From Defy & Hustle: OPIOID ADDICTION, FRAUD, PRISON & now MINISTRY
Radio/Podcast: Hear the transformational story of Reverend Jeff Grant on Defy & Hustle Radio with Noreen Ehrlich and Kelly Trepanier on WGCH.com or WGCH 1490AM Greenwich in which we discussed ethics, white collar crime, money, morality and learn how Progressive Prison Ministries helps individuals, families and organizations start their lives over after white collar and nonviolent incarceration issues.
He’s been through the darkness and now he helps others regain health and love.
Friday, Sept. 20, 2019, 9 am ET, Aaron T. Kinzel, Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, was our guest on Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls Ivy & Jeff Grant – The Voice of CT Criminal Justice. Live on WNHH 103.5 FM New Haven, rebroadcast at 5 pm. Live-streamed and podcast everywhere, see below. Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More Than Ever.
Aaron T. Kinzel is a Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. His teaching and research areas of expertise are education, corrections, and public policy. He is a consultant that has worked nationally on criminal justice reform, including contracts with the U.S. Department of Justice. Kinzel has visited dozens of correctional facilities throughout the United States/Europe and has worked with thousands of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals for over 20 years to help them become law-abiding and productive citizens . Kinzel’s passion for these issues arose from his own incarceration as a youth in which he spent nearly a decade in the carceral state, including several years in solitary confinement.
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The Criminal Justice Insider Podcast with Babz Rawls Ivy and Jeff Grant is broadcast live at 9 am ET on the first and third Friday of each month Sept. through June, from the WNHH 103.5 FM studios in New Haven. It is rebroadcast on WNHH at 5 pm ET the same day. Podcast and Archive available all the time, everywhere.
Fri., Sept. 6, 2019: Khalil Cumberbatch, Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice Fri., Sept. 20, 2019: Aaron T. Kinzel, Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Michigan-Dearborn Fri., Oct. 4, 2019: Charlie Grady, Outreach Specialist for the FBI CT Community Outreach Program Fri., Oct. 18, 2019: Michael Kimelman, Former Hedge Funder and Author of Confessions of a Wall Street Insider: A Cautionary Tale of Rats, Feds, and Banksters
Season Two Guests:
Fri., Sept. 9, 2018: Kennard Ray, CT Unlock the Vote and Candidate for CT State Legislator Fri., Sept. 21, 2018: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50 Fri., Oct. 5, 2018: Sue Gunderman & Beth Hines, CT Reentry Roundtables Fri., Oct. 19, 2018: Venice Michalsen, Assoc. Professor of Justice Studies, Montclair State University Fri., Nov. 16, 2018: Andrew Clark, Director of the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, Central Connecticut State University Fri., Dec. 7, 2018: Glenn E. Martin, Founder/Consultant of GEM Trainers and Past-President and Founder of JustLeadershipUSA Fri., Dec. 21, 2018: Fernando Muniz, CEO of Community Solutions, Inc., and community leader Rosa Correa. Fri., Jan. 4, 2019: New Years Retrospective Show Looking Back at Past CJI Guests. Fri. Jan. 18, 2019: Peter Henning, Law Prof. at Wayne State University and “White Collar Watch” columnist for the NY Times. Fri., Feb. 1, 2019: Jeffrey Deskovic, CEO of The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation who was Exonerated after Serving 16 Years in Prison Fri., Feb. 15, 2019: Jeffrey Abramowitz, Executive Director for Reentry Services, JEVS Human Services, Philadelphia. Fri., Mar. 1, 2019, Rollin Cook, CT Commissioner of Correction Fri., Mar. 15, 2019: Dieter Tejada, Justice Impacted Criminal Justice Advocate Fri., Apr. 5, 2019: John Rowland, Former CT Governor Fri., Apr. 19, 2019: Gregg D. Caruso, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Corning & Co-Director of the Justice Without Retribution Network at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland Fri., May 3, 2019: Michael Taylor, CEO of Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center in the Greater New Haven area Fri., May 17, 2019: Tarra Simmons, Esq., Attorney & Criminal Justice Reform Advocate, Washington State Fri., June 7, 2019: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50, Part Deux! Fri., June 21, 2019: Marcus Bullock, CEO of Flikshop
Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More Than Ever.
