FOURTEEN

REDEMPTION BABY

I knew when I got out I had to have some sort of symbol of hope—some sign that things were going to change, that my life would be better. So, when I got pregnant I knew, I was a redemption mama and this would be my redemption baby.

—ROSA LUCERO

In the beginning of winter, there is joyful news. Denise gives birth to a healthy baby girl, Elizabeth. Three months later, she’s in my office, showing me an iPhone full of baby photos. Her eyes fill with tears.

“I never believed I could love anyone so much. It hurts me, how much I love her.”

I just nod and reach out to squeeze her arm. “G-ma, I just can’t tell you how I feel . . .”

Denise has long called me G-ma—godmother. It’s the sweetest acknowledgment of both my caring and the power differential in our relationship. Today, she’s eager to tell me about the baby, the changes she’s experiencing, and how it’s all affecting her husband, Leroy. I know Denise has been married for several years, even though she rarely talks about Leroy. Today is different—she opens up. Leroy loves Elizabeth, but it’s hard for him to understand how Denise is feeling. She isn’t paying attention to him—the baby is everything. Her hormones are bouncing all over the place, and right now she’s wondering if she can take care of Elizabeth and go to graduate school at the same time. Admissions decision letters will be out in a month, and she’s worried UCLA will reject her. She’s also worried UCLA will accept her. I try to reassure her, telling her to wait until she receives the letter and then make plans.

“In the meantime, just enjoy being with Elizabeth.”

A few days later, after texting me even more photos, Denise adds her thoughts. Sometimes, it’s easier for Denise to text what she’s feeling than to express it in person. She’s not alone in this. Over the years, women have texted me deeply personal messages. Often, it’s something that’s happened that they’re too ashamed or too afraid to talk about face-to-face. They want me to know what’s been going on, but they’re worried how I’ll react. “It’s easier to have courage on a text,” Denise begins. “After Elizabeth was born, I got to thinking about everything. There’s lots of stuff going on inside of me. I seem to uncover more damage in my life than I originally anticipated. The revelation/epiphany has been forcing me to enlarge my circle. I guess you need to know—and tell everybody—the struggle to heal is real.”

I text back that I’m here for her if she needs me. I don’t want to text that I understand—there’s no way I can truly understand. I don’t know what it’s like to have experienced trauma, substance abuse, and the wounds of incarceration. Anyone who says they do without having experienced it is a liar. Still, I want to bear witness to her struggle and make sure her words are heard.

“I love Elizabeth so much but when I consider the possibility of inadvertently subjecting my daughter to the same situation because I lack the tools to protect her if the situation arose is more devastating than I can articulate. Now I’m trying to be honest. Write that in your book . . . Jorja.”

Elizabeth is the center of Denise’s world. She’s also a symbol of hope for her. While this is Denise’s first baby, she shares a feeling that many women who’ve given birth post-incarceration have expressed: a baby is a sign that a new life is starting for them as well. This is part of the reason many women have a child after incarceration, irrespective of how many children they already have. The new child is a sign of their hope for a new life. Nita, who had two children after serving seven years in state prison, told me, “These are the babies I want to raise without children’s services.”

Whatever their ages or birth order, children play a critical role in the lives of system-involved women. Overall, research has shown that being separated from their children is one of the greatest “stressors” that women who are incarcerated experience. As if we needed research to tell us what we already know. However, there are two sides to this coin: family reunification is also a crucial motivator for women to get out of prison and put their lives back together.

The desire to reunite with her children created the turning point in Rosa’s life. Although she struggled with trauma from being trafficked and being abused and then the work of recovering from substance abuse, there was no question that she’d ever go back to the rage and destruction she’d been caught up in. That life was over and she was focused on the future. But she faced a new struggle: with child welfare services.

“You’ve got no idea how crazy the system is. I knew that to get my kids back I was going to have to be more than a good mother; I was going to have to be a perfect mother,” Rosa explained, her voice urgent as she recalled what it took to reunite with her two sons and her daughter. Because of her drug use, she’d cycled in and out of jail multiple times. In the end, the fallout from the revolving door of lockup was more devastating than incarceration itself. What nearly shattered Rosa was her fight with the Department of Children and Family Services. “You know how Trump keeps saying the system is rigged? I wanna tell someone DCFS is rigged—and it’s rigged against mothers who’ve been locked up. I know lots of mothers who do worse things to their kids than I did and nothing happens to them. Because they haven’t been locked up.”

