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Melissa: It's The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Every day nearly half a million people are held in American jails. Most have not been convicted, they're simply awaiting trial and unable to afford bail. For the women held in our jails, according to the prison policy initiative, more than 80% of them are mothers. Every Mother's Day since 2017, the national bailout has brought together Black led organizations to raise money and bailout as many mothers and caregivers as possible to ensure they can spend Mother's Day with their children. Rodreshia Russaw is Executive Director of The Ordinary People Society. I talked with her about her participation in the Momma’s Day Bailout.
Rodreshia: The Ordinary People Society is a national organization that was formed in 2001 from Pastor Kenneth Glasgow here in Dothan, Alabama to address the criminal justice system and also voting rights throughout not only the state of Alabama but other Southern states. We are a non-profit faith-based organization that works on the ground, considered grassroots, that works with those that are formally or currently incarcerated, impacted by homelessness and other various crises.
Melissa: Tell me about Momma’s Day Bailout.
Rodreshia: The national bailout, which is founded Momma’s Day Bailout, is something that we have been a partner in for the past six years. Every day, every Mother's Day, a collective group of organizers and grassroot organizations get together and we bail out mothers. This is very critical for us because we know that many folks, especially that are incarcerated women that can't afford bail, and many of them are also in sitting in their local jails off of minor charges such as traffic charges or a failure to appear in court. This allows us for those who are in economical situations, financial situations, that they don't have the ability to make bond, this allows us to go in and make bond for them so that they can return back to their families.
Melissa: I just want to remind folks, and correct me if I'm wrong here, when you're talking about bail money for jail, you're talking about folks who have not been adjudicated guilty. These are folks just being held.
Rodreshia: That is correct. Many of them have not been convicted at all of a crime, and so they are just being held. It can be a simple bond. We're talking about people that are still locked up, women that are locked up in cages off of minor charges. Even the failure in the court system for not appearing in court. We have many clients that we serve through this bailout who never receive the proper notice to return to court, addresses change and that was a failure on their part that it was never changed. We have to get down to what the root of the problem is of why this keeps occurring.
Melissa: I spoke with Qiana Johnson, she's Founder of Life After Release, an organization led by formally incarcerated women and dedicated to supporting and empowering women who've been convicted or incarcerated. She talked to me about partnering with the national bailout.
Qiana: When I came home I was a released from prison on August 21st 2017, and I did my very first bailout in 2018. This is the part of the work that gives me probably the most solace, is to be able to take a woman, a mother, a caregiver, out of a cage and bring her home with her family for Mother's Day because I missed two years, two Mother's Days away from my sons, and so to be able to bring these mother's home and put them in place with their children where they belong is so comforting to me.
Melissa: Can you talk to us about what those two Mothers' Days were like for you and for your family?
Qiana: It was horrible. I think this is the first time that I can talk about it since coming home without actually crying, but it's because I'm able to work with mothers and have them come home and be with their children now that I'm not going to cry this time. It was horrible. It was racing to the phone to be able to get a 15 minute phone call in with my son just to hear them tell me happy Mother's Day. It was the shame associated with not being there with them, and on my last Mother's Day before I came home it was the uncertainty of not knowing when I was going to come home because they had messed up the paperwork that caused me to stay in prison six months longer.
It was a lot of emotions that I went through. I was angry. I was hurt. I was miserable. I was sad. Some of them all at the same time.
Melissa: How did you work to keep mothering, to keep parenting, even during the time that you were jailed?
Qiana: It was intuitive. It was natural. I tell folks all the time when a mother is removed from her surroundings it is devastating because everybody in her life starts to disappear. When you remove a man or a father from the community what starts to happen is people start to gather around and support him, the baby mamas, the mama's mamas, the grandmamas, the aunties, everybody comes and starts to support that man, but when a woman is removed everybody starts to separate themselves from her. They start to shame her. They start to ignore her. It was all of those things that were that was happening for me.
Being able to walk in my truth now is something that is allowing for others to walk in their truth and for others to be able to come home and to do something that is without shame, or without guilt, and to be able to actually heal. Most women, when they go to jail they go to jail for the things that are like poverty related. For theft, or for fraud, or for some type of poverty related crime. Very seldomly will you see something that people think is preventable like, "Why don't you just go to school? Why don't you just get a job?" There's a lot of shame, and miseducation, and misunderstanding that is associated when a woman goes to prison because society believes why did you have to do that?
We blame the women for their incarceration. Whereas, for the men, we comfort and we find ways out. That's the reason why the society has not caught up to the fact that we are jailing our women now and it's time for the women. They haven't caught up to that yet.
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Melissa: My thanks to Qiana Johnson, Founder of Life After Release, and Rodreshia Russaw who is Executive Director of The Ordinary People Society.
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