Tarra Simmons thought she was going to escape the fate of the family she was born into — a family where everyone had been incarcerated and everyone suffered from a substance abuse disorder.
And for a while she did.
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“I thought I was doing pretty well,” said Simmons, who is the executive director of Civil Survival, an advocacy organization for the formerly incarcerated. “I thought I had escaped the cards dealt to me, but I never dealt with the childhood trauma.”
Though she gave birth to her first child at 15, she managed to finish four years of high school in a single year, graduating at 16. She would be the first to graduate from high school and college and eventually became a registered nurse.
But after a series of abusive relationships, she fell into substance abuse. She eventually landed in prison at age 33 for multiple felonies where she served two years.
It was in prison that she met a group of law students who piqued her interest in becoming a lawyer.
On a recent episode of WNHH’s “Criminal Justice Insider,” Simmons shared the story of how she went on to graduate from the law school and eventually had to take her fight to be allowed to practice the law all the way to the Washington State Supreme Court.
“I think I had always kind of been called to fight for justice,” she said.
Prior to prison, Simmons said, she didn’t know any lawyers beyond the ones she came into contact with through the public defense system. That meeting with the law students was the first time she had the opportunity to ask about the legal profession and how she might become part of it.
After she served her time, she enrolled at the University of Seattle Law School where she graduated magna cum laude.
But when she wanted to sit for the bar exam last year the Washington State Bar Association decided to deny her application.
Though she managed to keep up her RN license, submitted to over a hundred random drug tests to prove her sobriety, graduated with honors, and was appointed to two boards by the governor, the state’s bar said she did not have the character necessary to practice law.
The Washington State Supreme Court saw things differently and reversed the Washington State Bar Association’s decision.
“Criminal Justice Insider” is sponsored by The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.
From Host Meredith Atwood: Episode 112 of the Same 24 Hours Podcast is with theRev. Jeff Grant (@revjeffgrant), a successful attorney who “lost it all” and gained a true calling and purpose. ⠀⠀ ⠀⠀ From addiction to prison to ministry, Jeff has a fascinating story – and I enjoyed my chat with him so much!⠀⠀ ⠀⠀ He, and his wife and partner-in-ministry Lynn Springer, co-founded Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc. (Greenwich, CT), the first ministry in the United States created to provide confidential support and pastoral care to individuals, families and organizations with white-collar and other nonviolent incarceration issues.⠀⠀
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You can also listen in your browser at www.Same24HoursPodcast.com, or in your favorite podcast app (iTunes, Stitcher, Podbean, Spotify) by searching “The Same 24 Hours”⠀ Purchase Meredith Atwood’s new book, The Year of No Nonsense, here. ⠀ About The Year of No Nonsense: ⠀Exhausted and overworked lawyer, triathlete, wife, and mom Meredith Atwood decided one morning that she’d had it. She didn’t take her kids to school. She didn’t go to work. She didn’t go to the gym. When she pulled herself out of bed hours later than she should have, she found a note from her husband next to two empty bottles of wine and a stack of unpaid bills: You need to get your sh*t together. And that’s what Meredith began to do, starting with identifying the nonsense in her life that was holding her back: saying “yes” too much, keeping frenemies around, and more. In The Year of No Nonsense, Atwood shares what she learned, tackling struggles with work, family, and body image, and also willpower and time management. Ultimately, she’s the tough-as-nails coach /slash/ best friend who shares a practical plan for identifying and getting rid of your own nonsense in order to move forward and live an authentic, healthy life. From recognizing lies you believe about yourself and your abilities, to making a “nonsense” list and developing a “no nonsense blueprint,” this book walks you through reclaiming yourself with grit and determination, step by step. With targeted, practical chapters to help you stop feeling stuck and get on with your life, The Year of No Nonsense is equal parts girlfriend and been-there-done-that. The best part? Like any friend, she helps you get to the other side. ⠀
Episode 112 of the Same 24 Hours Podcast is with theRev. Jeff Grant (@revjeffgrant), a successful attorney who “lost it all” and gained a true calling and purpose. ⠀⠀ ⠀⠀ From addiction to prison to ministry, Jeff has a fascinating story – and I enjoyed my chat with him so much!⠀⠀ ⠀⠀ He, and his wife and partner-in-ministry Lynn Springer, co-founded Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc. (Greenwich, CT), the first ministry in the United States created to provide confidential support and pastoral care to individuals, families and organizations with white-collar and other nonviolent incarceration issues.⠀⠀
Listen on YouTube:
You can also listen in your browser at www.Same24HoursPodcast.com, or in your favorite podcast app (iTunes, Stitcher, Podbean, Spotify) by searching “The Same 24 Hours”⠀
Purchase Meredith Atwood’s new book, The Year of No Nonsense, here.
