Young Scouts Join Mothers Behind Bars

For 8-year-old Christopher Curtis and his mother, the monthly meeting of Tutwiler Scout Group 821 was a chance to make birds out of pine cones together.

But when the meeting ended, the young Scouts filed out and the big iron doors of Julia Tutwiler Prison shut behind them, leaving their mothers locked inside. On this Saturday, Christopher told the guard he wanted to stay behind.

“He doesn’t want to go. We just have to look forward to the day that I can go too, and he doesn’t have to leave me in here,” said Rosalind Martin, who is serving a 10-year sentence for manslaughter.

Scout Group 821 is an official Girl Scout group sponsored by Aid to Inmate Mothers, an organization that works with prisoners at Tutwiler, Alabama’s only women’s prison. The Girl Scouts of America amended the rules to allow boys to participate.

Twenty-three states run such programs at 24 prisons under the name Girl Scouts Behind Bars.

“It was something we could do to give the children exposure to their mothers,” said Carol Potok, director of Aid to Inmate Mothers. “For the mothers, it promotes teamwork, integrity and all those things that Scouts are all about.”

The Scout meetings are a chance for Martin to become reacquainted with her son before her expected release next year after three years at Tutwiler. Christopher lives in Wetumpka at a group home for children with mothers at the prison.

“This is a chance to do something normal with Christopher,” Martin said as she stuck a feather into a pine cone. “There was nothing normal about my life before. I was a drug addict and an alcoholic. Thank God for my incarceration. I have stayed drug free and alcohol free since I’ve been in here.”

Once a month, volunteers bring Scouts to a parking lot in downtown Montgomery, where they board a van provided by Westminster Presbyterian Church for the 15-mile ride to the prison. The group has 22 Scouts, and about a dozen are regulars on the monthly trips to Tutwiler. On this particular day, the travelers ranged in age from 7 to 12.

Workers from Aid to Inmate Mothers travel with the Scouts and bring snacks and supplies needed for the meeting. That can be a challenge: Many supplies that would be routine at a normal Scout meeting are forbidden behind prison walls.

“We can’t bring scissors, glue or anything that has alcohol in it,” said Candace Fivecoat, an education specialist with Aid to Inmate Mothers.

Once at the prison, the children are searched before the iron doors open, admitting them to the Scout meeting, which is held at the back of the Tutwiler dining hall.

The mothers, wearing the prison uniform of baggy white pants and shirts, wait just inside the dining hall to give their sons and daughters hugs and to hear the latest news from home.

Sharon Jones, who used the name Loretta Gardner outside prison, kissed her daughters, 9-year-old Brittany Gardner and 10-year-old Princess Gardner.

“This is a good thing because I like seeing my mom,” Princess said.

“I like to see my momma because I miss her,” Brittany said.

Jones talked with Princess about her grades and the need to do well in school.

“She’s going to do better when I get home and can be with her,” Jones said.

Jones, who expects to be released in February, says she ended up in prison for drug-related crimes. “Because of the pain and the fear and the abuse I went through on the streets, I would never want my kids to go through that pain and hurt,” she said.

Ellen Piner of Tuskegee, who doesn’t expect to get out of prison until 2004, calls the Scouting program “a blessing from God.”

“This is giving me a chance to be a better mother for my children and a positive role model” for daughter Rayshawn Crayton, 7, and son Rino Piner, 10, she said.

For now, the Scout group exists purely to visit the imprisoned mothers. Fivecoat hopes eventually to take the youngsters on such traditional Scouting adventures as hikes and camp-outs, but those ambitious plans are dependent on donations and volunteers, both of which are in short supply.