Removing Bars to Motherhood

Too often, staring at the blank ceiling of her prison cell, Linda Carrillo was struck numb by the bad mother blues.

Sentenced to two years in the Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla for driving 6 pounds of methamphetamine across state lines, she felt the sting of her predicament: Being locked up was punishment enough. But it was missing those small, important moments with her children that made her cry inside.

“I missed my baby’s first day at school,” said the 33-year-old Stockton native. “It hurts to have to call your sister to find out what your son wore to school, how cute he looked. But I wasn’t the only one doing time. My son was living without a mother. And so, in a way, he was in prison just like me.”

But now Carrillo is getting a second chance at being a responsible mother through a unique state prison program that has sparked interest among corrections officials nationwide. As part of the Community Prisoner Mother Program, she lives full time with her youngest child, a 5-month-old daughter named Crystal.

The converted apartment building in the low-income downtown area where Carrillo and a dozen others spend their days in counseling and practical mothering classes is one of seven community prisons in California, and one of perhaps a handful nationwide. Inmates serve out drug-related sentences there without sacrificing the fragile bond between mother and child.

Critics call the program too expensive and counterproductive to the goal of requiring lawless people--parents or not--to pay for their crimes. Advocates counter that such programs are a more compassionate way to treat a small portion of the 85,000 women serving time in state and federal prisons--11,000 of them in California--not to mention their 200,000 children.

California corrections officials say the live-in arrangement allows children to avoid foster homes and could bring long-term rewards by breaking the inter-generational cycle of crime and drug abuse that afflicts the families of incarcerated parents.

“When these single mothers go away to prison, nobody raises their children,” said Kimberly Harrell, a mother of five and former drug addict who now directs the Oakland facility. “When they’re gone, people might give their children a warm place to stay, but they don’t really raise them. That’s a mother’s job. And here we teach them to become real mothers, how to stay clean and really parent effectively.”

Other than a Massachusetts program where women inmates live with their newborns for the first 18 months, corrections experts say they know of no other arrangement nationwide that matches the Community Prisoner Mother Program. Under the program, mothers sentenced for nonviolent crimes can live for three years or more with children age 6 years or younger.

Unlike drug treatment centers in many communities, in which mothers care for their children, the facilities are bona fide prisons where an inmate’s activities are aggressively regulated. During the day, the doors are left unlocked and inmates are on the honor system. At night, most facilities have alarms and video cameras.

Although there are no cells or bars, the women know that if they walk away, they will be considered escapees and receive extra prison time if caught. Only one woman has ever walked away from the Oakland facility in 15 years. She was caught and returned to prison.

“These women belong to the state, and I’m their jailer,” said Harrell. “I don’t always like that fact, but we all know it’s true.”

State officials recently launched a sister effort in Santa Fe Springs, an alternative sentencing program called Family Foundations in which mothers report to a facility to live with their children--followed by a year of supervised parole--instead of being sent to state prison.

Women sentenced to traditional prisons must apply to enter the 15-year-old Community Prisoner Mother Program’s six facilities: two in Oakland and one each in Salinas, Norwalk, Pomona and Bakersfield.

Looking to start their own program, Oregon correctional officials in January will visit the Family Foundations Program’s Santa Fe Springs site. Next year, California officials plan to open two more Family Foundations facilities, including one in San Diego.

Officials say the 94 women in both programs are nonviolent offenders who committed crimes to support drug habits. Fewer than 1% of the 11,000 women currently serving time in California are eligible for the program, they say, because inmates must have been given minimum sentences involving nonviolent crimes to qualify and must have children under 6 years of age.

Prisoner rights advocates say most state correction departments consider the California programs too expensive. But although the $31,000 annual per-inmate cost of the mother-child arrangement is more than the $21,000 yearly cost of a traditional prison setting, advocates say there are cost savings in foster care and, ideally, in preventing repeat incarcerations.

“Both these programs should be used as nationwide models,” said Denise Johnston, director of the Pasadena-based Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents. “We’re doing ourselves a terrible disservice to split families up while parents are in prisons and then expect them to fold back together and be functional. That’s a misunderstanding on how families work.”

Inmate Annette Powell says her wild and misguided pre-prison days didn’t diminish her motherly instincts one bit. She recalled the pain of handing over her newborn to a police detective the day she was sent to prison for welfare fraud.

“I felt like dying,” she said, holding 15-month-old Olesea’a Brown. “I waited seven years to have my baby. Now I had to give her to a stranger.”

Powell and a dozen others share the ground floor of a converted apartment building that is part day care center and part halfway house. While older children attend nearby schools, younger ones play in on-site nurseries while their mothers attend anger management and cooking sessions. Longer-term residents even leave during the day for vocational classes.

Most days, the facility is awash in mother-child activity: Infants cry, toddlers run about. Mothers sit breast feeding or calling after young wards as a television blares.

Compared to life in the Oakland facility, inmates say, the relatively unfettered days of traditional prison were a piece of cake. “Prison is easy,” said Evangelina Wells, who is serving five years for driving under the influence and hit and run. “This is hard time.”

She said constantly having to keep track of her child is difficult compared to the relative down time in traditional prisons. But inmates in the program also attend classes and seminars most of the day and are allowed little free time.

More than just learning practical tasks such as how to change a diaper and not yell at or hit their children, Harrell said inmates often learn for the first time how to actually live with their babies. “One woman came in here saying she wished she’d never had her child, that he was bad and that he’d always be bad,” she recalled.

“When she left here, she said she actually knew her child, knew his strengths and weaknesses, what he liked and didn’t like. She had learned how to be a real mother.”

Years after their release, some mothers still call the facility leaders to seek advice or recount successes. And most counselors eagerly accept their calls, like mothers themselves who want to know how their offspring are faring.

Although state law prohibits former inmates from returning to prison to visit, Harrell said the facility next month will throw an off-site party for scores of its graduates who want to come back and say thanks.

Carrillo said her time in the Oakland community has taught her how to stay straight.

“Prison life doesn’t scare me,” she said. “It’s being away from my kids [that does]. Next time, I won’t be eligible for a program like this, and it will be back to sitting in that cell worrying about where my kids are, why they’re failing school and where I went wrong.”