CHICAGO LEGAL ADVOCACY FOR INCARCERATED WOMEN Chicago, IL
By Mary Jo McConahay

Mothers with children under age 18 are the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, with few groups reaching out to them. When women go to prison, their children suffer mightily, sometimes irreparably. Women, who lose custody of their children, even if they go straight after release, may return to crime and addiction out of grief and despair. In l985, Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Women began to inform imprisoned parents of their rights such as mother-child visits, guardianship options, and public benefits while mothers are incarcerated. Staff provides legal counseling, and makes knowledgeable referrals to services including substance abuse treatment, education; help with domestic violence and job training. Yearly, CLAIM serves more than 2000 women and girls, aiming to prevent prison time from causing permanent destruction of their families and to change policy to support those families.

When Betty Gibson’s labor pains were three minutes apart, guards made her wait as they checked irons out from the prison armory, took her to a hospital, and shackled her to the bed. The small remembered mercy was that authorities placed a female guard, not a male guard as many women had, at the foot of the bed as Betty gave birth.

“I felt so degraded I couldn’t think when they asked me what to name him,” recalls Betty, her eyes clouding. “’David, that’s a nice name, it’s my son’s name’ the guard said, so I named my boy David. Then they took him away.”

Betty does not see David, now grown with a child of his own, and she does not see her other children, bitter and distant, separated too early and finally from a mother once addicted to drugs. There was no way at the time, she says, to make things right with her sons, even when she went straight. No one reached out to her then and said, “You can help yourself and keep your children and we’re here to support you.”

On a recent blustery afternoon Betty Gibson hit the Near West streets of the neighborhood where she once worked as a prostitute. Even well before dark the broken sidewalks and vacant lots covered with mud and pale brown grass exude an air of loneliness and risk. Here and there hardy entrepreneurs sell goods from the back of pick-up trucks. When a strapping man challenges Betty, proposing she buy a sack of groceries he has just received free from a charity, she defuses the situation with a smile and street talk that says between the lines, “Don’t mess with me – I’ve been where you are.”

Later, Betty Gibson points to a yellow line in the middle of the road, like the one in a bar district where she purposefully sat down once at a busy 2:00 a.m. hour, inviting suicide, but receiving only a broken leg. When she lunches over a paper plate of fried catfish at a corner restaurant a woman approaches from across the room. “Excuse me for staring, but don’t I know you?” she asks. Within minutes the woman is beckoning a companion to the table. “”Hey, this girl helps the ladies keep their babies,” the woman says. Betty is back in the neighborhood, selling not her body but hope.

In working with Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Women (CLAIM), Betty Gibson has learned that when women go to prison, it’s their children who suffer most. This Mississippi sharecropper’s daughter, molested as a child by the overseer’s son, recently received a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, is studying for a Master’s, and she has read the reports: Studies link parental incarceration with poor school performance, aggression, emotional problems, and the same kind of post-traumatic stress experienced by soldiers who have gone through war. Even babies are affected: they miss the irretrievable mother-infant bonding experience when they are snatched away as newborns. Very young children can be so shaken by sudden separation from their mothers they may develop late, and express sadness, anger, confusion, and the same kind of grief a person feels when a loved one dies. “I miss you too,” Betty says as she hands out fliers that invite the women to contact CLAIM.

If they have been successful in re-entering the community after jail, CLAIM can give legal aid to help reunite their families. Former prisoners can meet with each other at sessions of Visible Voices, a peer support group that aims at linking up with other advocacy groups to change policy that punishes women and children above and beyond a mother’s jail sentence. That night, at one session, former prostitutes and drug addicts passed around newspaper clippings about a rash of streetwalker murders, shared narrow escape experiences (“You get in that car and you don’t know if you’re ever coming back”) and planned an appeal to the state capital to pay attention. “I’m fifty-four, but my work is just starting,” says Betty.

Betty Gibson does not take CLAIM into jails and prisons like the Dwight Correctional Center in southern Illinois, a cluster of Bavarian-style buff stone buildings with deeply slanted roofs that looks cruelly at first like a college campus. Instead, this is the purview of lawyers like CLAIM founder Gail Smith. On a wintry day 18 women prisoners listen to Smith in a second floor room overlooking open fields, and trees gray-black against a sky threatening snow. Many appear to be mere girls, ponytails framing either side of butter-fresh faces, and most look pregnant, targeted for the information session by sympathetic prison authorities.

“Laws make it easier than it used to be to take a child from the mother, so try and keep your child with family or friends legally and out of foster care, We can help show you how,” Smith begins as eyes widen and some take notes on requirements for legal guardians, for instance, who can be appointed for limited times. In 2002, 66 babies were born to mothers here. Nationwide, about 5 percent of women are pregnant when they enter prison, and another 15 percent have babies less than six weeks old. By the time many have served their time and want to reunite with their children, it is too late – parental rights that might have been kept have been legally terminated. “It’s hard and painful to think about this. You may want to cry and walk out. Hang in there and I promise you it will get easier.”

Smith is persistent but warm in such sessions, answering individual questions that have a life-or-death sound to them on the part of the women. But she works on the policy side of prisoners and their children too. Smith drafted the legislation that forbade shackling women prisoners in Illinois to the bed as they gave birth, as Betty Gibson once experienced. Because foster parents want to adopt newborns for instance, as soon as possible, she advocates policy changes favoring community-based sentencing, where offenders serve outside prison, as a “make or break for reunification.”

At the end of another long day, Smith makes a visit to check in on Silvia Valentin, who once served time for attempting to shoot an abusive husband with a 22—the gun jammed. Her sons Ricardo, 9, and Charlie, 13, orbit their mom as if one of them must always keep her in sight. They never felt shame about their mother in jail, say the boys – they knew their father well – but her absence seems to have left a mark that will not quickly disappear. And Valentin cannot do enough for them. “As long as I’m good to my sons, help them study, maybe they’ll grow up to be something,” she says.

With CLAIM’s assistance, Valentin is receiving custody of her boys. “We stick together, “insists young Ricardo. “We come in a package deal.”