This discursive research analyzes how decisions about house arrest for women, mothers of children under 12 years of age and/or pregnant women are constructed discursively by judges. It is based on national laws and rules such as the Article 318 of the Brazilian Code of Criminal Procedure (Artigo 318 do Código de Processo Penal brasileiro), the Child and Adolescent Statute (Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente), the Habeas Corpus 143.641/SP with the Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal) decision and the international Bangkok Rules - United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-Custodial Measures for Women Offenders – of which Brazil is a signatory, in order to analyze a corpus consisting of 16 Judgments, between the years of 2017 and 2019, of the district of the city of Rio de Janeiro, for cases of granting or not of house arrest as an alternative penalty. Decisions at first instance are referenced at some moments of the analysis with regard of the entextualizations made by professionals during legal proceedings. The laws and official documents mentioned above are also analyzed. This is a discursive, qualitative- interpretative and interdisciplinary analysis, which articulates the studies of language and law in the field of Applied Linguistics, and more specifically to Forensic Linguistics. After evaluating the socio-historical relationship between motherhood, feminism and imprisonment, describing the judgment as a textual gender with support of the perspectives of chronotope, legal chronotope and entextualization, the discursive lens of this thesis turns, with the support of the Appraisal System, to the evaluative and moral indicators on the female behavior shown in the decisions. Although national and international rules converge to (i) the importance of interaction between mother and child in early childhood; (ii) the specificities in relation to the arrest of women and pregnant women and (iii) the criticism of female incarceration that has been increasing considerably in Brazil and worldwide, what is observed, as the research results, is that: (i) the discourses constructed by the judges are often moralizing, based on the idea that women lose the ability to be a mother once they commit an offence; (ii) the judges disregard the discourses present in the existing norms and laws, maintaining the punitive orientation that directly contributes to the increase in the number of women incarcerated in Brazil.