I knew a lot of those mothers too, and many of them struggled with substance abuse for years. It was impossible to believe they escaped unscathed. But Rosa was right: incarceration added an additional and often insurmountable burden to mothers trying to reconnect with and regain custody of their children. The chances a mother would actually succeed depended on where the children lived while she was locked up, what kind of relationship she experienced with them while she was in jail or prison, and what resources were available once she was released.¹ The social justice activist Renny Golden offered this sadly realistic description of the dilemmas that women face as they fight to reunite with their children as part of reentry:

How can a mother without a work history or a home previous to incarceration immediately find a job when she may lack a permanent address, has most likely not been in a drug rehab program in prison, and must negotiate reuniting with children who are troubled, angry or withdrawn? Finally, if she finds work, how can she possibly afford day care, rent and food on an $8 per hour job?²

Rosa’s life was a case study of the frustrations and inequities of the child welfare system. It was also a case study in strength and determination. First, she concentrated on her own drug rehab and recovery. When she was released, clean and sober after finishing rehab, her first call was to DCFS to find out how she could visit her children and, more importantly, how she could get them back. But what was about to happen added a new chapter in the criminalization of trauma. Rosa’s drug abuse could be traced in a straight line to the trauma of being sexually trafficked; now she was experiencing further trauma, courtesy of the child welfare system. It was all in the name of family reunification.

Family reunification is the “key goal” of child welfare agencies throughout the United States. It starts with the idea that if children are at risk, usually because of neglect or abuse, they should be temporarily removed from their families to ensure their safety. When they are, government agencies, like DCFS, are supposed to work with the parents to address the problems that brought the family to the attention of the child welfare system in the first place. Ideally, they work together to build family strengths so that children can eventually go back home. As part of this process, family reunification means that parents, usually mothers, are expected to fulfill various court-mandated expectations: being drug-free, attending parenting classes, having a job, providing a place to live. It all sounds like a great idea—in theory. For some families, the requirements are smoothly fulfilled: parenting courses are completed, counseling is ongoing, and children go back home. But this isn’t so easy for the women who describe this process to me—in fact, the requirements often prove to be completely unattainable. The deadline for fulfilling these requirements adds even more pressure to the mothers who long to have their children return to them. As the criminal justice scholar Suzanne Godboldt puts it so aptly, these women are literally “racing against the clock” to obtain employment and housing before their parental rights are automatically terminated.³ Formerly incarcerated women already have their hands full with more problems than child welfare can even track. They have probation officers on their backs, they have restitution to pay, they have to fight stigma on a daily basis. And on top of all that, here is yet another set of obstacles.

In addition, women have to make their peace with the people their children have been living with once they are placed in foster care. The child welfare default is “kinship care”—ideally, children are sent to relatives while parents get their lives together. “Ideally” is the key word here because there are problems with kinship care out of the gate. Often, extended family and relatives are part of a multigenerational pattern of neglect and abuse. The last people Rosa wanted taking care of her children were her mother and stepfather—they’d trafficked her! In her case, kinship care was out of the question, and so DCFS went to its next option: foster care, with strangers, in a system whose quality is, at best, inconsistent. There are tremendous foster parents who love children. One of my former students, Heather Fier, and her husband, Joe, had been foster parents to a baby girl for over a year. They were both happy and heartbroken when she was reunited with her birth mother and have remained in touch with the child. But not everyone is like Heather and Joe. Many foster parents “provide” only minimal shelter and food, as Clara Vasquez experienced when forced to live in her foster home’s backyard.

Although the extremes of Clara’s childhood were unique, the very mention of foster care frightens so many incarcerated women, with justification. It’s not just the anxiety of where their children will live—women are terrified they’ll lose their children forever. Half the states in the US have legislation that allows for the termination of parental rights if the parent with custody—usually the mother—is incarcerated.⁴ Beyond this, even the foster-care placement system is gendered: 11 percent of the children of incarcerated mothers are placed in foster care, in contrast to only 2 percent of the children of incarcerated fathers.⁵

Rosa wouldn’t allow herself to even think about losing her children. She was confronting enough of what social workers called “challenges.” Rosa’s three children were split up between foster homes, which made reunification even more difficult. But she was dedicated to doing what she had to—she wanted her children back. Just as she was beginning to work with her DCFS case manager on a family reunification plan, she discovered that she was pregnant.

