When incarcerated women give birth, that’s often the last time they see their baby until prison visiting day. After a few days in the hospital, usually while handcuffed to the bed, the moms lose their baby to a relative or to foster care. But in eight prisons across the United States, including Westchester County’s own Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, there’s an alternative.
Prison nursery programs allow moms and babies to stay together. At Bedford, that means mothers accepted into the program spend their child’s first eighteen months with them.
Hour Children operates the residential nursery at Bedford and their website says the service is, “providing infants born during their mother’s incarceration with critical bonding time with their mother. During the day, while mothers are attending school, mandated programs, or working, the infants are cared for in the Child Development Center, which is staffed by Hour Children employees and women who are incarcerated at the facility.”
The 2025 United States Prison Nursery report explains:
“Prison nurseries are arguably beneficial for three key reasons: promoting mother-baby attachment, reducing recidivism rates among mothers, and enhancing parenting skills. Developmental science emphasizes the importance of the period between zero to two years for critical infant attachment formation and the stability provided by consistent caregiver interactions.”
Dr. Lorie Goshin helped run a study on attachment styles in preschool-age children that participated in the Bedford nursery program as babies. They had more secure attachment styles than toddlers who had been separated from their mothers due to incarceration. Goshin explains, “ Because of how we’re parented from very early on, we develop representations in our mind of our own deservingness of care and how how predictable and caring the world will be.” But even among mothers with insecure attachment, their toddlers didn’t have one, unlike the sample group that was not in the prison nursery program. “ The findings were quite remarkable in that way,” says Goshin.
Opposition to the program is usually based on whether the mothers retain their parental rights as wards of the state. Also, some people are concerned about putting babies in an environment like a prison. Although, unlike inmates, the children may come and go. Goshin explains that critics think, “If a mother is facing these charges, then she doesn’t deserve to continue in her parenting role” but she “fundamentally disagrees” with this idea. She argues “people come into contact with law enforcement and with the criminal justice system for so many different reasons, many of which don’t have anything to do with their parenting role, and/or could be resolved with proper support.”
Photo Credit: Bedford Hills Correctional Facility- Radio Catskill archive.