⠀ About The Year of No Nonsense: ⠀Exhausted and overworked lawyer, triathlete, wife, and mom Meredith Atwood decided one morning that she’d had it. She didn’t take her kids to school. She didn’t go to work. She didn’t go to the gym. When she pulled herself out of bed hours later than she should have, she found a note from her husband next to two empty bottles of wine and a stack of unpaid bills: You need to get your sh*t together.
And that’s what Meredith began to do, starting with identifying the nonsense in her life that was holding her back: saying “yes” too much, keeping frenemies around, and more. In The Year of No Nonsense, Atwood shares what she learned, tackling struggles with work, family, and body image, and also willpower and time management. Ultimately, she’s the tough-as-nails coach /slash/ best friend who shares a practical plan for identifying and getting rid of your own nonsense in order to move forward and live an authentic, healthy life. From recognizing lies you believe about yourself and your abilities, to making a “nonsense” list and developing a “no nonsense blueprint,” this book walks you through reclaiming yourself with grit and determination, step by step.
With targeted, practical chapters to help you stop feeling stuck and get on with your life, The Year of No Nonsense is equal parts girlfriend and been-there-done-that. The best part? Like any friend, she helps you get to the other side. ⠀
On Friday, Sept. 6, 2019, 9 am ET, Khalil Cumberbatch, Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice, was our guest on The Criminal Justice Insider Podcast with Babz Rawls Ivy & Jeff Grant – The Voice of CT Criminal Justice. Live on WNHH 103.5 FM New Haven, rebroadcast at 5 pm. Live-streamed and podcast everywhere, see below. Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More Than Ever.
Khalil currently serves as Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice, a coalition of broad and diverse organizations whose goal is to pass criminal justice reform legislation in New York State. He previously served as Associate Vice President of Policy at the Fortune Society, a reentry organization whose goal is to build people and not prisons, and in leadership positions at JustLeadershipUSA. He is also a lecturer at Columbia University School of Social Work.
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The Criminal Justice Insider Podcastwith Babz Rawls Ivy and Jeff Grant is broadcast live at 9 am ET on the first and third Friday of each month Sept. through June, from the WNHH 103.5 FM studios in New Haven. It is rebroadcast on WNHH at 5 pm ET the same day. Podcast and Archive available all the time, everywhere.
Fri., Sept. 6, 2019: Khalil Cumberbatch, Chief Strategist at New Yorkers United for Justice
Fri., Sept. 20, 2019: Aaron T. Kinzel, Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Michigan-Dearborn
Fri., Oct. 4, 2019: Charlie Grady, Outreach Specialist for the FBI CT Community Outreach Program
Fri., Oct. 18, 2019: Michael Kimelman, Former Hedge Funder and Author of Confessions of a Wall Street Insider: A Cautionary Tale of Rats, Feds, and Banksters
Fri., Nov. 1, 2019: Corey Brinson, Former Attorney Convicted for a White Collar Crime who is running for Hartford City Council
Fri., Nov. 15, 2019: Cathryn Lavery, Ph.D., Asst. Chair & Graduate Coordinator for the Iona College Criminal Justice Department
Fri., Dec. 6, 2019: “Free Prison Phone Calls” Show, Guests to be Announced.
