Just Want to See You Dream Up
A formerly incarcerated mother and her son, in words and photos
One of the least-covered aspects of mass incarceration is its ripple effect: how the incarceration of one person can — and often does — thread trauma, fear, and desperation through the fabric of a community. In areas with high incarceration rates, one doesn’t even need to be locked up to feel the ceiling it puts on the neighborhood. Asking what incarceration has meant to these areas is often met with a smirking laugh. They’re million-dollar blocks and ten-year-olds being arrested. In New York City, just five neighborhoods make up over 1/3 of the city’s incarcerated population. On these blocks — from Harlem, to the Bronx, to Brownsville and beyond — Rikers is practically a resident. Parole is the needy neighbor constantly hitting you up for favors.
The extended pain of incarceration is particularly pronounced within families. The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s striking and succinct “A Shared Sentence” explores this, focusing on the damage incarceration does to children and loved ones. The problem is not small: over five million children in the United States have had an incarcerated parent at some point; in some states, it’s more than 10% of children.
“For children and families, incarceration is not a one-time event,” the report states, “but a daily reality that lasts well beyond a jail sentence or prison term.” Those children are more likely to drop out of school, more likely to experience health issues, and more likely to be incarcerated themselves. Among families with returning citizens, there’s distrust, stigma, and a fear I’m told about over and over again: the fear that everyone knows.
Hour Children in Queens, NY works to remedy this. Hour Children’s origins are in the 1970’s when Sister Elaine Roulet, a sister of St. Joseph of Brentwood, began working with women at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility upstate. According to development associate Jeffrey Smith, she initially went to teach reading, but incarcerated women would tell her, “I don’t know where my children are.” She started helping them communicate.
“Back in the 1980’s, Sister Elaine became aware of a number or children who were about to be placed into the foster care system and she wanted to prevent it from happening,” Smith explained. “So she reached out to the other sisters of her congregation, and it was basically an all-points bulletin asking were there any sisters who were willing to open up a convent where they would live and these children could be cared for.”
Sister Tesa Fitzgerald, now Hour Children’s executive director, was one of the five who volunteered to live with the first eight children. In the last 30 years, the organization has grown to provide job training, internships, childcare classes, life skills training, daycare, prison visitation, and teen mentorship programs. Their success rate hovers around 90%, vastly higher than even generous national estimates. They have expanded to run the nurseries at Bedford Hills and nearby Taconic Correctional Facility, and they make “practical, compassionate” visits to women at the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers Island. They have five residences where returning women and their children live, communally sharing childcare and chores. That first convent is one of them. They changed its name from St. Rita’s Convent to My Mother’s House.
“So that if any child was asked where he or she lived,” Smith said, “they could answer, ‘I live at my mother’s house.’”
Stephanie Reis was the very first woman I spoke with there. She was interning, working her way back from doing around 17 months on drug charges. She had her son, Major, while incarcerated. Hour Children kept them together in the nursery at Bedford Hills and gave her a place to go post-release that wasn’t her Upstate New York home. Stephanie points out that without Hour Children helping to maintain her connection with Major and providing a safe space for return, she probably would have been released with no net into the same environment and habits that led her to prison. Every single formerly incarcerated person I’ve spoken with has told me this: positive reentry can literally mean the difference between life and death.
At Bedford Hills, Stephanie was shackled while pregnant, a practice illegal in New York but often still inflicted. Stephanie told me she was shackled even though she was experiencing preeclampsia, high blood pressure during pregnancy that can lead to organ damage and death. She’s now an outspoken opponent of shackling, calling attention to its persistence long after it was techniccally outlawed.
Stephanie and Major now live in Hour Children’s housing. She’s attending Hunter College to pursue a degree in social work, and at 25, her life looks very different than it once did. She’s home, though it’s not where she’s from; she was part of a cycle, but she’s trying to break it; and she’s with her son, building a bond.
The audio slideshow below is a full collaboration with Joe Amditis and would not have been nearly as good without his expertise. The whole thing would have been downright impossible without the openness and trust of Hour Children, Stephanie, and Major. Thank you.
Greylined is an ongoing, evolving space sharing the voices and experiences of those affected by incarceration in NYC. To follow along, click here. Allen can be reached on Twitter @LissomeLight.
