She Fills Home and Heart With Inmates’ Babies

Since a few days after his birth, Petey Stephens has had two mothers. One cares for Petey in her home on a northwest Riverside County dairy farm. The other waits for him to visit her each week at the medium-security state prison nearby in Norco.

As Frieda Weststeyn holds young Petey’s hand, they walk through a metal detector and wait for the mechanical gate to roll open in front of them.

Together, they climb the concrete steps up a steep, green hill to the visiting area at the California Rehabilitation Center and wait for Sherry Stephens, a convicted armed robber, to join them.

Petey--about 15 months old, blond and slight--called out a loud “Hi!” when he caught sight of his mother the other day. Several inmates and visitors looked up from the spare, Formica-topped tables, then resumed their subdued conversations.

A veteran of these Thursday evening visits, Petey knew to wait while a guard took Stephens into another room and quickly searched her.

A Bag of Tootsie Rolls

Then he ran over and led his mother back to the table where Weststeyn and her 11-year-old daughter, Yolanda, waited.

As Petey sat on the table--playing first with a purse full of quarters, then counting a bag of Tootsie Rolls with Yolanda--one mother brought the other up to date on her son’s growing vocabulary.

During the past year and a half, Weststeyn has been foster mother to 10 children--all born to inmates of the state’s two prisons for women--the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco and the California Institution for Women in Frontera. Both prisons are within four miles of the Weststeyn farm, where the family keeps about 1,000 cattle.

Weststeyn, 46, works outside the public social services system, connecting with expectant inmate mothers through word of mouth and communicating with them by letter. Often, Weststeyn doesn’t meet the mother face to face until the day she comes to the hospital to pick up her baby.

She accepts no pay for her work, but she does get milk and some other food through the state-administered, federally funded Women, Infants and Children Program. The babies’ medical expenses are covered by Medi-Cal.

Once a month or so, an anonymous donation--of $12 or $17 or $25--comes in the mail, Weststeyn said.

Weststeyn began visiting prisoners at the California Institution for Women about three years ago after hearing in church about a program that matches inmates with volunteer visitors.

“It’s only three minutes away from here,” Weststeyn recalled thinking. “There’s no reason I can’t spare a couple of hours a week and talk with those ladies that never have anybody to talk to.”

So she did. And during her visits to the prison, Weststeyn noticed a lot of pregnant inmates. “I said, ‘I wonder what they do with their babies?’ ”

Some of the babies would be tended by relatives, others taken to foster homes and some put up for adoption, Weststeyn learned from an inmate friend.

“Most of the women don’t like foster homes,” Weststeyn explained, “because they don’t see their children as often as they’d like--and sometimes they don’t see them at all.” She offered to do something about it.

The prisoner Weststeyn was visiting passed her name and address on to a pregnant friend, who began corresponding. A month later, Petey Stephens was born at Riverside General Hospital. And two weeks after that, he joined the Weststeyn household.

“It went so quickly by word of mouth,” Weststeyn said, “that within four months I had five babies.”

And a nickname. Around the California Institution for Women, she has become known as the Baby Lady.

“These people all needed help, and I didn’t turn away any of them,” Weststeyn said.

That got her in hot water last year with Riverside County social services officials, who allow her to care for only three foster children at a time. “They said no one could take care of five children under a year old,” Weststeyn said. “They don’t know me .”

Nowadays, though, she follows the rules and keeps it to three, so she doesn’t jeopardize her foster-care license, Weststeyn added.

Amber napped quietly in her crib until Laurie, just 1 month old, awakened to cry for her bottle from the adjacent crib.

Michelle Weststeyn and her friend Karrie Akers, both 14, their hair still damp from a dip in the swimming pool, carried the two babies to the sofa while Frieda Weststeyn put a plastic bottle in the microwave.

Weststeyn has made a career of caring for her own family, including four sons, four daughters and eight grandchildren. Her children still living at home range in age from 11 to 22.

“They say, ‘We didn’t volunteer for this, you did,’ ” Weststeyn said. “They don’t always like to (help care for the babies), but they are pretty good about it.”

And her husband, Pete, doesn’t mind the crowd of babies, “as long as I don’t ask him to baby-sit too much,” Weststeyn said. “He wouldn’t have them all in our bedroom if he did. . . . He loves children as much as I do.”

Petey played outside with two of Weststeyn’s granddaughters in the small yard between the kitchen and the cows. When Lori Ann, 18 months, got a little too rough, Petey pressed his face against the screen door and called for “Oma”--Dutch for grandma.

Petey was the first of 10 prisoners’ babies that Weststeyn has taken in. His mother expects to remain in prison until Petey is 2 1/2 years old.

“I live from Thursday to Thursday,” Stephens said of her son’s weekly visits. “If I didn’t have Thursdays, I wouldn’t hang in.”

When she was arrested for armed robbery, Stephens recalled, she was addicted to drugs and didn’t know she was pregnant. Her husband, a truck driver, already was taking care of their 9-year-old son, and her only other relative, a sister, “was not about to take” the baby.

