When Pamela Clifton was sentenced to prison for a drug offense in the late ’90s, she had two small children, then 4 and 7. Her husband had recently died, so she was their only living parent. When Clifton was incarcerated, the kids went into foster care, and her right to see her children — and their right to a relationship with their mother — was terminated.
“I never knew where my kids were, if they were safe, if they were happy,” Clifton told Colorado legislators in April. “When they terminated my rights, they told me I could write them a goodbye letter.”
Clifton was testifying in support of a Colorado law intended to make it more difficult to terminate parental rights because of long-term incarceration. Senate Bill 39, which passed this year with bipartisan support, requires courts to include incarcerated parents in dependency and neglect hearings, and to consider whether a child has a “meaningful and safe relationship” with an incarcerated parent before making a decision to terminate rights. Terminating parental rights is considered a kind of death sentence for families involved in the child welfare system because it is intended to sever bonds for the duration of childhood.
Colorado parents who have been incarcerated say the new law is an acknowledgement of something they’ve always known: People don’t stop being parents when they go to prison.
“Just because people made bad choices, doesn’t mean they don’t love their kids. Everyone deserves a chance to make things right,” says John A., who has seven children, some of whom he was able to stay in contact with while he was incarcerated and others he wasn’t. He asked that only his last initial be used to protect his family’s privacy.
While incarcerated, he said, “your children are the only hope you have. From the children’s point of view, they want to know that their dad is OK. They want to know that their dad loves them. They don’t want to feel like ‘Dad didn’t love me enough.’”
Parenting from jail or prison has never been easy. Advocates say that while this Colorado law represents progress toward keeping more families together, significant barriers remain.
Jails and prisons temporarily shut down in-person visits during COVID, and children lost crucial bonding time with their parents. Some current and former spouses, family members and foster families are too far away to visit, or unwilling or unable to bring children to regular visits with their parents. Phone calls are expensive, though that is set to change. Opportunities for in-person visits in prisons are limited to a few hours a week, and county jails are even more restrictive. And some of the most promising avenues for incarcerated mothers to maintain their relationships with their children shut down even before COVID, and haven’t returned.
Still, Colorado parents who have been incarcerated say there’s nothing more important to them — and their children.
Incarcerated for years, but still a mom
Terrina Flora-Alexander’s son Addison was just 6 years old when she was incarcerated. She was later convicted of second-degree murder. He still has memories of a warm family life before she suddenly went away.
Flora-Alexander tells her story to anyone who asks. She told it in September to a group of lawyers who had convened in Breckenridge for the annual conference of the Colorado Office of Respondent Parents’ Counsel, and then shared it on Facebook Live.
When Addison first climbed into her lap after she was sentenced to prison, he buried his face in her hair. It smelled like her, he told her. In the prison commissary, she’d been able to find the same shampoo she had always used, and she started smearing it on the gifts she sent to her son. Flora-Alexander crocheted him a blanket, and sent him a pair of socks with a message of love written on them. She wrote him letters all the time, telling him to do his best, telling him that she loved him and missed him. She kept in touch with his teachers. She called him.
“The most important thing in my life was my son,” Flora-Alexander says. She knew she had to fight to be in her child’s life, and that guided her decisions while she was incarcerated.
By a stroke of luck and through determination on Flora-Alexander’s part, the mother and child got access to a pioneering program at Denver Women’s Correctional Facility that allowed overnight visits at an apartment within the prison. Flora-Alexander was able to hold her child, and to teach him to make his bed and do dishes. They spent hours together every other weekend, for years.
“My mother’s presence in my life while she was incarcerated shaped the person who I am today,” Addison Shireman said in a video recording he made for the same conference. He was 21 by the time she left prison. Now he is stationed abroad as a military police officer. It was difficult growing up with his mother in prison — Mother’s Day was hard, and birthdays, he said. Still, he felt her unconditional love. “I always strive to be the best because of my mom. And she did that behind bars, which is insane.”
But their family’s experience isn’t the norm. For one thing, Flora-Alexander was never accused of child abuse or neglect, and her son wasn’t involved in the child welfare system, which would have introduced an additional level of complexity.
“Caseworkers were often ignoring incarcerated parents and behaving as if they weren’t able to reach them,” says Shawna Geiger, who is director of engagement for the Colorado Office of Respondent Parents’ Counsel, a state agency that represents low-income parents in dependency and neglect cases. Geiger advocated for the new law, saying it would help reduce the trauma of family separation.
Under Colorado law, courts can and often do terminate parental rights if a parent is incarcerated long term, like Flora-Alexander was. Judges frequently determine that parents can’t meet the requirements of a treatment plan from behind bars — steps like parenting classes, family time or substance abuse treatment that are often required of parents involved in dependency and neglect cases.
The newly passed law, which goes into effect Jan. 1, requires the Department of Human Services and the Department of Corrections to find opportunities for parents and children to have family time if desired, and requires caseworkers to consider what programs are available for incarcerated parents when they’re writing up treatment plans.
Flora-Alexander was among the parents who testified in support of the change.
Not enough opportunities for family time
Whether or not parents are involved with the child welfare system, opportunities for connection are often too scarce.
India Price has been incarcerated since April 2020, and is serving a 21-year prison term for assault. She writes letters to her children, who are now 14 and 17, twice a week, and she gets notes and photos back from them through the prison email system. But she hasn’t been able to see them.
“The biggest challenge I face is not being there physically to help more,” Price wrote in a letter from Denver Women’s Correctional Facility, where she lives. “It’s important to be a good parent so they don’t end up like me.”
The Apartment Program, which allowed children to visit their mothers in a home-like environment at the women’s prison in Denver, only ever served a small number of families. It shut down prior to 2016, according to a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Corrections.
