The Power of Mothers

Description

Title: The Power of Mothers: Releasing Our Children
Author: Celia Lashlie
Publisher: HarperCollins New Zealand, 2010
Format: Paperback
Condition: Excellent – as new

Description:
New Zealand locks up more people per capita than almost any country in the developed world. Celia Lashlie wanted to know why, and more importantly, what we could do about it. The answer she arrived at was not more prisons, tougher sentences, or better-funded social workers. It was mothers.

The Power of Mothers is the most politically charged of Lashlie’s books. It takes two of New Zealand’s most high-profile young offenders at the time of writing — Bailey Junior Kurariki and Maka Renata — and looks not at what they did, but at what was done to them, and to the women trying to raise them. Lashlie’s argument is precise and uncomfortable: the system that was supposed to protect these children actively worked against the mothers closest to them, and the media fascination with the cases served mainly to obscure that fact.

This is not a book about bad mothers. It is a book about a country that tells mothers they have power, then dismantles every structure that would allow them to use it. Lashlie had spent fifteen years inside New Zealand’s prisons, including four as manager of Christchurch Women’s Prison. She had seen who went in and why. She was not writing from theory.

No reprint has been issued since her death in 2015. Secondhand copies are the only way to access it.

Why We Stock It:
The conversation Lashlie started about imprisonment, poverty, and what this country owes its most vulnerable families has not been finished. The numbers she was writing about have not improved. This book still has something to say.

We highly recommend watching the moving documentary about Celia Lashlie’s life and work.