Fri. Dec. 20, 2019: John Hamilton, CEO, Liberation Programs
Season Two Guests:
Fri., Sept. 9, 2018: Kennard Ray, CT Unlock the Vote and Candidate for CT State Legislator Fri., Sept. 21, 2018: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50 Fri., Oct. 5, 2018: Sue Gunderman & Beth Hines, CT Reentry Roundtables Fri., Oct. 19, 2018: Venice Michalsen, Assoc. Professor of Justice Studies, Montclair State University Fri., Nov. 16, 2018: Andrew Clark, Director of the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, Central Connecticut State University Fri., Dec. 7, 2018: Glenn E. Martin, Founder/Consultant of GEM Trainers and Past-President and Founder of JustLeadershipUSA Fri., Dec. 21, 2018: Fernando Muniz, CEO of Community Solutions, Inc., and community leader Rosa Correa. Fri., Jan. 4, 2019: New Years Retrospective Show Looking Back at Past CJI Guests. Fri. Jan. 18, 2019: Peter Henning, Law Prof. at Wayne State University and “White Collar Watch” columnist for the NY Times. Fri., Feb. 1, 2019: Jeffrey Deskovic, CEO of The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation who was Exonerated after Serving 16 Years in Prison Fri., Feb. 15, 2019: Jeffrey Abramowitz, Executive Director for Reentry Services, JEVS Human Services, Philadelphia. Fri., Mar. 1, 2019, Rollin Cook, CT Commissioner of Correction Fri., Mar. 15, 2019: Dieter Tejada, Justice Impacted Criminal Justice Advocate Fri., Apr. 5, 2019: John Rowland, Former CT Governor Fri., Apr. 19, 2019: Gregg D. Caruso, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Corning & Co-Director of the Justice Without Retribution Network at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland Fri., May 3, 2019: Michael Taylor, CEO of Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center in the Greater New Haven area Fri., May 17, 2019: Tarra Simmons, Esq., Attorney & Criminal Justice Reform Advocate, Washington State Fri., June 7, 2019: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50, Part Deux! Fri., June 21, 2019: Marcus Bullock, CEO of Flikshop
Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More Than Ever.
When Cornell Scott Hill Health Center CEO Michael Taylor was a kid growing up in West Philadelphia, he didn’t know that he would one day lead one of Connecticut’s oldest and largest community health centers.He just knew he wanted to help people like his friends who one by one found themselves incarcerated.
“Very simply put, I am a kid still from the ghetto in Philadelphia,” he told Jeff Grant, co-host of WNHH FM’s “Criminal Justice Insider,” during a recent episode.
“That was my upbringing. When you are raised in that kind of environment, where people face sometimes extraordinary challenges just in everyday life. If you have a heart you want to find ways of helping people.”
Taylor had a heart. He also had eight other friends with whom he was “thick as thieves and did everything together.”
After watching each of the boys he grew up with tangle with the criminal justice system at some point in their lives, Taylor said ,he knew he wanted something different. He’d hoped to become a doctor as a way to help people who grew up as he did, but he wasn’t very good at science. He pursued a degree in accounting from Northeastern University in Boston.
“I feel very blessed that I have been able to escape that and turn my life in a different direction,” Taylor said. “I give a great deal of credit for that to my parents and by the grace of God.”
He didn’t forget those friends. He still keeps in touch with those boys, turned men, whom he considers “lifelong friends.”
“Some were never able to recover from their incarceration experience, and their lives are quite hard,” he said,
Taylor’s background and the connections that he maintains to his friends influenced his decision to enter the health care field on the business side. He started his career in hospital administration in Boston. He worked for a number of large healthcare accounting and consulting firms before getting involved in the community health center movement back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He estimated to Grant that he has worked in some 300 health centers across the country over the years.
Before coming to Cornell Scott in 2008, first as a consultant, then as chief operating officer, and now as the CEO, he had an epiphany.
“The epiphany was that I was a health center patient as a kid,” Taylor recalled. “I didn’t know it at the time. To me, it was just the doctor’s office.”