“You would think this was a bad thing,” she told me, “but it wasn’t. I knew this was the start of a new life for me. This was my redemption baby. It was a sign I was going to get my kids back.”

As I listened to Rosa, I wondered if she’d considered abortion. In California, it would have been available and affordable, even free for someone in her circumstances.⁶ Across the country, a survey of the availability and cost of abortion presents a mixed picture. In sixteen states, including California, New York, and even Montana, public funding covers all or most medically necessary abortions. California requires insurance providers, including public insurance options, to cover abortion costs, regardless of medical necessity.⁷ Other states, including most southern states and some in the American West, have restrictions in place that severely limit the availability of abortions, even if they remain legal nationally. For example, thirty-eight states require a licensed physician to perform an abortion, even though studies demonstrate that first-trimester abortions are equally safe when nurses, physician assistants, and midwives perform them.⁸ Eighteen states require a woman to be counseled about the fetus’s ability to feel pain, a purported link between abortions and breast cancer, and the long-term mental health consequences of an abortion before she is able to obtain an abortion.⁹ Twenty-five states require women seeking abortions to wait twenty-four hours between counseling and the abortion.¹⁰ All of these laws, whether states have just one or a combination of them, create additional barriers for women seeking abortions. These laws also exacerbate already unequal access to medical care, alongside the historical discrimination that the healthcare system has inflicted upon poor women, women of color, and especially Black women (across all socioeconomic levels) and women—overrepresented in each of these categories—who’ve been incarcerated.¹¹

The vast majority of the formerly incarcerated women I met with were adamantly pro-choice; several had described times in their lives when they’d chosen to have an abortion. But a handful were clear that they could never have an abortion—even though they believed in a woman’s right to choose. Their ability to hold these two ideas was true for both Black women and women of color who’d been incarcerated. Only three out of all the women I interviewed were anti-abortion, telling me it was a sin and explaining that their pro-life beliefs were forged out of faith they’d discovered while in prison. One woman told me she’d had an abortion before finding God, adding, “I know she understands and forgives me.”

Rosa later told me she’d never considered an abortion. She was overjoyed about having this baby. But balancing pregnancy and reunification wasn’t going to be easy, and DCFS had a long “to-do” list for Rosa. She applied for Section 8 subsidized housing and also put her name on the list for a unit in a public housing development, aware that she could wind up living anywhere in Los Angeles County. She attended counseling religiously and submitted to random drug testing, carefully peeing into the cup her PO provided. The bright spot in her week was the supervised visits with her children. This was what she lived for.

And she went back to work at Homeboy Industries. There were delays in her case while she waited for government-subsidized housing to kick in. At Homeboy, she was happy to be part of a community. “I give thanks to Father Greg and Homeboy Industries every day of my life,” Rosa told me. She never worked as a waitress at the Homegirl Café, instead settling into administrative work within the main program. It was there she began to find her voice. “I got to know people who were just genuine, like Marissa.” Marissa Gillette was the curriculum director at Homeboy Industries, but, like all of the senior staff, she was much more than that. My ongoing research showed that the secret to Homeboy’s success went far beyond the job training that was part of the “Industries” in its name. HBI’s impact was largely due to the staff, who built deep relationships with the homies and homegirls, creating a community of kinship with everyone who walked through their doors. “Marissa broke down that wall. I would tell her, ‘Leave me the fuck alone; this is too much.’” Understanding her mistrust, Marissa would tell Rosa how much she valued her, how much she loved her. When Rosa would ask, “How can you love me?” Marissa would tell her how much strength she had, how gifted she was, and what incredible qualities she saw in her.

