Locked Down, Locked Out (12 page)

Until the 1950s, it was not uncommon for babies born in prison to stay with their mothers in prison-based nurseries, but the practice evaporated during the incarceration boom of the past forty years.
*
A few nurseries have recently reemerged in small-scale scenarios, like Illinois’ much-hyped Moms and Babies program, which allows babies to remain with their mothers throughout infancy—but permits a grand total of eight babies at a time.
¹⁵

Moms and Babies is located at Decatur prison, where Kayla spent her first state penitentiary bid. I remember well her condemnation of the program as she observed it firsthand, long before her own pregnancy. “It doesn’t make sense that it has to be inside of a prison,” she said. “They’re only letting women into this program who have nonviolent offenses and good behavior, people they could let out if they wanted. So why can’t they just let them
out
, instead of letting their babies come
in
?”

A debate currently rages among policymakers, experts, and intellectuals about whether the prison nursery is a cold sentence
or the better of many evils—a practical mitigation of the effects of a destructive system that would otherwise simply break the mother-baby bond. Plus, mothers who participate in the nursery programs show lower recidivism rates.
¹⁶
However, if mothers’ sentences continue past the age limit for babies in prison (the most lenient program allows them to stay no longer than thirty months), the bonds will still be torn.

Author Deborah Jiang-Stein, who was born in a federal prison in West Virginia, remained with her mother—in her cell—for the first year of her life. She visited the prison many years later, and she tells me, “The area felt familiar, even the smells and some of the buildings in the prison. It’s emotional memory... I was keenly aware of it as I walked the prison compound.”

I get in touch with Deborah in fall 2013. Kayla’s in prison, Angelica is in the hospital, and Deborah is working on her memoir,
Prison Baby
, about her early upbringing in prison and subsequent separation from her mother. Her views on “prison babies” don’t fit into a tidy box. Deborah’s penitentiary year (her first twelve months on earth) allowed her to form a strong maternal bond—a bond that would be cut only when Deborah was removed from prison and placed in foster care, while her mother continued to do her time. “I was only removed because they didn’t know what else to do with me,” she says, pointing out that in the years before 1980—when many fewer people and many,
many
fewer women were incarcerated—were “uncharted years for how to handle pregnant inmates and babies born in prison.”

She doesn’t see her early months in prison as a clear-cut negative. “I believe my year of bonding with my birth mother set the stage for future stability,” she says. “However, the separation from her and my placement in foster care also set the stage for trauma, self-doubt, and insecurity.” Deborah’s birth mother fought to
keep her child, but, still incarcerated, lost the battle, and Deborah was adopted by her foster family. She and her birth mother never saw each other again, and years later Deborah discovered she’d died of cancer.

Experimenting with New Ways of Life

A movement has recently emerged that calls for programs that allow new mothers to live outside prison in restricted community housing with their children. Deborah points to the benefits of this approach: “If it allows for visiting and nurturing contact, that can only help a baby.” Advocates note that community-based programs have all the benefits of a prison nursery without the downsides and are both more humane and more effective. According to the Women’s Prison Association,
¹⁷
infants and moms clearly fare better when they’re not separated, and community-based residential parenting programs have been shown to “protect public safety and reduce recidivism at a fraction of the human and economic costs of prison.”

However, these programs can blur into the realm of imprisonment, operating out of a framework of punishment and confinement—a manifestation of the prison nation. In a University of Illinois study of “The House,” a community-based “correctional alternative” for new mothers, “an underlying tension existed between social services and corrections objectives. Despite a services orientation, many residents and staff perceived the House environment as punitive.” Recidivism was low among those who completed the program, but a third of the participants didn’t complete it—and most of those women were reincarcerated. The study also raised an uncomfortable issue: If mothers are externally confined with their babies—sometimes with “unnecessary restrictions on contact with other family members”—their relationships
with their
other
kids, if they have them, may well suffer.
¹⁸

The most successful programs seem to function within a wholly different framework: one of support and accountability, connections instead of “corrections.” An encouraging example can be found in A New Way of Life (ANWOL), a chain of homes for recently incarcerated women in Los Angeles. The centers were founded by Susan Burton, a formerly incarcerated mother whose five-year-old son was killed by a speeding police car. Susan supports mothers in meeting the state’s reunification requirements so they won’t lose their kids to child protective services.
¹⁹

Along with providing women and their kids with their basic needs, ANWOL offers job training and assistance with case management—as well as opportunities to get involved with advocacy for a better system. ANWOL hosts the LEAD (Leadership, Education, Action, Dialogue) Project, a workshop that engages with the political and social systems that perpetuate the prison nation, emphasizing the targeting of black and brown people and the ways in which frameworks of isolation instill themselves in every corner of society.
²⁰
Women have the opportunity to get involved with All of Us or None, a movement of formerly incarcerated people working to restore the rights of people with past convictions, so mothers can not only work toward their own reunification with their kids, but work to change the system for future women in their shoes.
²¹

“And Then What?”

In the weeks after Angelica is born, whenever I have to tell someone about Kayla’s continued incarceration, I get a response like, “But what’s the
point
?” Or, “How is Kayla being in prison helping anyone?” I am thinking but not saying, “How is
anyone
being in prison helping anyone?”

There are a couple of reasons why my friends and family members see this question so clearly when it comes to Kayla: 1) They know her, or at least they know me, and they don’t see me as someone whose family member “should” be in prison, given my privileged place in society; 2) She has been separated from her baby, an occurrence that feels viscerally wrong. However, the “what’s the point?” response also prompts a vital question that, I think, should play a central role in any system of justice. That question is, “And then what?”

