From Prison, Celebrating Mothers, New Beginnings

It wasn’t exactly the kind of Mother’s Day most of us would appreciate. Caroline Contreras rose at dawn, filed out of her cell and lined up with 3,000 other women for breakfast. Then, after a morning behind bars, she spent the afternoon in a visiting room patrolled by guards.

But it wasn’t the surroundings or the routine that set the day apart. It was the presence of Cynthia, the teenage daughter that Contreras had been separated from for almost half of the youngster’s life. “What a gift,” says Contreras, now on parole, looking back on that prison visit two years ago. “The only thing I can compare to the emotional joy I felt on that day was the day that Cynthia was born.”

And I thought about what used to be my standing request for Mother’s Day: I’d like a little solitude, I used to tell my late husband. A few hours away from our three kids, who sometimes made me feel like an inmate on suburban lockdown.

How different this holiday looks to a mother whose view of the world really is framed by bars.

In her eight years in prison, Contreras saw her daughter just two times. That’s twice more than most of her fellow inmates saw their children.

There are more than 7,300 mothers among the nearly 9,500 women incarcerated in California. Most are serving their time in Chowchilla at the Central California Women’s Facility and the Valley State Prison, the world’s largest women’s prison complex.

They’ve left behind about 17,000 children, most with relatives or placed in foster care. More than half never see their kids during their prison terms.

“Many of the children live with grandparents, who are not able, economically or physically, to get them there,” says Sister Suzanne Steffens, director of Detention Ministry for Los Angeles’ Catholic Archdiocese. The rural California prisons are a five-hour drive from the urban areas where most inmates come from.

On a visit to the prisons three years ago, Steffens asked the inmates what the church could do to help ease their time and prepare them for life on the outside. Bring our children, they said. We need to see our kids. So the archdiocese rented a bus and took nine sets of children from Southern California to see their inmate moms two years ago on Mother’s Day. The next year, it was two buses and 20 families. This year, nine buses were scheduled to carry 136 children from 67 families up and down the state to Chowchilla.

Contreras’ daughter Cynthia was part of the original entourage. When Contreras went to prison eight years ago for robbery, kidnapping and assault, her daughter, then 11, felt like she’d been sentenced as well. She spent two years bouncing among relatives, then landed in a group home in Van Nuys. Mother and daughter kept in touch via letters and calls, but Cynthia had no way to visit.

Seeing her on Mother’s Day two years ago “was like giving birth all over again,” Contreras says. “I couldn’t keep my hands off her, touching her hands, her face, her arms. I wanted to count her freckles, to feel her hair. I made her take off her socks, ‘Let me see your feet.’ I wanted to count her toes, like when she was a baby, to make sure everything was there.”

The visit was no less profound for her daughter, now Cynthia Boutin, a 19-year-old Navy sailor stationed in Norfolk, Va., with her Navy husband and 6-month-old daughter. “It felt like a dream,” she says. “I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t believe I was actually there, face to face, with my mom. I’d wanted to see her for so long.”

Those three hours lighted a fire under Contreras. “I realized I was going to get out of here, and I’d better start thinking about what I was going to do.” She wanted to live up to what her daughter expected. So she signed up for vocational classes, became a certified optician and earned a license in air-conditioning repair.

When she was paroled in January, she moved into a Claremont home run by Crossroads, a program for women parolees. She got a job at an Upland air-conditioning firm. And she began donating 10% of every paycheck to the “Get on the Bus” campaign, to help pay for buses, counselors and lunches for the kids. “That one day changed my life,” Contreras says. “It made me realize how much I meant to my daughter, how much I wanted to be there for her.”

But while Mother’s Day visits are nice, there’s more to parenting than sitting across a table in a visiting room getting reacquainted with your kids. And a lot more needs to happen all year long if we want to build ties between mothers and children that are strong enough to outlast prison terms. After all, most women in prison are there by dint of bad decisions and selfish choices--not exactly models of motherhood.

Many are two- and three-time losers, drug addicts who move back and forth between jail and their children’s lives. But with support behind prison walls, latent maternal instincts can survive.

Support, such as parenting classes, to help mothers who’ve grown up in unhealthy homes understand what their children need. Drug treatment. Psychological counseling. And education for women so academically deficient, many can’t even write a letter home. “There are so many women in there who want to be good mothers, want to stop using drugs, want to be productive citizens, but they don’t know how,” Contreras says. “All they know is what they’ve always done. And their kids grow up angry, feeling unloved, because their mothers don’t know how to show that they care.”

She knows that some folks believe mothers in prison don’t deserve the privilege of parenting. “I understand that feeling,” she says. “But it’s not so much about what we deserve as what the children deserve. They don’t see their mothers as bad people. They just know they miss their moms.... They’re being punished when we’re the ones that did wrong.”

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Sandy Banks’ column is published Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.