Growth and development, of course, doesn't happen in a vacuum. The presenters were from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, which is New York's maximum security prison for women. Women in the State of New York who are pregnant and are incarcerated are able to keep their babies with them in prison for a year. The program consists of the Children's center, the Parenting Center, and the Nursery Program, which includes the prenatal center, the nursery, and two infant day care centers. The babies stay with their mothers until age 1 year, at which time they leave the prison nursery and go either to a relative, or to My Mother's House, a foster home that provides care for children who do not have family members to care for them.
Mothers have responsibility for the care and nurturing of their babies.
The philosophy of this program, which has existed in New York since the late 1800s, is that the babies and mothers have the opportunity to form an attachment during the first year of the baby's postnatal life, and that, even though they have to leave the nursery at 12 months, they have the beginnings of that internal working model that says the world is safe, and I am safe in the world. Judy Clark, who is in charge of the prenatal program, as well as the Children's Center, is an inmate at Bedford Hills, and has written an article about the program in Zero to Three , Vol. It's interesting to note that a women's prison has been proposed for the Topeka State Hospital site. This conference features Serge Lebovici , Susan McDonough , Peter Fonagy ,and Efrain Bleiberg and Martin Maldonado . 1997 Annual KDEC Conference.