PHOTOGRAPHER'S STATEMENT
The first two decades of my professional life were devoted to becoming and then being a certified nurse-midwife. Mother-baby bonding and attachment issues as well as empowering women were essential elements of my life’s work. But after my third child’s birth, I needed a professional direction that would allow me more time and flexibility to care for my family. I was recruited to evaluate children at the Mary Bridge Child Abuse Intervention Department in Tacoma, Washington. Over the next decade, I learned about childhoods traumatized by domestic violence, addictions, neglect, and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

While on leave of absence from the Child Abuse Intervention Department, the idea of doing a photodocumentary project on the Residential Parenting Program at the Washington Corrections Center for Women took hold and would not let go. I had loved taking photographs of people from an early age. My father gave me my first camera, a Brownie, when I was six. As a teenager, I discovered magic in the quiet isolation of our small home darkroom. Now I had the time, interest, support of my family, and a great camera.

Initial trepidation on undertaking such a project soon passed as I was welcomed by the prison administrators, officers, and inmates of J Unit, the unit where the mother-baby program is housed. What I have found is an administration setting the tone for “corrections” in lieu of punishment. Many of the inmates have been very candid about their lives…past, current, and imagined futures. Most of the inmates I’ve spoken with are intimately familiar with shame, remorse, failure, trauma, and loss. And these same women also speak with pride, hope, and determination about working through their issues and coming out from behind the razor wire fence better prepared to make effective decisions about their lives. It has been an interesting experience to be surrounded by women who are consciously and actively searching for a better way to be. They already know first hand what the alternative is.

When I reflect on vulnerable populations, I think being pregnant AND incarcerated is just about as vulnerable as it gets. The women who qualify to participate in the Residential Parenting Program realize what a gift they have been given. For most of them, participating in this program is life changing. Increasing numbers of pregnant women are facing incarceration. There are only twenty spaces available for mother-baby pairs at our state’s main correctional facility for women. But it’s a start.

Cheryl Hanna-Truscott, 2004