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June 10, 1997 The subject of children with mothers in prison has been germinating in me since the early 1990s. I have been drawn into this issue while producing documentaries about spouse abuse, immigration discrimination and child abuse. To research this subject from the inside out, I have begun working with a grassroots group of former inmates, Catholic Sisters and other female professionals, including lawyers, social service workers and me - one eager filmmaker. Our group is officially called Mothers and Children Together, and its primary raison-d'etre is to arrange cost-free bus rides so families can visit inmate mothers. It turns out that how long the bus ride ours is the only free transportation to the female prison here in Missouri, and generally about 60 people can be on the bus. The prison allows Mothers and Children Together four such trips each year. With an average of four children in a family, there is room for only twelve families at most to visit each season. As I assist on bus trips, traveling to the correctional facility, the ride itself becomes the dominant metaphor for the documentary - the long physical journey that symbolizes the emotional stretch between an inmate mother and her children. For it is here on the bus where the children come face-to-face with many realities about their mothers: the apprehension they often feel, anticipating their mothers' bizarre surroundings, and their powerful need for their mother's attention....  August 20, 1997 There is a game cabinet in the prison's visiting room. At first I thought it was strange that so many families hovered around their tables moving tiny pieces on a Parcheesi board. The dronelike din of the visiting room was often punctuated by the rippled slush of cards being shuffled. But soon it was clear how important these games were to mothers who too quickly ran out of conversation with her children because they hadn't been together for many months and they were all feeling shy or angry. These games bridged the gap of day-to-day ease with one another, after the hello hugs had been exchanged, after grandma gave the family gossip, after the children got Doritos or popcorn from the vending machines, after there were too few genuine feelings one could say out loud in the scrutinized arena. When a person's every movement must be visible, when nothing in the hour's visiting time is normal, one of the few possible pastimes is the artificial drama of games, with its winners and losers. Dec 9, 1997 On the surface, everything seemed normal, nearly commonplace as we rode the three hours to prison. The children and teenagers busied themselves with CD headphones and the coloring books and potato chips we had given out. Few children cried, none complained. Occasionally there would be a familial outburst, mostly from the younger boys who were bored with sitting in their seats, restless with high hopes, and overflowing with energy. Someone would eventually threaten to smack them, and they would settle into the pinch and shove of quiet roughhouse. That was the ride toward prison. The real shift in mood occurred on the way home. It happened in the way a cloud of private desolation seemed to wrap itself around sleeping children; the way their caretakers, weary after hours of focused supervision, let down their guards and abandoned their parental tasks; the way no one said a word about visiting that bustling visiting room of vending machines, plastic chairs and cinderblocks - a place that, once left behind, would always continue to shape their lives. I can't help but wonder what our purpose is in doing this, anyway. Today I watched families and saw a mother struggle to feel contact with the growing daughter unaccustomed to her lap. I saw children bored with stale cookies and urgent attention. During the short visit, I saw mothers hugging their young sons furiously, trying to love them as fast as they could. And on the bus ride home, I saw a hefty teenage girl curl up in emotional exhaustion (her little sister's coat thrown over her shoulders) as she sucked her thumb to put herself to sleep. March 21, 1998 After a two and a half-hour ride, the bus pulls up to the state correctional facility at noon, only to depart as required at 2:30. An American flag and a large granite sign mark the entrance. The sign reads Women's Eastern Regional Diagnostic and Corrections Center. This maximum security prison has been designed to look like a cross between a rural college campus and an industrial farm, with groupings of low, red paneled buildings, trimmed with white windows and topped with gray tin roofs. Immense parking lots surround the "campus." We wait in a long line to get processed, adults and children alike. At the entry desk, we empty our pockets into a tray and we hold out our arms to be scanned by a device that looks a lot like a cattle-prod. We must bring one photo ID and our social security numbers, which verify us as non-felons - the toddlers too. (No one who has had a felony conviction in the past five years is allowed to visit.) Because each visitor's identity must be "processed" in the computer, it often takes an hour after our arrival for the kids to glimpse their mothers. Sometimes, a visitor is barred from going into the visiting room anyway. Sometimes, an inmate mom has had a behavior violation a day or two before, but no one in our group gets notified. So her children may travel the distance, waiting in line to see her, only to be told they can't go in; they must wait quietly throughout the visit on the bus because their mother is being punished. When I enter the prison as a volunteer for Mothers and Children, I am not supposed to talk with any