Katie Piper reveals disappointment over ladies with infants getting jailed ‘to feel safe’
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atie Piper has spoken about her new real-life documentary present the place she visits moms who felt they needed to develop into “incarcerated to feel safe” and take care of their infants.
In UKTV’s Katie Piper’s Jailhouse Mums, the 39-year-old presenter meets feminine prisoners throughout completely different places within the United States as they undergo being pregnant and start serving time.
Across six months, she filmed 5 episodes about motherhood in prisons in locations reminiscent of Chicago and America’s southern states the place in some areas ladies and kids dwell collectively behind bars.
Piper advised the PA news company: “In every single place, there was one consistency, and that was that the victim was always the child and research shows that if you have a weak connection with your mother, or it becomes fractured in some way, in those first two to three years of childhood, you are statistically more likely to end up in prison yourself.
“And that was what I met. I met people that were just trapped in this cycle, and they didn’t want to be there but it had become their normal and I started to compare my own life, my childhood – my normal was certainty, stability, love, affection.
“I mean, my adult years were slightly more chaotic, and more difficult because of my own personal traumas that I’ve had, but to see people that felt comfortable around pain, struggle, abuse, was really quite sad and some people, by their own admission, were glad to be in prison.
“Some people said this saved me.”
Piper additionally mentioned the distinction between her and these ladies is that when she “unravelled” there was help from her family members to “pick” her up.
The Loose Women star mentioned she additionally met ladies who felt “relieved” as their different possibilities at motherhood had been “destroyed” by medicine, homelessness and abusive companions.
Piper, who competed on Strictly Come Dancing in 2018, added that seeing ladies caring for his or her infants in jail appeared extra “nurturing” and made it “almost quite a happy place”.
She mentioned: “I felt so sad that for some women, they had to get incarcerated to feel safe.”
Piper mentioned her expertise volunteering at a ladies’s jail within the UK, the place she has completed workshops and confidence seminars, impressed her to have a look at America which has a “varied” authorized system throughout completely different states.
She additionally mentioned viewers will hear tales of households being incarcerated collectively in addition to issues that may “shock, sadden and inspire”.
Piper additionally mentioned: “A lot of the conditions I saw were inhumane and that was hard to see because people sometimes do have to go to prison.”
She added that she “didn’t expect to see heavily pregnant women sleeping on iron metal bunk beds with no mattress (and) no cover”.
“I certainly didn’t understand what giving birth looks like when you were incarcerated,” she mentioned.
“I met women that went full-term into their pregnancy, and then left in shackles to go to a nearby hospital to give birth with a male prison officer witnessing that birth, but no family members allowed.”
She added that after the start, 24 hours later, some ladies declare they might return to their cell with “leaking breasts or a sanitary towel” and have to attend greater than every week to make a telephone name to get news about their child.
Piper mentioned: “I think what my project showed me is that in (the) majority of cases the best place for a child is with its natural mother… Overall, I really hope that this helps humanise the women that I’ve filmed with.”
Katie Piper’s Jailhouse Mums begins on Wednesday at 10pm on free-to-air leisure channel W and also will be obtainable on UKTV Play.