Marissa wasn’t just talking. Rosa definitely possessed great strength and resilience to deal with the overwhelming process of family reunification. Trying to meet the expectations and confront the bureaucracy of the child welfare system is in and of itself a full-time job. It took nearly a year and a half, but Rosa succeeded and was reunited with all three of her children, after welcoming her fourth child, Isabel, her redemption baby, into the world. Together, they made up a family: her eldest son, Arturo, was now twelve years old; her daughter Pahola was nine; and her son Daniel was seven; all three adored their new little sister.

Still, Rosa knew it would take a long time before both she and her family healed from the wounds of her incarceration. In 2018, the US Department of Health and Human Services reported that children whose parents have been incarcerated are at “increased risk of mental health conditions, including anxiety and depression. In adulthood, they have higher rates of asthma, migraines, high cholesterol, and HIV/AIDS, and are more likely to use illicit or prescription drugs.” The same report revealed that incarceration had an equally dire economic impact—adolescent boys with incarcerated mothers “are 35% more likely to drop out of school, and have a higher chance of ending up incarcerated themselves.”¹²

Ironically, although the child welfare system poses all sorts of legal and institutional obstacles, the biggest obstacle women who’ve been incarcerated face is rebuilding their relationships with the children they’ve been separated from, often for many years. Their substance abuse issues, their crimes, and their incarceration have all cost them precious time with their children. And the pain and loss those children have endured are difficult to repair.

No child responds the same way to the loss of their mother. But for every child, rage and desire exist side by side. Children blame their mother for what happened, but they long to see her again. This is what Adela faced. Although she never had to contend with children’s services, Adela had to confront enduring problems with both her children that began the moment she was arrested.

Adela still remembers the trauma of her arrest. It was a morning like any other. After telling her son, Joshua, and her daughter, Julia, to hurry up and get their lunches so she could drive them to school before she went to work, she walked out to her car. “I would go warm up the car and wait for them. They’d gather up their things, and they knew: the last one closes the door. It was December, it was cold, my car had ice and snow on it. The next thing you know, I see DEA, FBI—everybody surrounded me. I asked them, ‘What are you guys doing?’ They read me my rights. I kept saying, ‘I haven’t done anything.’ They had guns to my head, they had guns on my children. I begged them, ‘Please don’t point guns at my children.’” As she tells me this story, nearly fifteen years after it happened, Adela’s eyes fill with tears and her voice starts to shake. “I was angry because of the way they had treated my children—like criminals. I asked them what were they doing. I couldn’t believe it.”

After she was sentenced to two years of incarceration, the judge gave Adela three weeks to make plans for her children before surrendering herself to the federal penitentiary. She decided that her son, Joshua, who was thirteen, would live with her sister who had two sons; he’d fit in there. She made different plans for Julia, seven years old at the time. Her father, Lefty, had convinced Adela that their daughter should stay with his mother. When the time came to explain what was happening, Adela told Joshua the truth about her sentence but lied to Julia, saying she was going to a camp for dental assistants. “She asked how long I’d be gone, and I said two years. She said, ‘That’s a long time to go to camp.’”

These memories still hurt Adela. “After I came home, my daughter told me that she looked out the window and saw me walk away; she watched me get into the car to go to prison. Her grandma came into the room and asked, ‘What did your mom tell you?’ Julia said, ‘She told me she’s going to a dental camp.’ Then her grandma said, ‘Your mom lied to you. She’s going to prison.’ Julia couldn’t believe it. Why was her mom going to prison? Her dad was already in prison—she’d grown up hearing that her dad’s in prison because he’s a bad man. Now her mom is going to prison—how could her mom do bad?”

Adela was furious at Lefty’s mother. “It was my place to tell Julia, and I wasn’t ready to let her know. She had looked at me like her hero.” Still, her grandmother also tried to help Julia, taking her to church and to a pastoral counselor. In the meantime, Adela didn’t want her children to see her locked up. This was easily accomplished since the prison was far away, in Dublin, six hours from where the children were living.

Despite her deep emotional pain, Adela adjusted to prison. “I made up my mind . . . I was getting out and I would never be back in that situation again.” Listening to Adela’s story, I knew that her real struggle would begin once her incarceration ended.

After serving her sentence, then being released from the halfway house, Adela went to her sister’s. Both Celia and her husband, Sam, were willing to make Adela and her children part of the household. Adela knew she was lucky—very few incarcerated women find family who can offer financial and emotional assistance for any length of time. But even with her sister’s support, there were problems almost immediately.