inmates whose children are not on our bus. Of course, I do anyway. My chance to meet female inmates is very limited and all contact is closely watched by the prison officials. But I still I get to see inmate women with outstretched, tattooed arms reach for their daughters' bitten-down and peeling fingers. Big boys flush and lean forward after venting to their stored-up rage at separation, often yelling, "Do you know how long the bus ride took?" or "Why do you have to be so far away?" - and they grab their mothers necks, cheeks, shoulders, to plant kiss after kiss on their mother's warm skin. The act becomes contagious, a newly found way to keep control - close and invisible in the rumbling midst of more than fifty families in the room. June 15, 1998 Each time I get inside the prison, I come face-to-face with three surprising facts. First, most of the females are incarcerated for non-violent offenses - and the whole notion of a "convicted felon" slips away from its predatory meaning. Second, most female inmates are Caucasian, even though there is a disproportionate number of African-Americans behind bars, given the general population in Missouri. Most surprising is the way most of the children steadfastly idealize their mothers, regardless of their offenses. For months now, I have been trying to meet women while they are with their children and their children's caregivers, to see if they would be "right" for our documentary. The way I see it, the "rightness" needs to work two ways. Our production has to offer each family member something that enriches their lives - not dollars, but a connection with their own inner value. And they have to match my all-too-abstract checklist of racial and gender balances for the "complete picture" we are trying to present. My criteria also includes more white children than black, or at least an even number of white families to black because that it a more accurate representation of what I am seeing. I want some women to have an imminent release date, so our story could cover the difficult process of reunification. At least one child has to live with his father, to show the importance of active fathers in the story. July 20, 1998 There is, of course, always an elaborate paradox that arises when you are making a documentary. What is the truth when there's a camera present? What can be spontaneous when everyone appearing there had already agreed to be a "character"? Art has always manipulated the tension between reality and artifice, but as a video artist, I worry: do I lean too hard on that tension? My documentaries aim at avoiding deception, sentimentality and stereotypes. But to present deeper truths, these must rely inherently upon construction of on-going circumstances. The poet Richard Shelton once wrote, "Don't believe what they say about me. It's true, but it's not the truth." I hear those ideas in reverse in my mind. Believe what we are saying. This is not the only thing that's true, but it is still the truth.... November 5, 1998 I read somewhere that if you incarcerate a woman, you incarcerate a family. As I survey the children's histories, the pattern that surprises me most is that with five out of our six families, the kids lived away from their mothers long before, during and even after their mothers' confinements. They have always lived with other caregivers, regardless of whether or not their mothers were in jail. Of the 11 children I am working with closely, only Missy and Laurie have been raised by their biological mother. In a way, it is the mothers - not their street-wise children - who are ill-prepared for life.... This documentary started out concerned with what happens to children when their mothers go to prison. But I find it isn't just about the times their mothers spend in prison. Most of our children (those who are old enough to think about it) tell me they think their moms are better when they are behind bars. Even as they say this to me, they miss their mothers terribly. At the same time, they don't quite know what it is they miss. I keep going back to the day more than a year ago when our consultant, Dr. Richard Rosenfeld, startled me when he calmly proclaimed, "Moms are often at their very best when they are behind bars. That is the period of time when they have their acts most together." So I now wonder: does the belief that moms are better off in prison really mean that kids are better off then as well? I find myself questioning whether these kids are in turmoil because their mothers are in prison, or is their misfortune due more to their mothers' drug addictions - whether in or out of prison? And what is it in their mothers' own impoverished histories that brought them to this point? As Deeds, my director, said to me the other day, "It is a vicious cycle. And the people who are the most vicious about it are the ones who are outside the cycle." January 20, 1999 As we begin to screen the tapes we've shot thus far, I am finding that it is too easy to focus on our inmate mothers' problems - and to lose sight of their children. I remind myself that a mother's crimes, her possible innocence, her hopes and her desperate choices - these are not our topic. I come back and back to what I think is the underlying issue: does love help people or not? As we move through this terrain of convicted felons, we are visiting remarkable places where the language of love is spoken differently. But love is the one priority we can all relate to - strong connections between family members, their absolute and arbitrary bond. Love can be the lens to understand the broken families we encounter - and by understanding the ambiguities, perhaps we can relate others' flagrant mistakes to the familiar ones we know all too well.  |