Taylor ended up serving on the board of that very community health center in West Philadelphia, Spectrum Health Service, that he visited as a child. He’s also friends with the center’s current CEO. Now he is at the helm of a community health center that he said is in the top 1 percent of providers in the country of medical and dental services. Cornell Scott also provide an array of behavioral health services including mental health and substance abuse help, services that are often necessary for successful reintegration after incarceration. The center has undergone an expansion to provide more of those services.
“It’s sort of a circle of life,” he said.
“Criminal Justice Insider” is sponsored by The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.
Philosopher Gregg Caruso has one big problem with punishment: It doesn’t work.
In a world where social determinants like poverty, abuse, and malnutrition play a much larger role than individual choices in shaping the course of one’s life, he argued, a criminal justice system bent on punishment over rehabilitation is not just ineffective; it’s needlessly cruel and counterproductive.
Caruso offered those thoughts on his path from free will skepticism to criminal justice reform on the latest episode of WNHH’s “Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls-Ivy and Jeff Grant.”
“Who we are, what we do, is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control,” he said. “We’re not really morally responsible in the basic desert sense.”
This academic philosophical conviction, that social determinants that one has no control over play a much larger role in one’s life than whether or not one is a “good” or a “bad” person, inevitably led him to the world of criminal justice reform.
Because, as he sees it, the American criminal justice system is predicated on the preeminence of free will, and on the idea that those who suffer deserve to suffer and those who succeed deserve to succeed.
When one has no control over one’s DNA, the circumstances in which one was born, and one’s psychological predispositions, he said, a punitive rather than a rehabilitative criminal justice system just inflicts further harm on those already struggling, and does nothing to solve root causes that lead to crime in the first place.
“A big part of my view is that criminal behavior is a byproduct of social determinants,” he said, “and those are obviously going to be affected by the political structure, racism, poverty, socioeconomic inequality, housing and healthcare inequality, educational inequality. We have to start realizing that those are determinate factors in many peoples’ lives and are responsible in many ways for the kinds of outcomes we see.
“And if we want to address criminal justice, we really want to start addressing those social determinants.”
Instead of locking people in cages without access to adequate education, job training, and health care, he said, the American criminal justice system should follow a “public health quarantine model” that temporarily segregates from society those who have committed crimes and are proven to be a danger to others.
During that quarantine, people should be placed in an environment that resembles the natural and social world they will return to post-incarceration, and they should be provided with the necessary training and health care and resources to help them successfully reintegrate into society once they no longer pose a threat to others.
An overly punitive system simply doesn’t cut down on crime, he said. Roughly 76 percent of formerly incarcerated Americans are re-arrested on new charges within five years of their release.
“The goal,” he said, “should be to rehabilitate and reintegrate.”
“Criminal Justice Insider” is sponsored by The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.
Most women in prison are mothers. Most of those moms were the primary caretakers of children before they went to prison, and plan to go back to living with their children after they get out. But mothering is already hard; doing it from behind bars is even harder. Sometimes incarcerated moms don’t even tell their kids where they are out of shame or fear for their children. If they do talk about it, communication can be very hard: calls are limited and expensive, writing letters requires literacy, paper, envelopes and stamps, and visits can mean a lot of travel, complicated rules, and very unfriendly surroundings.
But then moms finally get out, and it’s all easy, right? But it isn’t. Most moms have to find places
to live, ways to make money, often stay sober and healthy, among other things, and getting back custody of children is not easy even without those complications. Once mothers have their children back and they are living together in the community, things aren’t always easy. Reentering moms are already disadvantaged when it comes to job skills – having kids means more food and clothes and shoes to buy, and higher rent to pay. In addition, kids whose moms have been incarcerated are often dealing with extra challenges, such as anxiety, problems at school and behavioral troubles. But there is also no love like a mother’s love, and no matter the hurdles, formerly incarcerated moms also want to be there for their beloved children as role models and caretakers and best friends and moms.
In my book, Mothering and Desistance in Reentry, I write about the 100 interviews I did with formerly incarcerated mothers on exactly these topics. Women spoke to me about both the role that mothering has had in their criminal behavior (and the stopping of that behavior, also known as desistance) and also about themselves as women and people, independent of their roles as mothers.