“It was a difficult transition.” Adela shook her head as she said this. “It was hard because I didn’t feel like I knew how to be a mother. . . . How am I going to tell them not to do things, when I felt like I was going to be judged all the way around—because they were hurt. I tried to make the best of it. Then, they started becoming rebellious toward me. I think Julia was nine and Joshua was fifteen or sixteen. At those ages, I felt like how am I going to do this? I didn’t know how to talk to them. It was getting worse and worse as they were becoming more and more rebellious. One day, I said, ‘I’m done trying to kiss you guys’ ass. I know I’m far away from perfect—I committed a crime and I paid for it. I don’t feel like I’ve got to pay you guys for it too. I think we should start clean, like fresh from the beginning. It’s overwhelming me emotionally because I don’t know what else to tell you two. I don’t know how else to be a mother. You either want to be with me or you don’t want to be with me. We lost each other once. We gotta work on it.’ Once I had the conversation, things started to be better for a minute. Then other things started happening.”

Adela faced unique issues with each child. Her son was in high school by this time, and he’d started smoking weed. Her daughter was ditching school. Adela felt sadness. “I was losing control, and I didn’t know what to do as a mother anymore. I’m not going to beat them—what do I do?” All the responsibility for the kids was on her shoulders. She’d contacted each of her ex-husbands, Sleepy and Lefty, who were both still incarcerated, and told them she was out, that the kids would be fine. “I felt like I’d been through the same thing they felt each day, being in prison, worrying about my kids. I wanted them to feel better and not worry too much. They both thought, ‘Now mom is home, she’s got this.’ Too bad it wasn’t true.”

Adela worried that Joshua really needed his father. Her son’s dope smoking persisted until he wound up in a hospital ER after having a series of seizures. The doctors warned that he’d suffer more seizures if he continued to smoke dope. Joshua said he’d quit, but Adela feared marijuana would be a gateway drug to “something stronger.”

Their relationship continued to be troubled, and Adela suggested they go to counseling. Even though they went several times, Joshua felt uncomfortable sharing his feelings with a stranger. “I told him that’s okay, and we stopped. It’s been hard for Joshua. We’re not as close as I am with Julia. I don’t know if it’s because he’s a boy.” It’s difficult for Adela to talk about her son; her voice drops, her speech becomes halting. But despite her pain—or maybe because of it—her son has grown into a good man, avoiding any kind of trouble. He explained to Adela that he loved her, that she was strong compared to her brothers, who were stupid. They were in and out of prison, and, he said, he “didn’t want to go down the same pathway.”

When she became a teenager, Julia posed much more of a challenge for Adela because, as she explained, “I see myself in her.” The problems in the mother-daughter relationship really became apparent when the family moved from her sister’s house forty miles back to LA. Adela was working full-time at Homegirl. “That’s when her rebellion started. She started wearing dark lipstick, she was goth, she started to dress different.” Julia would promise to bake cookies for Adela, then ask what time she’d be home. “If I told her six, she would get there about five thirty. Pretty soon, I caught on to it.” At Homegirl, Adela told Erika she had to leave early so she could spy on Julia. Hiding in wait, what she saw shocked her. “She was dressed like a little cholita, wearing clothes I’d never seen.” Adela followed Julia into a liquor store and confronted her. “I said, ‘Damn what kind of weed is that? You guys smell strong.’ Her friend was like, ‘Oh shoot!’ I told Julia, ‘Say goodbye to your friend—you’re never going to see her again.’ She said, ‘You can’t do this to me,’ and I said, ‘Oh yeah? Just watch me.’”

The next day, Adela met with the school principal and Julia’s guidance counselor. She learned that Julia had been ditching class and getting into fights. “She was out of control.” Even though they hadn’t always gotten along, Adela called Lefty’s mother and told her what was happening. She immediately said, “Bring her now.” Adela didn’t waste any time, driving Julia to her grandmother’s “with only the clothes on her back.” Adela laughs as she remembers. “She told me, ‘I hate you! I hate you!’ and I said, ‘You’re gonna hate me right now but you’re gonna love me tomorrow.’ I told Erika I needed some time off—I was taking Julia to another school. Everyone at Homegirl was so supportive.”