“That program saved me and my son,” Flora-Alexander said at the conference in Breckenridge. The program closed when her son was about to turn 14. “It saved our family from second-generation incarceration. It saved my son from being involved in different situations because I was able to take accountability for my own actions. I was able to stand up for him, and advocate for him from inside.”
Families enrolled in the program say the reasons for shutting it down weren’t communicated clearly to them.
Kalena Rodriguez was out on bond for nearly four years after her crime, a violent abduction that followed years of selling drugs, she says. By the time she went to prison, she had three children; the youngest was just 5 months old, and the oldest around 7 or 8 — old enough to understand. She had a chance to say goodbye, and she still remembers her oldest boy’s cries.
The Apartment Program at Denver Women’s Correctional Facility was Rodriguez’ best shot at keeping a relationship with her three kids, but it was hard to get into. Any infraction was enough to disqualify someone.
“I set my goals high and I knew what I wanted to do. I taped a picture of my sons to my prison ID. I always remembered, ‘act like my sons are right next to me.’” It took a year, but she got in. When it shut down, Rodriguez says, “it was very, very difficult for my kids, my babies, because that was all they knew.”
Then, during the height of the COVID pandemic, family visits were cut off completely.
Krista Burkholder is a social worker who works for New Horizons Ministries. The program, which is affiliated with Skyline Mennonite Church in Cañon City, helps place the babies born to incarcerated mothers with foster families. Mothers who are in jail or prison seek them out in hopes that they can be reunited with their children after their release, and New Horizons Ministries sees regular visits as a crucial part of their job. That work became much harder during COVID, when visits were limited to video calls.
“The moms that were in prison over 2020, they did not have the bond with their kiddos that the moms I’m working with now have,” Burkholder says. “Everything was just a mess.”
Some programs that taught parenting skills were shut down during COVID, and have not resumed, according to advocates and people who are currently incarcerated.
The Colorado Department of Corrections declined an interview request. But a spokesperson said in an email that the rooms once used for the Apartment Program are now used for a mother-baby program for parents who give birth in prison. Infants can spend up to 8 hours a day there for the first 28 days of their lives.
Four families have used the mother-baby unit for visits from their newborns so far, according to the department’s emailed response to questions. Two-hour family days with planned activities for children and free time are also offered once a quarter and around holidays to residents of both Denver Women’s Correctional Facility and Denver Reception & Diagnostic Center, where new prisoners are housed.
Giving birth in prison
The pain of giving birth while incarcerated — and the separation of an infant from their mother — can be especially difficult for families to overcome without support.
Natalie McFarlane was 19 and pregnant when she went to prison for her role in a shooting that missed the intended target and instead wounded two girls, ages 7 and 13. She still has scars from the shackles that dug into her swollen ankles during her pregnancy. McFarlane was transferred to Denver Health during labor, and was permitted to hold her infant child for five hours only because a sympathetic nurse took a long lunch; it was supposed to be two hours. Then she was wheeled into a basement room in the hospital set aside for prisoners, and from there bused back to prison. It’s still painful for her to talk about, she said, even 16 years later.
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Visits with her daughter were everything. Her mother brought the baby twice a week. Later, McFarlane, too, was able to access the Apartment Program at Denver Women’s Correctional Facility.
McFarlane has been out of prison for six years now, and the rocky start to her relationship with her daughter still shows, she says. Her teenage daughter took awhile to get used to seeing McFarlane as her mother, after living with her grandmother for most of her life.
“It’s been hard. But if I didn’t have the Apartment Program it would be 10 times harder because we wouldn’t get that one-on-one bond you definitely need as a parent,” says McFarlane. She has friends in prison who never get to see their kids.
Parenting after prison
Most people who are incarcerated are released eventually. For parents, getting out of prison means negotiating a daunting set of challenges: the trauma of being separated from their children, the trauma of being behind bars, the trauma of whatever set them on the path to incarceration to begin with.
When Clifton was released, she says she learned that her 13-year-old daughter had been abused in foster care, and had been labeled “a handful.” Human services asked Clifton if she wanted her back. She did. Clifton’s younger child, though, had been adopted. She didn’t reunite with him until he turned 18, when he called her to ask if she would take him back too.
“They were both deeply scarred,” Clifton told legislators in the spring. Her family isn’t alone — she knows dozens of others who have been similarly shattered. “This story is old and so am I.”
Rodriguez, who was released in 2018, says she never stopped being part of her kids’ lives; she saw them regularly while she was behind bars. Still, it took her awhile, after she was released, to get used to being responsible for four people.
“I was being their friend more than their mom,” she said. Five years later, though, their relationship is strong. “It’s like (the separation) never even happened.”
Flora-Alexander now works for an Aurora-based program called Breaking Chains, Building Bonds, which helps parents navigate trauma as they rebuild relationships with their children.
On a recent fall day, the program’s attendees gathered for a graduation ceremony. The kids ran around outside and in an adjoining room, while their parents, in a circle, talked about what they appreciated about each other: their dedication to being good mothers and fathers, their willingness to try again after things fall apart, their commitment to the community they had built inside and outside prison walls.
Lori Foster’s 5-year-old daughter was there, seeking out her mother for comfort and snacks. Foster, who was in and out of jail and prison for most of her 20s and 30s, used to avoid gatherings like this because they were too painful. She had lost custody of her daughter, and it was hard to see other parents with their children. For a time, Foster was overwhelmed with guilt and shame, and she struggled to stay sober.
“There’s so much trauma I need to address,” she said. Foster has learned to do breathing exercises to ground herself, and to avoid triggers. With the support and encouragement of this group, Foster now has visitation rights, and she’s fighting for more time with her child.
“Now I have my daughter and she’s able to show up to events like this,” she said. “It’s a beautiful thing.”