DENVER—Lori Martin helps her daughter crush Oreo cookies in a plastic container, then pops open a can of Cream Soda.
“Are you going to put it in there?” Joscelyn Martin, 6, asks her mom incredulously.
“Yeah,” Martin answers. “It’s how you make cake.”
At first glance, it seems like a pretty normal interaction. But, in reality, it’s a unique bonding moment for the mother who is serving 26 years in prison and the daughter who flies from Oregon every three months to see her.
Inside the walls of the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility, children like Joscelyn make overnight visits to their mothers, playing “hot potato” with stuffed blocks, making “cake” from ingredients available in the prison commissary and reading bedtime stories.
“It’s the routine stuff I don’t normally get to do,” says Martin, 34. “It makes me feel a part of it.”
As the population of female inmates in the nation’s prisons skyrockets, the children left behind are starting to play a more pivotal role in rehabilitation and re-entry programs at prisons across the country.
Officials say helping mothers bond with their children is crucial not only to preventing recidivism but also to helping kids live with having parents in prison.
“Folks out there are going to say, ‘These people committed a crime, so they don’t deserve this normal process.’ But the kids do,” said Ann Adalist-Estrin, director of the National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated. “And because the parents made a bad choice doesn’t mean they’re exempt from parenting their kids. As I always say to people, ‘Well, what’s the alternative? Do you want to parent her kids?’ Because somebody has to do it, and it best be her.”
Nationwide, the number of children with a mother in prison has more than doubled since 1991, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. About 65,600 mothers are incarcerated. They have 147,400 children.
Suddenly losing a parent to incarceration can cause those children to suffer “attachment disruptions” and prolonged stress, which, in turn, impacts the child’s brain and leads to behavioral problems, said Adalist-Estrin.
Advocates of overnight visitation say it gives mothers and children much-needed one-on-one time to make, mend and maintain relationships in an environment that is more like home.
“There’s enough time to set up a little routine,” said Sarah B. From, director of public policy and communications for the Women’s Prison Association. “The mother can tuck the child into bed. Some of the more natural rhythms of a parent-child interaction are able to take place.”
In Colorado, more than 2,300 women are in prison. An estimated 70 percent of them are mothers, like Gina Trujillo.
Trujillo, 38, who is serving four years for auto theft, has four children. Her youngest, De’Angelo, 2, was born while she was in prison. He used to cry every time he saw Trujillo. But now he is all smiles when he visits his mother overnight every other weekend.
Mother and son play robots, slide down a slide and cuddle in a rocking chair. Trujillo puts a tiny hat on her head, and De’Angelo mimics her, giggling.
“We’re not bad people. We just made bad choices,” Trujillo said. “This gives me an opportunity to build a relationship with my kids and to be the kind of mom I want to be.”
Sheila Ray is playing a video game with her 13-year-old son and losing miserably.
Her two kids have grown up visiting her in prison. Her son was 9 months old when she was arrested for robbery. Her 11-year-old daughter was born while she was incarcerated. Ray, 33, hopes to be paroled next summer.
Until then, weekends are a time for them to connect, despite her absence. They have 19 hours together.
Ray helps with homework, does her daughter’s hair and gives both kids manicures and pedicures.
Her son admits he’s embarrassed his mom is in prison and tells friends she works out of state. But he’d come every weekend to visit, if he could.
“We’re not on a time limit,” he says. “I get to spend the night with her. When she comes home, I’ll be used to her being around.”
There has been little research done on overnight visitation programs, like the one in Denver, but officials say they are rare. Denver’s program began in 2003 and, since then, 27 mothers and their children have participated.
Twenty of the mothers have been released from prison; only six have returned. That’s a recidivism rate of 30 percent, compared with the overall recidivism rate for women of about 47 percent.
The program requires mothers to go through parenting classes, participate in other educational and work programs and remain discipline free. In exchange, they earn overnight visits with their children every other weekend. They are responsible for planning menus and activities and disciplining their children.
“Think about the difference in children. If you were incarcerated when the child was 2 and it’s four years later and you’re getting out, and the child is 6, it’s a much different child,” said Joanie Shoemaker, a deputy director with the Colorado Department of Corrections who was warden of the Denver Women’s facility when the visitation program began.
“You try to get them into thinking about what it’s going to be like to be in the community and to be responsible for this child again.”
At the Denver facility, four “apartments” flank a play room filled with books, toys, puzzles and comfy couches. They are in a separate part of the prison where they don’t see inmates outside the program. Joscelyn is coloring her mother a “blue raspberry” cake that Martin tells her “sounds delicious.”
Joscelyn was only 2 when her mother was arrested for killing her father. She will be an adult before her mother comes home.
But the little girl knows only that Mom is in “timeout” and it’s fun to come visit “the apartment,” where Mom gives her piggyback rides and makes the best Kool-Aid.
“I love her one hundred and billion much,” Joscelyn says.
On this night, mother and daughter will push their beds together and cuddle up. Martin will have Joscelyn read to her for the first time.
And long after Joscelyn has drifted off, Martin will stay awake and watch her sleep, just like when she was a baby.
“This,” Martin says, “is the only chance I’ll have of being a mom with her.”
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On the Net:
National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated:
Women’s Prison Association:
