Incarcerating Our Moms
A personal reflection on opportunity and responsibility
As Mother’s Day approaches, I think back to how we celebrated a few years ago when my mom was serving her sentence. It was not the most ideal of circumstances, of course, but I know it could have been much worse. On the day my mom was sentenced, my fifteen year-old sister and I accompanied her to the Federal Building where my father had been sentenced to five years in prison just hours earlier. I was filled with fear and anxiety. I actually spoke at the sentencing, repeating some parts of the letter I had submitted to the judge a month or so earlier. It had been six years since my parents were first indicted, and for six years of their childhood, my little brother and sister were both unsure of whether or when they would be separated from both of their parents. My family had already lost so much by the time of the sentencing — my parents were planning to divorce, our home was in foreclosure, they had trouble holding jobs once employers found out about the convictions; my mom was the glue that held things together. She has always been a model citizen with so much compassion — she has worked as both an ER and hospice nurse, actively volunteers in the community, and nurses wild animals back to health (true story: she once gave CPR to a wounded deer she saw on the side of the road). She taught us, and lives by, the mantra that “honesty is always the best policy.”
A prison sentence for my mom would be a sentence for our entire family.
I begged the judge to consider the impact it would have on my siblings if, at their formative ages, both of our parents went to prison, given our father was already going. I was only 24 at the time, working 12–14 hour days in New York and living paycheck-to-paycheck with a roommate in a one bedroom apartment. I had no idea how I would be able to care for my siblings 90 miles away who really needed someone who could be there to feed them, provide for them financially, drive them to and from after-school activities, sports games, college visits, etc. I was terrified that if my mom went to jail, they would feel lost and scared and start to perform poorly in school and act out. I was not the ideal person to be their “replacement mom,” and unfortunately, we did not have other family members as options. I spoke to the judge about how a prison sentence for my mom would be a sentence for our entire family and would very likely derail bright, ambitious, and caring children from a promising trajectory. I will never forget the prosecutor’s snappy response to what I said — that if my mother was not incarcerated it “would not set a good example for my siblings.” It was infuriating — she did not know the kind of person my mom was or how detrimental it would be to our family if my mom went to prison.
Thankfully, her comment did not sway the judge. When all was said and done, my mom received one year on house arrest with the ability to leave home to work, drive my siblings to and from activities, buy groceries, etc. She was also able to take my brother and sister on college visits, and I am proud to say that both are now at top ranking institutions with excellent scholarship packages. While there were some low points for my mom career-wise while on house arrest (she had a difficult time finding an employer who would hire her with her conviction and for a period of time was using food stamps), she did eventually find a great job at a company that looked past her conviction. She was given raises and promoted to one of the senior-most positions at her company, which enabled her to get her finances on track and led to a new opportunity in a C-suite position at a promising startup.
No two families are alike, and I can’t imagine what would have been had we even fewer resources, as many others do. Stories like my family’s exemplify why alternatives to incarceration (ATIs) are so incredibly important. WPA’s JusticeHome program is another ATI that keeps families together and provides opportunities for mothers who are facing incarceration to work toward a positive future for their families. JusticeHome provides support to its participants as opposed to discipline and punishment. While my mom had an electronic monitoring bracelet and had to submit (for approval) a list of every time and reason she needed to leave and return home, JusticeHome allows its participants to move freely without electronic monitoring. Its aim is to treat participants as human beings, assess their individual needs, and provide them with the resources they require (housing, counseling, parenting classes, etc.) to build better lives for themselves and their children. It has an impressive success rate (with a much lower recidivism rate than that of incarceration) and on a per-participant basis, it costs taxpayers one-fourth of what they would pay to incarcerate these mothers, and that does not even take into account the tax dollars that would have gone to pay for foster care (~$40,000 per child per year). Programs like this are a win-win for everyone involved because they address the root causes of crime to strengthen families and make communities safer.
We would have been paying to tear a family apart and ruin the lives of two children with so much potential.
Looking back on my own family’s situation, I often wonder what would have happened if the judge had listened to the prosecutor — if she had set, in the prosecutor's words, a “good” example for my siblings and sent my mom to prison. Which prison would she have gone to? How far would it have been from my siblings? From me? How often would we have been able to see her? And where would we all be in our lives today? Would my siblings be in college? Would I have made it this far in my career in New York? Would my mom have been able to to propel herself in her own career? If she had been in prison, she certainly wouldn’t have had the job opportunities that enabled her to build her career to the point it’s at today. She would not have been able to provide support for my siblings in their school endeavors and college applications. And we, the people of this country, would have been paying in our tax contributions for her to be incarcerated instead of allowing her to be a positive, contributing member of society and her local community. We would have been paying to tear a family apart and ruin the lives of two children with so much potential, quite possibly creating the conditions that cause inter-generational cycles of poverty and incarceration.
This Mother’s Day, I’ll be making a contribution to WPA to support all of the other mothers and their children who deserve the chance to build bright futures through alternatives to incarceration, and I would urge anyone reading this to do the same. As a country and a community, we have the opportunity and responsibility to generate positive societal and economic change, and it starts with you.
Justice Talk welcomes guest blogger, Jennifer.