Without Weststeyn, she said, Petey “would probably be in a foster home somewhere. And I probably wouldn’t know where he was. And I probably wouldn’t see him.”

Since Petey was born, Stephens’ good behavior has earned her a transfer to the lower-security prison in Norco. Ironically, that means her son’s visits come less frequently, because Weststeyn has to split her three weekly visits between the two prisons.

Although they live worlds apart, Stephens knows that Petey is bright, healthy--and nearby.

“I’m very thankful,” Stephens said, smiling across the visiting room table at Weststeyn. “There are a lot of women in prison that are pregnant and don’t have anyone.”

Prisoners’ fears about losing their children sometimes are justified, said Barbara Labitzke, foster home development coordinator for Orange County’s Social Services Agency and executive director of Southern Area Fostercare Effort, an eight-county coalition of social services officials.

Their agencies’ “primary responsibility is to look to the best interests of the child,” Labitzke said, so visitation during incarceration and custody after the inmates are released are “examined on a case-by-case basis.”

A history of violence or child abuse or neglect could lead to a decision to permanently separate children from their parents, she said, but “if family reunification is the goal, we do attempt to facilitate that with visitation” while a parent is imprisoned.

Public agencies will place inmates’ children in foster homes near the prisons, in their home counties, or with relatives, said Doe Cherry, deputy director of the Riverside County Department of Public Social Services.

“That’s the mother’s choice. If she wants the children placed close, we would work that out,” Cherry said.

Still, Stephens said while pushing Petey in a swing beside the Norco prison’s visiting room, “I wouldn’t do it again: I wouldn’t have a kid in prison. . . . I’m missing some very precious time with him.”

“I love babies,” Weststeyn said, sitting at her kitchen table with 5-month-old Amber in her lap. “And I think those women need help. They need to see that somebody on the outside still cares.”

Amber’s mother is serving a two-year sentence for robbery. Laurie’s mother is doing 16 months for burglary. And Ryan’s mother, who entrusted her newborn son to Weststeyn just last Tuesday, is serving 3 years and 8 months for arson.

Weststeyn bent her head and tickled Amber, who responded by opening her big brown eyes even wider. “And you can’t help it that your mommy’s in jail,” she told the baby.

In Frieda and Pete Weststeyn’s master bedroom--which looks a bit like the baby furniture aisle at Toys R Us--baby clothes, blankets and supplies occupy the shelves above a line of cribs. Photos of the many babies are hung on a crowded wall.

“They’re part of my family,” Weststeyn said. “They’re mine until they leave here.”

Petey, Amber and 2-week-old Ryan remain at the Weststeyn farm. Laurie went home with her father last week. Steven, Luana, Rita, Joshua and Erica are back with their mothers, “on the outside,” or in group homes for inmate mothers and their children. Melody fell victim to sudden infant death syndrome last December.

“I found her dead in her crib,” Weststeyn said, tears welling up in her eyes. “Little Melody. She was 6 months old.”

Weststeyn paused, concentrating on Amber’s face as she rocked the baby in her arms.

“I just took one look at her and I knew she was dead,” Weststeyn added, looking up again. “I had to go tell her mom on Sunday. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

“She’s out there (at the prisons) all the time,” said Rebecca Jurado, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California. “She comes out two times a day, sometimes, with two or three babies . . .”

Weststeyn “has become a one-woman crusade,” said Jurado, who represents women inmates in several lawsuits over care, conditions and programs in the state prisons.

One of those suits seeks to expand prisoners’ access to a program that allows them to live with their children while serving their sentences with other inmate mothers in community-based facilities.

At homes in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose, 32 mothers and 37 of their children are living together under the mother-infant care program, said Bob Gore, assistant director of the California Department of Corrections. Seventeen women are waiting for places in the program.

Within a month or two, 10 of those women should be accommodated at a new facility--called Fry House--opening in San Francisco, Gore said. And 15 more places will be available soon afterward in Oakland.

But advocates for the prisoners say this is not enough. They estimate that 500 or 600 prisoners with children under 7 years old may be eligible for the program, having probable release or parole dates within six years, and no record of child abuse or certain other crimes.

Their lawsuit, still pending in Sacramento County Superior Court, charges that the Department of Corrections has been illegally denying prisoners access to the program by failing to tell them about it, delaying their applications, and rejecting those applications for improper reasons.

Corrections officials deny the allegations, saying the program always has been open to any female prisoner who applies and qualifies. The problem, some say, is that they do not receive many applications.

The mother-infant program could help reduce the severe overcrowding that plagues the state prison system by placing more women outside the fences in less costly facilities. The California Institution for Women now holds 1,841 inmates, or 226% of its capacity. The women’s unit at the California Rehabilitation Center is at 165% capacity, with 827 prisoners, Gore said.

The primary goal of the program, though, is to keep families together both during and after incarceration. That’s also the result of Weststeyn’s efforts, Jurado said. “She’s basically opened her own mother-infant care program--unfortunately without the mother.

“She’s providing a very valuable service,” Jurado added. “I wish there were more like her.”