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1 introduction Journeying into the Worlds of Prisoners’ Children “Although you’re far, you’re always near. You’ll always be my mommy dear. For what you did will never change. There is no reason to be ashamed. The love for you is in my heart although we’re very far apart. My love for you is very clear. I’ll see you soon my mommy dear.” Valencia was eleven years old when she wrote this poem to her mother, who was locked in a prison some three hundred miles away. After her mother was incarcerated, Valencia and her older sister went to live with her grandparents in a public housing project in another state. There they joined their teenaged brother, who had been raised by their grandparents and had never lived with Valencia and her mother. Valencia’s new family also included her grandparents’ infant great-grandson, who had been living with them since his birth. Her grandparents, living on a fixed income supplemented by food stamps, struggled to make ends meet, especially with Valencia, her sister, and the baby now in the household. Valencia yearned to see her mother, but a six-hundred-mile roundtrip that would require a hotel stay was simply out of the question for the family. They could not afford the risk that their old, less than reliable car would survive the trip. If it broke down, they would not be able to repair it and they certainly could not afford to buy another one. And so Valencia and her mother remained exiled from each other. Three years would pass before Valencia would see her mother again, and many other poems would flow from her pen during those years, all expressing her longing to be with her mother. Maintaining her connection with her mother while separated by hundreds of miles was just one of the issues Valencia would face during her mother’s Intro.qxd 4/20/11 5:06 PM Page 1 incarceration. The lines “For what you did will never change/There is no reason to be ashamed” suggest others. Valencia had to grapple with the fact that her mother “did” something that resulted in her imprisonment, meaning something that was at a minimum impermissible in the law’s eyes. She also recognized that her mother’s crime was irreversible and that there was no way to change what had happened. Valencia’s admonition that there was no reason to feel ashamed reflects recognition that others would view her mother’s actions and her incarceration as stigmatizing experiences. Valencia, however, chose to continue seeing her mother through a lens imbued with love and pride, rejecting the stigma that might otherwise have clung to her. In addition to dealing with those challenges, Valencia also had to adapt to a new household and cope with the constraints imposed when families are poor. What’s more, she had to navigate this rough terrain without the support and assistance that her mother would have been able to provide during a time of turmoil had she been there. Managing all this upheaval and the difficult emotional aspects of her mother’s incarceration was a tall order for an eleven-year-old. The unwavering devotion to her mother and belief in the enduring nature of their relationship that her poem reflects shone through the darkest days and helped sustain Valencia as she found ways to adjust to her circumstances. Valencia is one of a group of children whose mothers were involved in the criminal justice system whom I interviewed in an effort to understand what parental incarceration meant to children’s lives. I tell many of their stories in the pages that follow. They are emblematic, in several respects, of the situation many prisoners’ children face: a parent’s incarceration is a disruption to a child’s world that can bring separation from all that was familiar, including friends, school, and community. It can also bring the challenges of integration into a new household, financial strain, and sorrow. Valencia and others you meet in this book are just a few of the growing number of children in the United States who have experienced parental incarceration. They represent the collateral consequences of the nation’s historic experiment in mass incarceration that has touched the lives of millions of adults and their children. Although we do not know exactly how many children are affected by their parent’s incarceration , we do have some estimates of the numbers and can identify...

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