinking one step ahead, like you get a job and it's like, oh, shit, they're going to do a criminal record check on me. They're going to see pick me and it's going to show whatever my chart, whether or not those were convictions, see picks still show charges. Every arrest doesn't lead to a charge and every charge doesn't lead to a conviction. I find for the women that I that I spoke with, there's kind of as always this, you know, you're running on this hamster wheel sometimes in your head of thinking, oh, my goodness, I need to always be one step ahead, but maybe not always feeling like you can get off that that hamster wheel. So the shame and the stigma can be very isolating because you don't want to disclose because you don't know who you can trust. You don't know if that disclosure is going to be weaponized against you. You're still trying to constantly make up for what you've done to your family. So you feel like you're being judged. And, you know, there's a whole consortium that goes in that container. And I think the base of that container is really a lot of shame. You talked about shame, stigma, all of these things. Is there a way that, you know, I say we, but is there a way that we can make that experience of reintegration better? Like I would love to know, Rain, like what what would you have needed? Like what did you need? I think I just really needed people who were there for me, that people who I know that sort of had my back. I got released directly into a halfway house where there are other people there who were incarcerated. But just because we come from a space of incarceration does not necessarily mean that you are trustworthy. This stems from also the culture of the halfway houses in that they sort of perpetuate, you know, lateral violence, where they sort of present that atmosphere as you being like a crab in bucket clawing your way. So when you're clawing your way up, you're sort of pulling down people. One of the things was that you would have to wait a certain time before you leave for a weekend visit with your parents. Now, if you were to probably tell something that Lorraine did, then maybe you could, you don't have to wait all that time. They would grant you a free pass just because you did something good in their eyes. Right. And so it was very problematic. But because we had set this precedence in the walls to Bridges program, where we think of each other as not just as co-learners, but as sisters. In the walls to Bridges classes, Vinita, we share so deeply and so intense. Some of these people, like Ray, they are actually professors. So I could refer to them as references for jobs. And I just want to underscore what Lorraine's saying around like supporting folks, right? So like it's such a pleasure for me to like write reference letters and talk about the need to like employ women, like women who have criminal records, right? So it's really important to create spaces for women to flourish. Like, you know, if you want to work with folks who have been formerly incarcerated, have conversations with folks, right? I've often invited formerly incarcerated women for years into my classroom. And it is not in the sense of voyeurism. I ask them to leave the lecture, you know, do take carriage of the space. And I talk to my students, if you want to ask questions, you do it because you're trying to critically enhance your learning around social issues that have contributed to the criminalization, right? So it's how you frame those pieces, create spaces for women who have been inside. Can I ask for a couple of lines of definition of what the walls to Bridges program is? Yes, so the walls to Bridges program brings together people within car spaces and people from university spaces for a four credit term university course. We dismantle that banking system where there is one expert in the room. And and in that classroom, we're all expert and we're all learners. And so there is no no such thing as a professor who knows it all. Because we're learning and we're learning from each other and teaching each other. This is a space where many, many wonderful, empowering transformation occurs. I, as a criminalized person, I was just so blown away that while I am actually teaching these professors things that they don't know, you know, and they can only get from textbooks. And sometimes textbook does not quite cut it. It was really, really that space for me that actually turned it around for me. I took the facilitator training in 2016 and I've been affiliated with programs since then. And it is intense. I mean, if you are invested in social justice, transformative work, you you've got to own your stuff and you've got to, you know, be willing to engage in like self reflection, which really asks you to, you know, speak to your location, like think about, you know, your social identity and are you complicit in processes of subjugation and harm? If you could identify a couple of larger structural changes that you think are needed to stem the incarceration of racialized women that we're seeing, what would you suggest? Let me rupture the system. Abolition now, abolition, abolition, the absolute rupturing. I'm not even going to use the term dismantle. I'm going to borrow from the work of Dr. Shereen Razak and talk about like rupturing these systems. No more prisons, you know, and I know that's a hard concept for people to wrap their head around and there's no expectation that folks are going to hear this podcast and be like, you know, what are we talking about? But really and truly abolition is is connected to a larger ecosystem of like the shadow carceral state, the child welfare system, you know, the immigration refugee system, the health care system, the education system, all of these systems. We don't have one system in this country that is not entrenched in systemic racism, not one, right? And so if we want to work towards lessening, reducing, you know, whatever language you want to use around, you know, the incarceration of Indigenous and Black folks, Black women, we need to get rid of prisons. We need to get rid of prisons. So I will lend it there and let the calls come in. That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient, a huge thank you to both Lorraine and Ray for taking the time and their busy schedules to talk about this really important issue. If you'd like to know more, including info about the Walls to Bridges program, I've dropped some resources into the show notes on theconversation.com. And the other big news this week is that we're on Instagram. Come look for us at Don't Call Me Resilient podcast and slide into our DMs and let us know you're there. And if you're liking what you're hearing every week, consider sharing this pod with a friend or family member or drop a review on the podcast app you use. And if you haven't done this already, please give us a follow on whatever podcast app you're using. It means you won't miss an episode. Finally, if you have ideas about news stories that you would love to hear us cover, send us a note. Email us at dcmr at theconversation.com. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab. The lab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Vinita Srivastava. Bogey Sai Si is our producer. Oli Nicholas is our assistant producer and student journalist. Jennifer Morose is our consulting producer. Our audio editor is Remitula Shake. Ateka Kaki is our audience development and visual innovation consultant. And Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's the amazing Baki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water.