Adela started spending more time with Julia; they went to counseling together. “I felt like I had to make up for those lost years—all the time I was locked up and I wished I was with my daughter.” Adela’s words are sadly familiar. Many mothers lament the years with family they can never make up—and every one of them described to me their fears and worries over how their incarceration would affect their children in the long term.

Meanwhile, the number of children affected by women’s incarceration grows every year.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 80 percent of the women locked up in local jails are mothers. In one calendar year, jails will separate 2.3 million mothers from their children.¹³ The Sentencing Project has reported that in the US, the number of children with a parent in prison increased 80 percent in the sixteen years from 1991 to 2007. These separations have serious long-term consequences for families. It has long been believed that it would be better for mothers, families, and communities if there were community-based alternatives to incarceration—but where are these? Along with this deficit, there are very few reentry programs like ANWOL, that allow women to live with their children.

In the midst of my latest round of interviews focusing on mothers and their children, my phone started ringing. It was Susan Burton, telling me we were going to New York to sit down with formerly incarcerated women on the East Coast and talk about their experiences. Along with that, there were some programs she wanted to visit, and she’d be speaking about her memoir at a bookstore and meeting with several foundations. I was exhausted just listening to her, yet I also knew she was constantly developing new ideas, searching for ways to help while she advocated for incarcerated women everywhere.

Six weeks later, in New York, our first stop was Hope House, a transitional home in the Bronx modeled after ANWOL. Susan believed so deeply in this effort that she’d actually given part of her savings to the founders of Hope House, Topeka Sam and Vanee Sykes, to set up this small, immaculate townhouse offering housing and programs for five women at a time. From its founding in 2017, Hope House had progressed, offering a clear-cut example of how the ANWOL model could be replicated in other cities. This was Susan’s plan: to create a model for reentry homes that could be replicated all over the country. What she was putting together may have looked obvious, yet it was brilliant. I couldn’t believe she was the first one to do this. But she was, and it was to have far-reaching implications for formerly incarcerated women—something I would soon discover as I traveled alongside Susan, literally and figuratively.

I spent a lively afternoon with Vanee, learning how she and Topeka met while incarcerated at Danbury Federal Prison and put together their plan to open a reentry home for women. Tragically, two years later, Vanee would die of Covid-19, but not before Hope House and her work with Topeka was well on its way.

Our time at Hope House was a prelude to our visit the next day to Hour Children, the well-known women’s reentry program based in Queens.¹⁴ The program’s several buildings were located in the center of Long Island City, a blue-collar community filled with fast-food restaurants, auto repair centers, and small bodegas. It was four miles and a world away from Manhattan. I could see smoke stacks and frame houses next door to pizza joints. In the midst of a working-class neighborhood, Hour Children appeared to have a handle on how to support women and their children as they struggled to heal from the impact of incarceration. It also had an approach that was completely different from anything I’d experienced in my efforts to understand the world of formerly incarcerated women.

The minute we walked in, I felt at home—there were children everywhere. The materials on display in their main office told the whole story. A poster with a mission statement proclaimed, “With most reentry programs focused on men, Hour Children provides valuable services to women and their children, helping them to reunite and establish stable lives and a future filled with hope.” There were additional placards explaining, “Our mission is to help incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women and their children successfully rejoin the community, reunify with their families and build healthy, independent and secure lives.” This was a mission statement that was clear and all-encompassing and promised a lot more than referrals and monitoring.

Hour Children traced its history back to the groundbreaking work of Sister Elaine Roulet, a Roman Catholic nun who devoted her life to serving mothers during and after incarceration. Her basic belief still stands as a guide to enlightened public policy for incarcerated women: that women should have consistent visits with their children along with receiving parenting lessons to end the cycle of familial trauma. Although this seems like such a simple idea, the activities involved in putting that belief into practice have been nothing short of radical. Sister Elaine was the guiding force behind the Children’s Center at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York, which because of her efforts ultimately became a place where mothers could live with their newborns and play with their older children instead of “visiting” through glass.

