In 1983, attorney Ellen Barry organized a panel of nine mothers for the National Conference on Women and the Law.  They told of how their own incarceration had affected their young children.  They ranged from a woman who had been back home with her family for ten years to two women who were on furlough from Alderson prison just for the day.  Hearing their voices, hearing what they and their children went through, was riveting.  I worked with Ellen that summer, and several of us who were in the room that day still work with women prisoners and their families.

Since then, the rate of women’s incarceration has skyrocketed, due to mandatory prison sentences for nonviolent, drug-related offenses.  Women of color are affected far worse than white women.  Federal law reduced the time frame in which mothers can regain custody of their children in foster care.  In general, they have just 15 months to complete all programs and tasks required to reunite with their children, or else lose them forever.  This has created something of a perfect storm: the prison industrial complex and the child welfare system come together to create legal orphans, who are permanently cut off from their mothers—often, from their entire families—and who may or may not be adopted.  We need to hear what they’re going through.  It will take all of us together, advocates and the families affected by these systems, to fight this institutionalized racism. 

Women prisoners teach us about the system’s parallels to slavery.  Warnice Robinson was in our Visible Voices group and later a CLAIM Board member.  She spoke a painful truth in a public hearing, using her own separation from her children to promote community-based sentencing instead of prison.  Then she told about going into labor in prison.  She was placed in handcuffs, leg irons and a chain belt.  At the hospital she was paraded past other patients, and then shackled by one wrist and one ankle to her hospital bed through hours of labor.  She had been convicted of shoplifting, and was accompanied by correctional officers:  where exactly did they think she was planning to go?  The women legislators heard Warnice’s clarity, vision and courage. CLAIM was invited to draft the bill that made Illinois the first State in the nation to ban this violation of human rights. 

I applaud the YWCA’s initiatives to raise your voices against systemic injustice in Illinois.   We need every organization and every woman to use her full voice, to challenge racism, poverty, and gender violence.  If the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and the debates still unfolding teach us anything, it is that we have a lifelong task ahead of us to deeply hear the experiences of our sisters and brothers in low-income communities of color, and to work side by side for change.