IJFS - Interdisciplinary Journal of Family Studies

The goal of the present article is the study of perceptions, and meanings of motherhood inside a specific context such as the prison. This exploratory study is based on nine interviews conducted on imprisoned mothers already condemned. The results were analyzed with ATLAS.ti, a software specialized for qualitative analysis. They show the presence of three family codes which capture different aspects of mother-child relation: in particular it was visible that motherhood and children emotional closeness, during prison term, act as protective factors for those women, mitigating pain, fail and frustration connected to the everyday experience in prison.