This innovative work all began as a result of the partnership between Sister Elaine and Elaine Lord, the superintendent at Bedford Hills. Their first step was creating a program that allowed mothers to live with their babies for the first year to eighteen months of their lives, a critical period in terms of infant attachment. Hour Children runs a residential nursery at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where infants and mothers can stay together. Women are expected to stick to their mandated prison program, so during the day, while the mothers work or attend classes, their infants are cared for by Hour Children employees and other incarcerated women, who staff the Child Development Center.

But a dilemma remained: while infants can stay with their mothers, what about older children? So many are lost, living with relatives or placed in foster care in homes that don’t understand their deep need to connect with their incarcerated mothers. In 1986, Sister Elaine put what was termed “an open request” to the Catholic community for help.

Sister Tesa Fitzgerald answered the call. Along with four other members of her order, she set up a small home in Long Island City to care for children whose mothers were incarcerated at Bedford Hills. Once the first group of children was in residence, the staff, led by Sister Tesa, brought them to visit their mothers in prison. This activity had an unexpected consequence: in conversations with the incarcerated women, Sister Tesa soon understood that these mothers wanted desperately to reunite with their children once they were released, yet all too often they lacked the supports and the resources to do so. It was the familiar list of needs: housing, job training, counseling, help with parenting. Six years later, in 1992, Hour Children was founded to help these women and their children “reunite, stabilize and transform their lives.” This meant providing transitional and permanent housing, job training, and job placement. Most significantly, the Hour Women program focused on women pursuing careers, not just low-wage jobs. The program’s success in these efforts was notable; women were able to walk into careers as head chefs, dental technicians, computer programmers, and paralegal professionals.

This was a fresh approach to helping women negotiate life after incarceration, with potentially far-reaching impact. Most agencies and organizations, from halfway houses to the Homegirl Café to ANWOL, focused on the issue of employment. Their emphasis was on getting formerly incarcerated women jobs—the higher the pay, the better. Homeboy Industries had multiple individuals working full-time on work-force development and job training. Formerly incarcerated women signed up for the Homeboy businesses, and their training very often led to long-term employment in the outside world, but this was not a career. Shayna Welcher had come face-to-face with this dilemma once she left the Homegirl Café and went to work in a popular LA restaurant, where she’d interned for six months. A year later, during an economic downturn, the restaurant went out of business, and Shayna struggled to find another job. The importance of these job placement efforts was clear—women had to satisfy their probation officers and children’s services agencies: their focus was on making a living and getting their children back, not starting out on a career.¹⁵ The difference with Hour Children was how it stressed that women didn’t need to sacrifice meaningful work to meet administrative and economic demands. In fact, according to the career-placement staff, emphasizing careers, rather than just jobs, helped women and their children much more in the long run, allowing them to avoid low-wage jobs that would lead to the long-term pressures experienced by the working poor.

Hour Children is committed to making sure that women receive the support they need to “plan for their professional future, which includes setting expectations and developing a set of attainable goals.” Their staff engage in “one-on-one education and career planning.” Additionally, the organization secures mentors who provide guidance and support for women, helping them “to develop as working professionals.” These services, all reinforcing the goal of career development, offered something different and significant—which really was the identity of Hour Children.

I’d wondered where this incredible organization got its name and kept checking if I even had it right—was it “our” children? I was reassured that it was “hour” and learned that the name referred to the many pivotal hours in a child’s life: the moment of the mother’s arrest, the time allowed for visits, the time of the mother’s release. These moments formed the vision of Hour Children and gave it its structure: it made sure children were taken to visit their incarcerated mothers, and it provided programming for incarcerated mothers and support for children and teenagers waiting for their mothers to return. Once women came home, there were apartments and small houses where a mother and her children could live comfortably, cooking meals for the family with food obtained from the agency’s food pantry. This food pantry was another testimony to Hour Children’s effectiveness and its innovative approach. In keeping with the culture of the organization, the food pantry emphasized safety and dignity. When a staff member told Susan and me that she’d be taking us to visit the food pantry, I’d expected to see a small back room stocked with canned goods. Instead, we entered a building the size of a Trader Joe’s, with a large inventory of healthy and nutritious food and home products. It had, in fact, more to offer than a Trader Joe’s, and if you told me I was viewing a local gourmet market, I wouldn’t have blinked.

