By Lanz Christian Bañes
Vallejo Times Herald
CALIFORNIA — When Terri Raiford finally emerged from prison, she found that three of her four children hardly knew her.
“I wasted nine years of my life in prison,” Raiford said Saturday at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Fairfield.
But now Raiford has spent 15 years clean and sober and actively works to educate the community about the issues surrounding incarcerated parents and their children.
Raiford was one of several panelists at Families Making Connections, a workshop organized by the Children of Incarcerated Parents Committee/Solano Re-entry Council and the Children’s Network of Solano County.
This is the first year the organizations have come together to discuss the issues facing families with an incarcerated loved one.
“When you have someone inside, you feel all alone,” said Gail Patrice-Brown, whose husband faces a life sentence at the California State Prison, Solano, in Vacaville.
Patrice-Brown was also a panelist, representing the Solano prison’s inmate family council, which advocates for inmates’ families. The panelists offered advice to the dozen or so workshop attendees about issues such as obtaining temporary guardianship of an incarcerated person’s children and explaining to children why their parents are imprisoned.
“There’s just a myriad of issues that affect ... the inmate or the family of the inmate,” said Victor Abrunzo, who works with the inmate family council in Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla.
Sister Suzanne Jabro, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Restorative Justice Works, offered a solution in the form of the center’s Get on the Bus program, which busses the children of inmates to the prisons.
“When the children came through the door, everybody just got up and ran to each other sobbing,” Jabro said of the first time they tried the program 10 years ago.
That first bus of 17 children has since grown to 50 buses with more than 1,000 children last year. Get on the Bus visits prisons twice a year -- Mothers Day and Fathers Day. Knew this year will be a trip to the Solano prison, Jabro said.
Karen Shain, the co-director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, said the key to helping these families is a joint community effort.
“If we can just get organized, if we can really get together, we have a lot of potential to change things,” said Shain, noting how her organization helped ban the shackling of female inmates who were giving birth.
For more information about inmates with children, contact the Children’s Network at (707) 421-7229.
Copyright 2009 The Times Herald