The women spoke about prison being an opportunity for them, no matter how horrible, to get to know themselves away from the streets and sober. I write relatively often about the disgusting fact that prison has become, for mostly poor Black and brown women, the “room of one’s own” that Virginia Woolf wrote about so famously; I call it “a cell of one’s own.”
I am most proud of Chapter Five in the book, where I write about the way forward. Ideas such as prison nurseries, college behind bars, moving facilities closer to home, and perhaps a ”moms court” in the tradition of drug courts are important. However, we must also step out of the reform box and imagine a world without prisons. In the tradition of Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba, among many more, I suggest that we must imagine what kind justice we could achieve without cages, especially for mothers and their children. What do you imagine? How might we, for example, create a victims justice system rather than a criminal justice system? How might we use transformative and restorative justice to center victim and community transformation instead of focusing on punishment? How might we move beyond our bloodthirst in pursuit of true justice?
I also hope you’ll join me and some amazing activists at my book party this coming Wednesday 5/1/2019 at The State House in New Haven at 7:00pm. Please contact me at[email protected]or 917-664-2546 with any questions or to RSVP. You can also RSVP on Facebook athttps://www.facebook.com/events/824321921276498/ .
In power,
Venezia (Venice) Michalsen, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Justice
The effects of incarceration last far beyond the time someone is in prison. If someone you love has spent time in prison, they may likely still be facing some serious emotional and psychological traumas from their time away. Being a great support system for your loved one can be confusing if you are unsure of how to best help them reintegrate into society. Luckily, there are steps and resources you can use to help them build a new life they love and feel fully supported by people like you. Use these simple steps to help your newly-freed loved one feel supported and inspired to build a healthy fresh start.
Asking How You Can Help
The easiest way to begin your conversation and provide support is by simply asking your loved one what they need. Sometimes simple human interaction is the best way to reintegrate someone into society, since incarceration is an extremely lonely and isolating experience. Ask your loved one if there are any activities they’d like to do, or healthy habits you can practice with them to begin rebuilding their routine at home. People require different levels of support after incarceration, so your loved one may need some time to think about what they need before they accept any help. Be patient and consider these questions you can ask to enhance their new stage of life:
“How can I best support you right now?”
“What would make your day easier today?”
“What habits do you think will help you feel excited for the week?”
Get Educated
Sometimes supporting your newly-freed loved one requires some research on resources available to help them. Luckily, online and community resources are only growing in numbers as the stigma of incarceration is drifting from society. Do your best to consider mental health challenges associated with time in prison and learn warning signs of unhealthy coping mechanisms as they deal with the stress of reintegrating into society. Your loved one may be at risk for symptoms of alcoholism, depression, or anxiety, but these can be treated easily if you connect them with professional help early on. Getting educated with mental health resources can help you support your loved one by connecting them with professionals such as:
Licensed psychologists
Support groups specific to incarceration and the associated challenges
Job-reintroduction or social career services
Maximize Your Time
The easiest way to support your loved one after incarceration is to maximize the time you spend together. Incarceration sometimes causes people to value their time more, and your loved one may leave prison anxious to experience new things and make the most of their time. Joining them may give them the support they need and can add a pleasant social aspect into your time together. Think about wholesome activities that will help your loved one both reintegrate into society and feel fulfilled at the same time. Personal and professional development activities are a great place to start if you are looking for ideas on how to best spend your new quality time. Consider getting into the habit of activities such as:
Cooking classes or making the time to grocery shop for healthy food
Spending time outdoors
Learning how to support your newly-freed loved one is easier when you consder the things they have missed while incarcerated. You can protect their mental and physical health by staying updated on resources and allowing them to ask for help when they need it. Implementing healthy habits and trying new experiences together will also help you make the most of your quality time and enjoy the memories you do have. Do your best to follow these ideas and brainstorm ways to support your loved one after incarceration so they can integrate into this new stage feeling loved and supported.
Patrick Bailey is a professional writer who contributes to many blogs.
formerly incarcerated mothers on exactly these topics. Women spoke to me about both the role that mothering has had in their criminal behavior (and the stopping of that behavior, also known as desistance) and also about themselves as women and people, independent of their roles as mothers. 