The food pantry was initially created to “address hunger and health-related issues” that impact formerly incarcerated women and their children, along with the low-income families in the surrounding Long Island City community. But the pantry also helped to connect the women and families it serves with the surrounding community. Today, these efforts are reinforced through educational workshops, cooking demonstrations, and partnerships to extend resources. The Hour Children food pantry also works with Visiting Nursing Services of New York and the Food Bank for New York City, ensuring that women, their families, and nearby residents can seek out resources and services to help sustain their lives. Food and hunger are long-term problems in Long Island City for many seniors, the homeless, and all those confronting the deprivations that accompany chronic poverty. Hour Children’s business model doesn’t see those problems and the needs they create as a reason to deprive individuals of healthy food. The supermarket-style “business” is staffed by volunteers and draws upon donations for funding. It offers fresh organic vegetables and fruits, meat and fresh fish, dairy products, canned goods, pasta, rice, whole grains, granola, and healthy cereal—all consistent with cultural tastes and preferences.

However, there are no cash registers: everything is free. Hour Children reported that annually almost ten thousand people shopped at their sites. Those astonishing numbers and the use of the plural are correct. Their services have expanded to all five New York boroughs, connecting formerly incarcerated women to the outside world, as well as building the health and capacities of the communities around them. Shoppers come from surrounding neighborhoods. There’s no admission requirement—it’s accepted that only needy individuals shop at the food pantry.

Although Susan and I were visiting their main site, Hour Children has bases in several communities throughout Queens where, every year, it provides housing to almost two hundred families. There are six “communal” homes where women live with their children. At these homes, women are helped in finding career-track work and, ultimately, moving on to permanent affordable housing—also obtained through Hour Children. There is therapy, case management, and ongoing support to help navigate the challenges of the child welfare system and the process of family reunification. Finally, just as at ANWOL, there is no expiration date for help. This means that mothers and their children are given all the time they need to heal and adjust, each woman receiving housing and services specifically tailored to her needs and the needs of her children.

Susan and I sat with Sister Tesa in her cluttered office while she called different women in and introduced us, explaining how each plays a vital role in the program’s functioning. Her staff is deeply committed, as well as being multiracial, multicultural, and multitalented. Sister Tesa also explained that the Children’s Center, founded by Sister Elaine Roulet, continues to function. I found the details of all this work—once again—to be new and completely different. I should have gotten used to the fact that Hour Children consistently challenged the usual ways of working with currently and formerly incarcerated women. There has been so much research on the importance of the bonds between incarcerated women and their children. Hour Children figured out and has sustained so many ways of fostering this critical attachment.

In addition to the ongoing activities of the Children’s Center, during the summer, Hour Children supervises eighty children who spend a week visiting with their mothers at both the Bedford Hills and Taconic Correctional Facilities. These children live throughout the state of New York and sometimes even in neighboring states, but that’s not viewed as an obstacle to keeping them connected to their mothers. Hour Children provides transportation for every single child, picking them up wherever they might live and bringing them to each of the prisons. The children spend time with their mothers during the day; once visiting hours end, the children stay with local families who serve as their “hosts.” These host families are an integral part of the summer program, acting as “the glue that holds this program together, year after year.” All host families are volunteers, and some welcome children into their homes both during the summer and over school breaks and holiday weekends.

The results of all these efforts to keep children actively involved with their incarcerated mothers have been significant: Hour Children reports that women in their programs were six times less likely to return to prison; their recidivism rate within three years was less than 5 percent. Every program Hour Children creates drives toward their goal of increasing women’s chances for success once they exit jail or prison. Integral to that success is supporting and building mothers’ relationships with their children. I wondered what it would have been like for Clara to have stayed connected to her children and how much pain she and so many others would have been spared.

At the end of the day, sitting in Sister Tesa’s office, I listened to her plans to expand the program and to continue to help women confront the endless demands of public bureaucracy. The work was frustrating: keeping families together served everyone’s interests, but government policies and child welfare services kept placing obstacles in the way of women, while Hour Children wanted to give them support and resources, to help them to heal and succeed. After our meeting, when we walked out into the late-afternoon sunshine, Susan looked back at the building and quietly observed, “Every woman who’s been locked up deserves this. They just need a chance—to be with their children and start a new life.”