Prisons are allowing mothers to raise their babies behind bars
DECATUR, Illinois: Destiny Doud thought she had just 48 hours to be a mother.
Like most of the hundreds of pregnant women who give birth while serving time each year, Doud was slated to give up her newborn to a relative just days after the baby was born last May.
Doud recalled hugging Jaelynn close at the hospital, waiving off nurses’ offers to take the girl to the nursery. She wanted every minute to hold her daughter ahead of that wrenching separation.
But just before handing off the baby to her own father, Doud learned she had qualified for a radical alternative. She could raise Jaelynn behind bars.
On June 2, 2017, Doud cradled her newborn as she passed through a chain-link fence topped with razor wire, through heavy steel doors to a cell outfitted with a crib. A sign on the door reads: “Doud: Y21214 Baby: Jaelynn.”
The Decatur Correctional Center is the only home the girl with wispy blonde hair and iceblue eyes has known in her 11 months.
Prison nursery programmes remain rare country-wide, but eight facilities in as many states have opened them amid dramatic growth in the number of incarcerated women. The bold experiment in punishment and parenting has touched off a fierce debate.
Advocates say the programmes allow mothers to forge a crucial early bond with children, creating healthier kids and a spur for mothers to improve their lives. Detractors say prison is no environment for children and that the programmes may simply put off an inevitable split between many children and their mothers, making it that much more painful.
Doud and Jaelynn are among dozens of test cases.
Doud faces a daunting road back to routine family life. At 21, she is serving a 12-year sentence for bringing methamphetamine across the Illinois state line. She is trying to tame a drug addiction and figure out a career with only a high school diploma. She’s allowed to send Jaelynn’s father baby photos, but he too is in prison.
Still, she said the programme has given her fledging family a lifeline - one she intends to seize. Doud, whose own mother was in and out of jail when she was a child, said she is determined to make sure a third generation of her family does not end up incarcerated.
“She reminds me that I have something that’s great now,” Doud said, smiling at Jaelynn in Decatur’s nursery. “Something to live for.”
At the end of a hallway on a special wing, the drab, institutional walls of this minimum-security facility erupt in a riot of colourful murals: Children play on a jungle gym, a bright sun beats down on a church, and a yellow school bus chugs along.
Hand- drawn portraits of children hang nearby, and tiny
Doud and Jaelynn are among dozens of test cases. Doud faces a daunting road back to routine family life. At 21, she is serving a 12-year sentence for bringing methamphetamine across the Illinois state line.
handprints climb up a column at the centre of a large room. Infants giggle, slumber in their mother’s arms and strain to turn over in play gyms.
It’s easy to mistake for a day care - that is, until the uniformed prison guards begin their rounds.
Welcome to the “Mums and Babies” programme.
Six women and their infants, ages newborn to 11 months, live in the unit, which is segregated from the prison’s general population. Each pair’s home is a typical cell, specially outfitted with cribs, changing tables and additional lively murals.
Decatur’s warden, Shelith Hansbro, said the cells are not barred and that women are not handcuffed on the wing because it can distress the children, even as young as they are. Still, security remains paramount.
Cameras are perched above each crib. The prison doesn’t house sex offenders. And when a child is taken outside the nursery unit, all prisoners are ordered to stop moving about the facility and remain where they are.The children can play outdoors in a prison yard retrofitted with a jungle gym.
There are strict criteria for selecting participants. The women must only have nonviolent offences on their records and typically have sentences that are two years or less, so mother and child never have to be separated and the children’s time in prison is limited to their earliest years. Though Doud’s sentence is longer than most women in the program, she could qualify to serve some of that in a residential drug treatment centre.
There are counsellors and a child aide to help the mothers, and other inmates at the facility serve as day- care workers so the women can attend classes to get GEDs, improve life skills, and receive drug and alcohol counselling. Hansbro said the approach is compassionate, but also tough.
“We tell them we are going to be up in your business,” Hansbro said. “We are going to be telling you things about how to raise your child that you might disagree with.”
On a Monday morning in April, Doud and the other moms gathered in a circle with their babies perched on their prison-issued blue scrubs. Led by a volunteer, each took turns reading passages from “The Velveteen Rabbit.”
Christine Duckwitz, 30, cradled two-month- old Isabelle and turned the pages. The mother from rural Illinois was caught with heroin last year. Isabelle’s father overdosed and died on Christmas Eve, just a month before the girl was born.
LaTonya Jackson, 38, read to five-month- old Olivia, who was decked out in a Minnie Mouse outfit, with a black bow on her head. The girl’s brother, the eldest of eight, was gunned down in a drug deal turned robbery in St. Louis soon after Jackson arrived at Decatur for a theft conviction.
Such turmoil is common in the lives of the women, Hansbro said. Things as simple as reading books to children sometimes fall by the wayside. Other mothers have never had such rudimentary parenting themselves, so the programme begins with the basics.
“We have found that if there is going to be anything that keeps women from reoffending, it’s going to be their bonds with their children,” Hansbro said. “If we expect them to be successful, we need them to give them those tools they need to be successful.”
The reading session ended with the volunteer asking the women what the moral of the story was. “What’s the lesson?” the woman asked. “That love makes you real?”
As the women answered and talked, Jaelynn tottered off unsteadily and grabbed a ball, before plopping over. Some of the women burst into laughter. Jaelynn had taken her first steps that week. “She can barely walk, but she thinks she can run,” Doud said proudly.
In October 2016, Doud and her boyfriend were speeding down an Illinois highway with 104 grammes of methamphetamine they planned to sell. She noticed police cars streaming toward them in the oncoming lanes.
“Right then, I knew we were going to prison,” Doud said. “I told my boyfriend, ‘I love you; I’ll miss you.’ ”
Doud and Jaelynn’s soon-tobe father were charged with meth trafficking, the result of a drug habit that spiralled out of control.
Doud’s situation soon grew more desperate. She said she woke in the middle of the night, sick to her stomach, nine days after her arrest. The jail nurse gave her a pregnancy test. Doud was stunned by the results.
“She said, ‘Congratulations!’ “Doud said. “I was like, ‘ No, this is not positive. I’m going to prison.’ ” — WP-Bloomberg