Sandra Barnhill is the executive director of Aid to Children of Imprisoned Mothers, Inc. (AIM), an Atlanta-based advocacy organization for incarcerated women, their children, and the children’s caregivers. She is an attorney and practiced death penalty defense and prison conditions litigation prior to creating AIM in 1987. Among AIM’s unique contributions in advocacy was the creation of a support program for grandmothers, who are the main caretakers of imprisoned mothers’ children. In addition, most of the families served by AIM’s intergenerational programming are African American. She discusses her motivation and the organization’s approaches to advocacy on behalf of incarcerated mothers, their children, and grandmothers.
Sandra Barnhill
I ATTENDED the University of Texas (Austin) Law School. I practiced law for about four and a half years, but most of that time, I did death penalty work and a number of prison condition cases. One day I looked up and realized that we weren’t doing anything at women’s prisons, and so I said to my boss at that time, a White male, “Don’t you think we ought to do something?” He said, “Hey, yeah. Fine. You find the money to do it and we’ll litigate it.” Along with another woman in the office, we began to put a call out to women in southern prisons who had written the office and some women in Alabama. One woman in particular wrote a real compelling letter to me. I went down to Montgomery and spent eighteen months doing an investigation. We finally filed suit. Before the ink was dry on the consent decree, the prison was in violation of everything. The primary issues were parity between men and women in terms of the vocational and educational opportunities. We also included Eighth Amendment cruel-and-unusual-punishment issues, as well as issues regarding visitation.
After all of that happened, I was very disillusioned. The woman who initially wrote to us was a woman in her fifties and a strong warrior. She too—all of us—were sort of disillusioned. It became clear that the law is not the answer. It’s a part of the answer, but the real answer is people claiming and using the power in their own lives. So, I quit practicing law. I started this organization in 1987, and we’ve been around for about fifteen years. I really started it to do two things. One, to work on my own personal empowerment as an African American woman. We all live in a society that constantly says, “I can’t.” We internalize some of that, and so I wanted to say, “I can, I will, I must.” Therefore, I started AIM. I also wanted to be active in the empowerment of women because I think we have to learn how to be sisters and allies. I wanted AIM to be a place for our voices, so the way we figured out what work we do, is we ask the women. When I first started AIM, I went to see women in jail and in prison and said, “What is it that we can do for you?” They said, “Bring my kids. Help me take care of and see about my kids.” So, those are the ways in which we try to do the work.
I think that, as African American women, there is no place for us in American society. I think we carve out little enclaves, but this is not a safe place for us. It doesn’t make a bit of difference whether you’re locked up in prison, or whether you’re out here on the outside, because we’re still locked out regardless of where you are. I think it’s doing the work and just seeing that in some ways, there is a lot of joy about the work, but there is a lot of pain about the work, too. As I look at my sisters inside, it speaks so clearly about my own life, in that prison is the end product of the racism, sexism, homophobia, and antifamily that converges in a place called prison. That’s the most extreme manifestation of it, but there are manifestations of it every day in our lives as Black women.
We take a phrase from the battered women’s movement. We always believe the women, and the reality of their lives is different. They are not bad women. I think that’s a lot about how the racism plays out because there are two predominant images of women in our society. One is what I call “the bad girl,” and that’s primarily associated with White women—that they are susceptible and easily tempted and swayed. They’ve fallen off, but they can be redeemed. Then there is the “evil woman,” which is the predominant image, in this culture, of African American women, as beyond redemption.
I am really proud that our work is intergenerational: the kids, the moms, and their grandmothers. In a five-year period, we moved to do more mostly for the kids and the grandmoms. In order to do that, we decreased what we did for the women. I’m happy that we’re moving to a place where we can hold those three balls because we have to work on each of those fronts.
The kids are writing books about their lives. One of the young women said she was going to be a millionaire, and I forgot all that she was going to do. That’s what I mean, that untouched spirit. They haven’t figured out that in this world, there are no constraints. They haven’t figured that out yet, and I think that is really good, particularly based on the situation that they are in. Because if anything about the reality of life would smack you quick, it would be that your mama’s locked up. Yet what came out of that is that kids are normal; what’s not normal is the situation. The kids developed coping mechanisms, and some of the mechanisms that they develop to cope get them through the short term. They survive through that. However, over the long term, those are not the best coping skills. I see a couple of things in the kids. I see resilience. I see vulnerability. I see what I call the untouched spirit.
What kids understand about their situation depends on the age of the kids. When they’re very young, they just kind of understand that their mother’s in prison, she’s away. I think that as they begin to get older, the analysis is different. What we put forth here is that the children need to know, we need to tell. Then you also need to talk about how you’re being held accountable, because I think having kids think that this is just a set-up or a frame-up and that kind of thing is not good. Now, some of that may be involved, but each of us has choices that we have to make.
Some women are locked up because when they looked at the array of choices, first of all, all of them were bad. That was the first thing. Then, out of the bad ones, they just picked the one they thought was the least bad. That’s true of some women, but it is also true of women that they looked at the choices, and some were good and some were bad. But they picked the bad choice. There are issues around personal decision making and we think it’s very important to share that with the kids because kids see what you live and that’s how they learn. We talk a lot here. So many women are incarcerated for drugs. But, we have house rules here: no drugs. We don’t steal from one another. This is a community. This way, kids are developing their principles about living.
