Supporting an inmate family.. What we wish you know

I'm actually pretty open about my life as an inmate wife.  My husband still is my best friend and my daughter's hero. We married in 2003 after living together for 2 years. My husband went to prison in 2006 and we have been an inmate family since then.  We are ten years in and have 30 years to go but we always hope that he won't have to serve the whole thing.  What he did is really not important to this blog.  I'm not ashamed of it but that is his story and by rights he should be the one to talk about it. I am posting this as the wife of an inmate and in this post, so I'm going to go over the basics of how to support a family of an inmate. Now why would you want to know this?

 Lets start with the statistics:

The United States contains 4 percent of the prison population as well as 22% of the global prison population.

According to study done in 2014, "...more than 2.7 million children have a parent who is incarcerated in the United States and more than 10 million children in this country will experience a parent incarcerated at some point in their lives...  That is 1 in 28 children in this country who right now have a parent in prison,"

(https://nrccfi.camden.rutgers.edu/files/nrccfi-fact-sheet-2014.pdf)   Trust me, you might not be aware of it, but you know someone living the life of an inmate family.  

So how can you be of help? Well lets start with what NOT to do, like:

Don't feel it's your responsibility to tell an inmate family member what you think of what their loved one did.

Your opinion is not wanted or needed unless it is specificity asked for and often times the family already knows what the average person thinks about what happened anyway. Telling the family your opinion only makes YOU feel better and can in fact destroy your relationship with the family you are “supposed” to be supporting. The family is already going through a very confusing, emotional, and scary time, your judgment does nothing to help with this, so leave your judgments at home.

You aren't allowed to tell us how to feel.

This is especially true for children. My daughter faced this to a limited extent when my husband went to prison. Most of the time it was unsaid but clearly implied that she shouldn't “love” her father because he did a bad thing. (However, if the inmate had harmed the child, then this is different scenario and requires careful approach. Still, like with rule one it is better to hold back unless specially asked for.) On the whole, a child loves his or her parents and by putting their parents down, you are perhaps unintentionally putting the child down as well. My daughter was 13 and very vocal about what she thought of people's “helpful” advice on “forgetting her father. She would always point out that what he did was wrong, but he was still her father and no one was going to change that. She was old enough to defend herself, however other children are not. So if you want to help an inmate family, please watch how you phrase things around their children.

The inmate wife or husband, doesn't want to hear your BS either. She has made her decision or is in the process of it. She is fully capable of sorting through her individual feelings on her own, and if she needs help she will ask you.

The next? Goes a lot with the one previous. DON'T ASSUME… ANYTHING

The beginning of the prison journey is pretty scary. Most of the time there is so much to adjust to that we are often very distracted. So we forget things, we neglect things, or we just stop doing things for awhile. Don't automatically get upset if you forget your birthday party or a dinner date we were supposed to have together. More than likely we forgot or don't feel like celebrating. Either way it has nothing to do with you, and a lot to do with us. You might assume that going to a party would distract us, but in actuality it just might all be too much right now.

Remember our lives is not behind the bars it's BETWEEN them. For the dedicated prison family, we are never fully outside and never fully inside. We are somewhere in between. Our wardrobe will take a beating as we now must have, as one of my friends call it, “going to visit” clothes. If we want to save a lot of time going through the metal detector before the visit, we buy things we know won't set it off. And this can include anything from metal buttons on your blue jeans to something as trivia as the under wires in our bras. Some facilities will wand you down but for a long term inmate family this is just too much of a time waiting stress and we just throw on a sports bra for visits. My daughter and I spent the first year looking for shoes that didn't set it off (Dr. Scholls are generally your best bet) and we don't buy any jewelery.

If we live close enough to visit, our schedule includes going to and from visiting and visiting time. Those that can afford phone calls, their lives also revolve around when they are going to call. Our time with our loved ones is still very limited. Our phone calls are monitored, our visitation is monitored and even our mail is monitored. If we mess up, we stand the chance of losing all three privileges. If our loved one messes up, (or doesn't but get blames for it anyway), then we can still lose contact, either through them going to Seg, or even losing the privilege to call, have visits or even mail for a given period of time. So when we can have contact it is precious to us and if it coincides with something we had planned to do with you. We will change our plans. You may be our dearest friend, we may love you to death but our family needs our attention first. So just understand this and don't make it more difficult for us.

Keep in mind that fear plays a big part in our lives now. When my husband was first in prison, he got his ribs bruised by an overzealous CO who had not idea what a PTSD trigger was. This CO then made it a point to try to be intimidating to my daughter and me. We got through this nonviolently despite the CO playing with my triggers. This is mainly because if I had reacted out towards his behavior, that would have been a permanent loss of visits for my daughter and me… That is through the rest of my husband's sentence. This is always a concern, so we do whatever we can not to lose our visits. It only takes a second to lose them and a lot of vigilance to keep them. We also deal with lock downs (when there is no visits, no phone calls, and no mail for a temporary period of time), Visiting room drama, traffic issues, time constraints, advocating for our family members and on and on. We adapt and we deal but it is a part of our lives.

You can help in simple ways.

1. You can listen to our fears and not pass judgment.

2. You can ask how we are doing or even about our inmate if you can do so without judgment.

3. You can be a solid presence in the lives of a child of an inmate. You don't have to agree with what their parent did but you can let the child know that with you it's OK to talk about their loved one in prison and it's OK to love their parent regardless of what they did.

4. You can volunteer to keep the children for a visit, so that the wife or husband can have an individual visit with their spouse or just to give their parent some breathing room.

5. Something as simple as giving an extra postage stamp goes a long way in the life of a inmate family.

6. Most of all you can love them. Many of us (myself included) lost a lot of family due to my decision to remain with my husband. I act like it don't bother me but some times in some ways I miss them. I live with my DECISION because I love my husband and my daughter but having other people who I can turn to when life gets nasty, means a great deal.

Ultimately, like everyone else, An inmate family needs love, patience and the security that people out here can about them as much as their loved one in there. It's not an easy life even if we did choose it, our only crime is that we love someone who messed up. Our punishment is the judgment of society because we won't abandon them. If you know a family member, you have ultimately two choices. You can either helping hand by supporting us regardless of our choice or you can be one of those who judge us. We expect you to be the latter, we cherish those who do the former.

It's your choice. We have made ours.

Thanks for listening.