Not Their Mistakes

Author: HELPUS

I chose the name HerVoice because women in the prison system are silenced and never heard.

That’s the whole reason. I want people to understand it’s not just men who should be heard. Women suffer too — they suffer tremendously — and it goes to deaf ears.

My daughter is being held at McRae Women’s Facility. She was at Whitworth before she was transferred to McRae. Most of what I know, I know from her letters. She writes, she calls, and we visit when we can. The letters are hard to read.

She tells me there are no programs inside to help with rehabilitation. Nothing running that would help her earn her way toward release. She’s housed at a closed security prison, but she’s classified minimum security. The men have work details and jobs — that’s what she says. The women don’t. They sit in a dorm all day with nothing to do, leaving out only to eat. No mental health counselors. No general population counselors. Just a dorm, day in and day out, nothing to help them be released. And when someone dies in there, she says they just make them move on like it didn’t happen.

She tells me they’re threatened not to speak up.

When a woman tries to speak up about programs or about mental health, she’s basically told that’s not their problem, and she gets yelled at. The guards carry riot guns to intimidate them. And if someone reaches out anyway, my daughter says they come in and tell them they don’t care who they reach out to, and they’d place them behind the doors of their cell with no communication with family. No contact with the people who love them.

I don’t know if that has happened to her. I know she carries it.

Her whole aura has changed. She is not herself anymore.

At Whitworth, she was doing fine. She was going to school. She was in other programs. Now it’s just blank. She told me she doesn’t know how much more she can take. To me, it sounds like she is at her end. When we talk, she is always down. I believe it’s taking a toll on her mentally and physically.

And what she talks about, over and over — she talks about how women are held longer than men on the same charges. That’s not only something she sees inside. We’ve looked into it ourselves, and from what we’ve found, the parole board moves quicker for men in certain cases. She talks about how the men have work programs and details to keep them occupied, and the women are locked in a dorm day in and day out, only leaving out to eat.

I want people to know who she is. Not just where she’s held.

She’s a hard worker. She’s always been into fashion and singing. She started her own fashion company — she’s actually been put in fashion shows. When my oldest daughter was diagnosed with kidney failure and placed on dialysis, my daughter took care of her for ten years. She took that on. When my oldest daughter passed, she adopted my grandson and raised him. He was sixteen when she went in. He’s graduated now, but you can tell this was another loss for him. And when she met her husband, he had a two-year-old boy whose mother left him when he was a baby. She took on raising him too. Both of those kids are lost without her.

She always looked out for her family. That’s who she is. That’s who those gates have.

She’s been gone two years now.

We’re fighting the appeal, and we fight on it every day. It’s exhausting. What keeps me going is wanting my daughter home. That’s the whole thing.

What I want people to know is that these women are still human. They are not their mistakes. They deserve to be treated as such. There are talented women behind those gates. Some of them were never given a chance. Some were in the wrong place at the wrong time. A second chance won’t hurt. They have futures locked away.

FreeHerFuture is what we like to say.

What if a mass release took place, and those women came home and changed their lives? We would never know — because they won’t give it a try.

If they can’t provide these services, then why not try some early releases? Why not reform programs on the outside? Give them a chance. Justice is not always a sentence. Sometimes it’s a second chance. Because right now they are leaving prison with nothing. Just trauma.

And they are still human. They are not their mistakes.