If you didn’t know that it is broken, didn’t know that the American criminal justice system is terribly, tragically broken, that’s okay … I didn’t either. Not until I lived it. But now that I have lived it, I’m telling you. And now you have a choice, too. Do you walk away?
You can. But the problem is not going away. Of the 2 million people locked up in America today, 98% of them will come home eventually. Home may mean your neighborhood, your church, your job. That’s what Redeem-Her is all about: preparing women to come home and preparing communities to support them once they get there.
In the past few months, we have discovered that this means a lot of different things. Sometimes it means something as simple as taking a pair of socks out of your drawer to send to a woman who has none. Other times it means something as complicated as finding housing for a woman with nowhere to go and nothing but the clothes on her back. It could mean something as fun as delivering Christmas presents to an inmate’s children. At other times it could mean something as painful as standing next to a woman in court as those same children are taken away from her forever. It can be something as natural as giving a woman a shoulder to cry on, or something as bizarre as storing someone else’s cremated mother in your storage unit (an example I speak from experience about!).
When it comes to helping women come home, we know that we don’t have all the answers. We’re barely home ourselves. Some of us are not even home yet. But we also know that every hurdle we make it over is a hurdle we can help somebody else over. And I guess that’s what it comes down to: You can create programs, open centers, fund grants and write books, but, in the end, the best person to help a woman returning to society after a season of incarceration, is another woman who’s been there. And that’s who we are: Women who’ve been there.
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Stacey Kindt, reunited with her two children.
On September 13, 2004, I was released from prison and began to rebuild a life on the outside.
Ojore Lutalo, a man who spent over 16 years in isolation and remains incarcerated today at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, NJ said, “If something is not right, you don’t just walk away from it and leave it for the next person to fix,” and I guess that is what Redeem-Her is all about for me.
Something is not right. I have the choice: to leave it all behind and walk away to my comfortable home in the suburbs, or to fix it. I choose to fix it. And to tell as many others as I can that it needs to be fixed.
To contact us:
Women Who’ve Been There
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