In a 2012 speech, Glenn E. Martin, founder of the organization JustLeadershipUSA, which aims to cut the prison population in half by 2030, suggests: “At sentencing, we must ask our judges, ‘And then what?’ When the head of our police department decides that aggressive policing is the way to public safety, we must ask, ‘And then what?’ When our governors tinker around the edges by right-sizing prisons instead of downsizing the system, we must ask, ‘And then what?’” In other words, if the goal of “justice” is not simply revenge, we must have a route to amelioration in mind, every step of the way.
²²

Kayla stays in prison, mired in despair and futile anxiety, while her baby languishes at the hospital and then at “home” without her—and then what?

Deborah Jiang-Stein spends a year in prison as an infant, able to bond with her mother for twelve months behind bars—and then what?

Sable Kolstee is torn from her kids and prohibited by parole rules from seeing them, even upon release, knowing they’re out there but not in her arms—and then what?

Joe Jackson spends the rest of his life in prison for a drug offense while his family struggles financially and emotionally without him—and then what?

Marcos Gray serves out juvenile life without parole, held prisoner to racism and poverty—and then what?

Has society gotten better because of these incarcerations? Have these prisoners “changed their ways”? Has prison “reformed” them, nineteenth-century-style? Have separation and disconnection worked their magic?

The topic of rehabilitation arises during a prison visit the week after Kayla has given birth. Kayla is morose, both physically sick and heartbroken, and every question we ask falls to the ground with a barely audible “yes” or “no.”

“I’m taking a parenting class,” she finally offers. “Yesterday we had a guest.”

“Who?” I ask.

“Well,” she says, “it was this lady who was locked up for like fifteen years. When she went in, her kids got taken away and went into foster care, and they stopped seeing her, talking to her, everything. Then finally she got out, and they didn’t even
want
to see her.”

“That’s terrible!”

“Eventually
her kids did start talking to her again, once they were adults,” Kayla assures us. “And now they’re pretty close. They can call each other up just to say hi, and everything.... But yeah—there’s a lot of women in the class who’ve been in here forever, and they think their kids don’t love them, and who knows, maybe they don’t. So I guess the lesson is just, even if you’ve been gone a long time, you still might be able to get to know your kids.”

And that is a parenting class, prison-style.

Angela Davis points to the irony of such classes: “In the jails and prisons where they are incarcerated, [women prisoners] are presumably being taught to be good mothers, even as they are powerless to prevent the state from seizing their own children.”
²³
Deepening the irony, that “seizing” is more likely to happen if women admit to drug problems, seeking rehabilitation: “Their admissions are used as evidence of their incapacity to be good mothers.”

Indeed, as the weeks tick down to Kayla’s release from prison, the Department of Child and Family Services will pay her a visit. Because she has admitted to a drug addiction, she’ll be told, she might be denied custody of her child, even after release.

On the afternoon of the parenting class conversation, as we’re driving out of the parking lot, Mom provides a word of commentary: “Probably, a better parenting lesson would involve letting her actually spend time with her child.”

And then we head off to the hospital to see Angelica, who’s tucked into her nursery crib, alone.

And then what?

Part Two
Coming Together

Chapter 6
The Case for a Pen Pal

Only connect.

—
E. M. Forster
, Howard’s End

Kayla’s pregnancy and postbirth incarceration in 2013 breaks me of my nostalgic fondness for letters. The urgency of the situation—the baby—strains the space between us, and at this overcrowded prison letters take three weeks to be processed upon arrival. I am dropping envelopes in the mail slot with a kind of reckless uncertainty, knowing that many of my messages will fall useless into Kayla’s lap, bearing outdated questions or now-irrelevant tips. But as our correspondence continues, I begin to think: The reason I once loved writing to Kayla was because it offered a chance for deep, sustained communication—a communication that doesn’t usually happen between people who are, in so many ways, hundreds of miles apart.

I’ve corresponded with a couple of dozen prison pen pals over the past eight years. The “use” of pen-palship has made itself visible in small and large ways over the course of these loosely threaded friendships. Sometimes, a piercing phrase will spring up
out of the envelope—a truth that will never leave my mind. At other times, a prisoner will contribute a vital bit of information that proves unavailable anywhere else. Often, though, the “use” of pen-palship is not in the particulars of what is being communicated, but in the act of communicating.

Prison is built on a logic of isolation and disconnection. Letters between pen pals are almost always exchanged for the opposite purpose and with the opposite effect: connection.

As summer dawns, I think a lot about how the act of pen-palling is significant, not just for my relationship with my sister, but in the way it mirrors the mindset shift that will be necessary to rethink how our society “does justice” on a much larger scale. My conversations, correspondences, and relationships with prison-torn families have taught me that separation breeds more separation, that the coldness and isolation of prison breed the coldness and isolation of violence. And I think about how the one-on-one relationship, in which the prisoner emerges as a person (with thoughts, a personality, a history, hopes, dreams, nightmares), might serve as a model for the beginnings of a person-based, connection-based justice system.

The Person Steven Woods

In early 2006, I began working on a piece on prison-based activism for the music and politics magazine
Punk Planet
. I wanted to write about action happening on the inside, action that might not be getting any attention beyond the walls, and I began writing to people in prison to find out what they were thinking. I soon developed an ongoing correspondence with my first prison pen pal, Steven Michael Woods, who was on death row in Texas. Steven was leading a hunger strike to advocate for more humane—or, at least, marginally tolerable—conditions. Addressing the envelope
(“Polunsky Unit,” death row) scared me. My image of Steven was murky and amorphous, a silent symbol of the media label routinely slapped on death row prisoners: “worst of the worst.” However, the day I received my first letter from this man, I came to the jarring, thudding realization that he was human. Not Inmate No. 1267, but the person, Steven Woods.