‘It’s not an act of charity; it’s an act of solidarity’
It started with a hopeful phone call.
The holidays were approaching and Sharon Fitzer, family coordinator at Logan Correctional Center, a women’s prison in central Illinois, was hearing from moms worried their children wouldn’t have any gifts to open.
She reached out to attorney and advocate Alexis Mansfield, who coordinated with a Chicago-based group called Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration. Together, they planned a toy drive with a goal of 400 donations.
That was a decade ago, and Moms United now hosts the toy drive annually. Since 2014, the group has collected and distributed about 1,500 gifts per year, which it distributes to Decatur Prison, Cook County Jail and a handful of rehabilitation centers across Illinois, in addition to Logan Correctional Center.
“This is a way of showing incarcerated parents that we see them and we understand that they’re still parents and that it’s important to do something as simple as giving a gift to their child,” said Holly Krig, director of organizing for Moms United. “And it’s important for the child to know the gift is from their parent, not from a stranger. It’s not an act of charity; it’s an act of solidarity.”
About half of imprisoned people in the United States are parents of children under 18, according to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform research and advocacy group. That means 2.7 million children have a parent serving time in prison or jail on any given day, and more than 5.2 million have had an incarcerated parent at some point during their lives.
“If you think you’ve never met a child with an incarcerated parent, you probably have,” Krig said. “Especially if you’re a teacher or you work in a school or you work in health care.”
Sixty percent of women in state prisons have a child under the age of 18, according to Sentencing Project data. That’s a heartbreaking statistic any day of the year. It’s particularly so at the holidays.
“The toy drive is in support of material donations,” Krig said, “but it’s also a way of defying and resisting the way in which the prison system works to isolate people and remove them from our consciousness.”
The toy drive works like this: You choose a toy or teen gift at this link: bit. ly/holidaysolidarity10. You add it to your online cart. For shipping address, you choose “shipping to the address on Holiday Solidarity Moms United’s Community Registry.” You place your order.
The gifts are then shipped directly to the designated facility, where staff members open and inspect them. Then volunteers set up the gifts for moms to choose among and present to their children during a supervised visit.
Keeping parents and their children meaningfully connected throughout a prison term substantially decreases the negative impacts of incarceration on children, research shows, and is correlated with reduced recidivism rates by the parents, which in turn minimizes the re-traumatization of the children.
We have a ways to go in creating and cultivating those meaningful connections.
I’ll never forget reading a 2020 report examining the relationships between incarcerated mothers and their children, filled with haunting interviews with women at Logan Correctional Center.
The woman who learned her son was living with a person who had sexually abused her as a child, and was powerless to do anything about it. The woman who desperately wanted to receive a drawing from her child, but couldn’t receive mail with any crayon markings, per prison policy.
Only 1 in 3 mothers had children who lived within two hours of the prison, the report found, and many of the children lived with relatives who were unable to drive them to visit. When their children could visit, the mothers interviewed worried they’d be traumatized or physically harmed by the conditions: pervasive mold, broken toilets, raccoon and other pest invasions, lead paint.
Some people will shrug at this. Some people will see it as justice. I asked Krig how she responds to those critics.
“I encourage people to remember, as a starting point, that for the children there’s nothing they’ve done to deserve or justify having their parents ripped from them,” Krig said.
From there, she encourages people to examine whether our mass incarceration policies are meant to — or built to — reform and heal, or punish and avenge.
“For me, these mutual support drives are things we’re doing to take care of each other and build relationships, even across razor-lined walls,” Krig said. “The more we can build those relationships, the more we can see one another as people and really care about one another, the more we can really effectively challenge these systems.”
And ideally come with a better one.
Meanwhile: Children deserve joy. At the holidays, and not at the holidays. And parents deserve the basic right to try to provide it.
And those of us who are able to can help them do so.