Educational Media Reviews Online

This highly recommended documentary opens with some startling statistics: women are the fastest growing population in today’s prison system and 80% of those incarcerated women are mothers of school-age children. Filmed over four years at the maximum security Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Bedford, NY, filmmakers followed five female inmates as they struggled to stay connected to their children and extended families while serving long-term prison sentences.

A particular thrust of this film is to promote the benefits of prison parenting programs as family dynamics are at the core of this film. Filmmakers honestly record the tremendous toll that incarceration takes on the mothers, their children and the extended families that must now assume the emotional and financial costs for these motherless children. While one inmate asserts, “You can be a parent wherever you are,” another concludes, “When someone goes to prison—especially a woman—her best friend has been failure.”

This film doesn’t engage what role race, family dynamics or poverty play in these women’s lives. Nor does it engage in a cost-benefit analysis of prison parenting programs except to note that since the film was completed, 40% of the funding for Bedford’s parenting programs has been cut. But it touchingly records from the mother’s perspective what it means to parent behind bars and, paradoxically, how incarceration actually made them better mothers.

Awards

• Best Documentary, Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival
• Director’s Choice Award, Social Justice Film Festival