Children with mothers in jail

How children with their imprisoned mothers grow up in the inhospitable environment of jails calls for a closer look. Children aged up to four are allowed to live with their imprisoned mothers. The age limit can be extended up to six with approval from jail authorities. Clearly, it is the most important phase of children's upbringing when a mother's attachment to her child proves vital and decisive. On that consideration, such children are allowed to live with their mother serving jail terms. Here is an issue of humanitarian consideration. But can a prison, particularly when its environment is yet to be much different from that pained in the Resurrection by Tolstoy, be even remotely congenial to healthy growth of children - both physically and mentally? Mother's care for her child is ensured but who ensures her care? She does not have the wherewithal for looking after her baby the way she would like. It is the supplies from the prison authority that she has to depend on.

Again, in confinement children do not have the liberty to enjoy the companies of their near and dear ones they were supposed to do in their free life. In prisons of Bangladesh, facilities are woefully limited. Children in reality are not the prison's charge, so it has no particular obligation to ensure the children's welfare there. Children are suffering the rigour for no fault of their own. If anything, it is their mothers' offence that has forced them to be placed in the hostile environment. If they enter a prison as babies, they would not even know what homes can be like. Most likely, they would consider cloistered living normal. This is where distortion of their mental perception takes place.

In advanced countries prisons are no longer considered so; rather those are viewed as correction centres. It is a question of human rights and dignity that must not be compromised even if it concerns a criminal. However, where petty offences or first-time crimes are concerned, the focus is on rehabilitation of the offenders. A correction centre takes the responsibility of rehabilitating such offenders to normal life. Putting women offenders with children in a prison cannot be accepted anyway. A separate correction centre for them can be built where children will have all the facilities such as a day-care centre, a children's park, a school etc.; so that they do not come in contact with dubious characters. Or, in its absence a separate wing with some of these facilities can be developed.

The fact is confinement has its lasting psychological impacts on impressionable minds. Even when they are released from prison, they have to struggle to integrate with society. Some of the psychological scar they will forever bear because of their mother. But this can be overcome with care and counselling by child psychologists. It is essential that the government took steps towards turning the country's prisons to correction centres one by one. Children who cannot live without their mothers condemned to jail sentence need special care and they must be given it.