Why are pregnant people in prison? Clean Break theatre performs play at City St George’s • City St George's, University of London

School of Policy & Global Affairs hosts “affecting” play Scenes from Lost Mothers, which explores the moral dilemmas around incarcerated mothers and babies.

By Eve Lacroix (Senior Communications Officer), Published Tuesday, 1^st April 2025

“The loss is like an amputation.”

This is a haunting line from Scenes from Lost Mothers, delivered by an actress who plays an incarcerated mother whose child has been taken from her.

The performance at City St George’s, University of London was delivered by Clean Break theatre company and funded by the School of Policy & Global Affairs (SPGA) and the Violence & Society centre.

The event was organised by criminologists Dr Jennifer Fleetwood and Dr Annie Bunce to enable discussions between students and staff about the ethics and challenges women face in prison while pregnant and after giving birth.

Yesterday, the Sentencing Council suspended its plans to create guidelines around different sentences for people depending on age, sex and ethnicity due to political rows around “two tier sentencing”.

The rules would have advised magistrates and judges to get pre-sentence reports on peoples’ backgrounds before handing out sentences due to concerns about minoritised groups receiving harsher sentences.

Pre-sentence reports would have included information on whether people were abuse survivors, pregnant, or of an ethnic or faith minority.

Some prison reform groups suggest women should not be imprisoned at all, particularly those imprisoned for nonviolent crimes, as no rehabilitation happens behind bars.

Dr Bunce was invited to hear evidence at an All-Party Parliamentary Group (AAPG) meeting about women in the criminal justice system, including findings from a recent HM Chief Inspector of Prisons (HMIP) report.

She noticed a throughline between the “deeply depressing” findings from the HMIP report, the APPG meeting, and the play, and said:

The play was a moving dramatisation of very real issues and mirrored key findings from a thematic report published by HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) on coping in a women’s prison.
The bottom line is that even women’s very basic needs are not being met in prison. This lack of basic care, as well as poor contact with family and friends, are two of the most common reasons for women self-harming.
What Scenes from Lost Mothers also highlighted though, was glimmers of hope such as examples of prison officers who showed genuine care and compassion.
If people take one thing away from the play, I hope it is that these pockets of good practice need to become the norm instead of the exception because, as the HMIP report found, small things can make a big difference to women in prison.

Shona Babayemi (Clean Break theatre) introduces the play

The focus on hope was echoed by Dr Fleetwood, who has spent 20 years researching and teaching about women, crime and the criminal justice system. She previously worked with Clean Break theatre and said:

The work of Clean Break theatre is innovative and award-winning and seeks to raise issues of women and justice. Their plays are always fantastic, thought-provoking and memorable.
The incarcerated women, even in the most difficult situations, are full of hope about bettering their lives and those of their babies. The fact that they are hopeful is incumbent on us to be hopeful, too.

The play was performed by actors Claire Bayley, Shaina Cannon and Ro Florence and introduced by Shona Babayemi, who led a discussion afterwards.

The characters discuss babies being separated from their mothers, starting life on the back foot, or bonding with other relatives.

In one scene, a woman delivers her baby in hospital wearing long cuffs. She describes feeling like a watched “zoo animal” and being escorted back to prison “with three zookeepers but without her cub”.

Another scene details the humiliation of not having postpartum essentials such as nursing pads and nutritious food.

One character with lived experience contributes to a government report and asks:

Why are we sticking pregnant women in prison in the first place? There are other options like halfway houses, weekend visits, special maternity prison wards.

The audience was made up of criminology students and academics from midwifery, law, criminology and sociology from across the University. One participant described the play as “rich, affecting, intense”.

The play, written by Gurpeet Kaur Bhatti, is based on findings from a study on the Lost Mothers project, a study on maternal incarceration and birth in prison.

The charity Clean Break was set up by women in prison in the 1970s and continues to support women who have been involved with the criminal justice system, or who are at risk of criminal justice involvement.

The theatre performs plays on adversities which can lead women into prison and on the periphery of society, including homelessness, or the school exclusion to prison pipeline.

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