NEWS FEATURE: A `Summer Camp’ for Jailed Moms and Their Kids

c. 2004 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ In a training room of the city jail, Joyce Morris and her 10-year-old daughter Kathryn instinctively held hands. It was something they hadn’t done for six months. On this mid-July day, they had just begun a unique experience _ a “summer camp” for incarcerated mothers and children designed […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ In a training room of the city jail, Joyce Morris and her 10-year-old daughter Kathryn instinctively held hands. It was something they hadn’t done for six months.

On this mid-July day, they had just begun a unique experience _ a “summer camp” for incarcerated mothers and children designed by Hope House, a Washington faith-based organization.


Staffers of Hope House and The Rebecca Project for Human Rights coordinated a get-acquainted game called “Zip, Zop, Zap” and arts and crafts projects to help break the ice after months of separation.

But what did Kathryn like best?

“It’s four things,” said the sixth-grade honor roll student who couldn’t sleep the night before the reunion. “My mom. My mom. And my mom. And my mom.”

Carol Fennelly, director of Hope House, has developed similar summer camps in other parts of the country for imprisoned fathers and their children, but this was the first time she had worked with mothers in jail after receiving a request from the D.C. Department of Corrections.

“When someone opens that kind of door … it’s just irresponsible and unfaithful, in my opinion, to walk by,” said Fennelly, a Roman Catholic who founded Hope House in 1998. “I think that God opens doors and God opened that door and we have to walk in.”

The program opened with nine mothers, dressed in black Hope House T-shirts over their jail uniforms, parading into the room and greeting their children by singing “The Greatest Love of All.” Their first line was: “I believe the children are our future.”

Swaying and clapping their hands, the women sang strongly, as a tear rolled down one mother’s cheek.

After the song _ part of a welcoming program they were asked to prepare for their children _ the mothers were permitted to hug their kids, some of whom had not touched them since their incarceration began.


Emotions continued to run high as the women took turns at a podium before their seated children and read poems expressing apology, agony and redemption. Many had to pause to collect themselves in the midst of words that tumbled out as tears _ both children’s and adult’s _ flowed.

“I know there is a God because I won’t be away too long,” said one mother, whose two daughters joined her at the camp program. “I also know that I have hurt you and what I’ve done is wrong.”

The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found in 1996 that 70 percent of female inmates had a child who was still a minor. Based on that percentage, they estimate that about 54,000 mothers of minor children were housed in local jails across the country in 2002.

Odie Washington, director of the District of Columbia’s Department of Corrections, said the jail holds between 115 and 150 women, often on charges related to theft or substance abuse. Some are awaiting trial, serving six-month to one-year sentences, or awaiting transfer to a federal facility.

“In the correctional system, one thing that we sometimes forget is that female offenders, unlike male offenders, are still parents and they’re active parents and it’s important that we assist them in maintaining those family contacts,” Washington said in an interview. “Any little way that we can assist the female to maintain that bond, I think, is going to pay dividends for the children, for the mother and … for society as a whole.”

Over the course of their first of three days together, mothers and children alike marveled at each other.


“I didn’t know she knew how to do that,” said eight-year-old Shalonda Freeman of the artistic talents of her mother, Katrina Holloway.

Her mom, who had been in jail for a year, had crafted a delicate spiral of lace around a plastic bottle that was being transformed into a musical shaker to accompany drums later in the program.

Chanda Hinton, a 37-year-old mother, admired how her “baby,” 13-year-old Samuel Cooley, had grown.

“He’s such a big boy,” said Hinton, recently released from a detoxification unit and headed to a court-ordered halfway house. “He’s braver than what I thought he was. I’m proud of him. He’s more mature than I thought he was.”

Together, using glitter glue and tissue paper accented with a zebralike pattern, mother and son had turned a bottle into an instrument and a wastebasket into a drum.

Fennelly said she sees her prison ministry as a variation on the biblical theme about visiting the prisoner.

“It didn’t say `Bring the kids’ but I think it means that,” she said.

Morris, 38, who was convicted of distribution of cocaine, was thrilled to be with the youngest of her three children. She had talked with her daughter daily by phone but chose to have her stay away from “noncontact” visits in which inmates speak on a phone to visitors on the other side of a glass partition.


“I’m enjoying this time with my daughter,” said Morris, who anticipates a Dec. 28 release. “Besides giving birth to my daughter, this is the best day of my life.”

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