The grandmothers in our support group are in the forties to late fifties. They talk about the reality of their lives, their frustration, and their feelings. Sometimes they say that their daughter had been in prison before, and out and in, and “When is she going to get her life together so I can live my life?” One of the things that hit me in a real poignant way is that most of the grandmothers that come have health issues. I think that’s a manifestation of the stress, the “dis”-ease in their life, struggling with a lot of stress issues. The therapist who runs the meeting for them talks a lot about wellness and stress management. A lot of women in our community have high blood pressure, hypertension, and diabetes.
We support whoever the caregiver is. In most cases, it’s the grandmother, but also there are a lot of maternal aunts and cousins. Women fill up the gaps in society. When the mom’s gone, the women in that family take up the space. I’ve been doing this work for fifteen years, and I’ve only worked with two fathers who had the kids. Statistics and research show us that men get far more visits than women when they go to prison because there is a female in his life: his mother, his sister, his lover, whomever, will bring the kids. Women get very, very few visits and women struggle more with the issue of who really is going to take care of my kids. What if the grandmother is ill or can’t take care of them?
A woman once called, and she was talking about who could take her kids. She had very young infants and nobody in the family wanted to do it. It was about punishing her. That’s the way our society is. Men make mistakes, but somehow they’re still men. We definitely don’t want to punish them or we don’t hold them accountable. But the level of our rage or anger at women is much more profound. That goes back to the images of the “evil woman” and the “bad girl.” When a woman falls, she really falls.
I hear a couple of different things about the issues of drugs in women’s lives, particularly in Black women’s lives. A lot of women are involved with drugs because they are involved with a man who’s involved with drugs. He’s either selling it out of the house, or she’s being in a sense a “mule” for him by carrying and delivering packages. Sometimes it starts like that. Sometimes women are trying to medicate themselves against the pain of this world. I mean, in terms of society, I’m educated, and some days I want to get away from it, to escape from it. I don’t have anybody I have to care for but me; no children or spouse. Some days I find life to be overwhelming. What if I had a couple of kids that I was caring for?
What I’m saying is I don’t justify it, I understand it. I understand that we live in a society that basically is woman-hating, and also, in many ways, threatened by people of color. It becomes very difficult to negotiate your way in the world. And when the world has also said, “I don’t care what you do, you have no place …” I think all of the realities of that are very, very painful. That doesn’t excuse what the women have done, not in any way, because I think ultimately each of us has to be accountable for our own life and how we live in the world.
I remember when I represented a man on death row. One of my clients said, you know, “The first time I ever thought about my future was once I got here.” I mean, locked up, waiting to be executed. Hello! In some ways, life is so fast that there isn’t a chance to think about what could the future look like? How could it be different? As we have these kids write their autobiography, we tell them to “write whatever ending you want.” What I found to be real for some of them, and some of their mothers too, and even the grandmothers, is that the ending that they see is very, very bleak.
Yes, it’s hard to parent in prison, not impossible, but it is difficult because there are so many issues. You’re locked up. There’s somebody else who is playing the primary caregiver role. How do you support that person, when your philosophy around parenting or discipline may be different? When your kids get older, as teens—and part of what adolescents do is challenge their parents and challenge the system—then what place does that put you in, because they could very easily say, “Why should I listen to anything you have to say? Look where you are?” All of those issues come up for women. One of the things that I’ve noticed over the years—and a lot of people don’t agree with me on this, but I really feel strongly about it—I feel that when a woman comes out, she should not be with her children for the first six months. That’s my personal opinion.
She gets out of prison with a bus ticket and twenty-five dollars, and she has to find a job. She has to report to parole. In an institution everything is structured. You’re told when to get up, when to go to sleep, when to go to work, when to eat. So now, a woman is out and she has to reconstruct her life. I think that kids deserve and that mothers want to give their kids their best self. And I think there ought to be some way for us to support the creation, or re-creation of the best self. Sometimes when women get out, the next day they’re at their mom’s house and they’re all living together. She’s trying to find a job, and she’s trying to interact with the kids. I think the best self doesn’t have a chance to come forth.
The women told us they want this—we just don’t have the money for it—it is counseling when they come out, for them and the kids and the grandmother. I think in that six months that kind of intensive stuff ought to go on. Women ought to be helped with getting a job. There ought to be a family plan to be developed, a family mission statement. All of those kinds of things need to happen in that time frame. I think women need to see and spend time with their kids, but I fundamentally think they need to see and spend time with themselves. It is hard in this world, whether you are locked up or free, to see and spend time with yourself. That’s what I think needs to happen.
Prison is antifamily, and it doesn’t have to be. I understand the issues around safety, security, and custody. I also acknowledge that being a correctional official, and a guard, and all of that are difficult jobs. I understand all of that. But I do believe that as bright as we are as a society, we ought to be able to find a way to hold people accountable, but work towards their restoration as a human being, the dignity of the human spirit, and a reconciliation with the community, where they have to live. Until we figure all of that out, I think things are going to be more and more screwed up.