An assessment of the challenges of children in prison with their Mothers: A case of langata women maximum prison

Children growing up in prison with imprisoned mothers are faced with a myriad of challenges. The Kenyan laws allow toddlers to stay with their incarcerated mothers in prison up to the age of four years. Definitely, the children who live in prison are not criminals and as such should not be subjected to any treatment and environment that reduces their human basic natural rights. It is against this backdrop that this paper assessed the challenges of children in prison with their mothers taking in Lang'ata women prison. Specifically, the paper assessed the social, psychological/emotional and educational challenges. The paper is intended to influence the justice system in the best interest of the child. The study used a naturalistic design which was purely qualitative in nature to collected data from Langata women's prison. The researcher purposively sampled only women with their children in the prison. The data collected was analysed using content analysis to generate qualitative report which was presented in a continuous prose and verbatim citations.