The maternal subject in contemporary popular discourses of Correction: Reading Amanda Brown’s Prison Doctor Memoirs

This paper adds to the limited research on representations of incarcerated mothers by analysing Amanda Brown’s best-selling memoirs, The Prison Doctor (2019) and The Prison Doctor: Women Inside (2020). These works detail her experience working in various British prisons, including at Bronzefield Women’s Prison from 2006 to the present. We argue that Brown’s portrayal of the maternal subject is influenced by “a middle-class gaze”. We show that from the prologue of the first book, Brown highlights her own “good” middle-class maternal identity, contrasting it with the negative portrayal of incarcerated mothers. She presents herself as a loving, caring, yet firm and pragmatic middle-class mother. For incarcerated mothers, Brown implies that prison can be a transformative space where they might become, like her, “good” mothers by adopting middle-class neoliberal attitudes, behaviours, and practices.