100 Years Of Support For Prison Families With Barbara Allan And Carolyn Esparza

 

Prisons have been around since the beginning of time, and the family members on the outside are the often forgotten victims of incarceration. Joining Julia Lazareck on the show today are Barbara Allan of Prison Families Anonymous and Carolyn Esparza of the InterNational Prisoners Family Conference. Both are founders of their organizations and authored books that contain their wisdom. They also have immense experience in dealing with the prison system and helping families of the incarcerated.

In this podcast, they share their personal stories and provide helpful information that anyone the criminal justice system has touched can benefit from. They understand the shame and stigma that families experience when a loved one is incarcerated and are advocates for change. Learn about their journeys and organizations that are open to everyone on the prison family journey.

Their books, Doing Our Time on the Outside and The Unvarnished Truth about the Prison Family Journey, along with Prison: The Hidden Sentence, can be purchased on Amazon.

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Listen to the podcast here:

100 Years Of Support For Prison Families With Barbara Allan And Carolyn Esparza

Thank you, Julia. Thank you for having me. I started Prison Families Anonymous as a grassroots group back in 1967. My husband had been incarcerated. He committed a crime that made headlines and it was all over town. I was a second-grade school teacher and I had to face people. I had to go back to school and teach and go back into the community with what I felt was a stigma. I felt very alone and I had no idea how to negotiate at a system that I knew nothing about. I never knew anyone who had been arrested, tried. It was all a whole new world for me. I put my foot in it and there was nobody to help me. I felt as if I was going to drown. As I started visiting my husband in the county jail, I met people in the jail who were in the same predicament I was.

I reached out to them because I intrinsically knew that they would probably be the only ones who knew how I was feeling. In talking with people and meeting people, we’d get together at someone’s house usually mine because I had two very young children. We started talking and sharing our feelings. It grew into a formal organization, which we call Prison Families Anonymous because of the stigma. We wanted to promise people anonymity and confidentiality if they so desired as we reached out to the community and started speaking, Rotary clubs and churches about the impact of incarceration on the family. We started a weekly support group for the families where they could go and talk about anything that was on their mind, any of the feelings they had, ask any of the questions that they had. Once a month, we would have a speaker from the system. It just grew. There was no plan. It happened because there was a need.

I knew I wasn’t alone. I knew that the things that were happening to me were real. Sometimes when you’re involved in a system that I call a non-system, you begin to think that maybe you’re a little crazy. These things can’t be happening. It’s unreal. You find out by talking to others. “No, this has happened to me. I feel the same way. I got through it.” Before I started Prison Families Anonymous, I had been going to Al-Anon meetings. Al-Anon is for the families of relatives of those who have a problem with alcohol, it’s the other side of the coin of AA. I heard a lot of things that I thought could help our families like, “Take your eyes off him. Take care of yourself, let go.” All the wonderful things that I have told other people and continue to tell them, and not things I invented. They’ve been known to relieve some of the stress and to give people the opportunity to find ways of helping themselves. That’s why sharing information, strength and hope takes a lot of the burden off about families.

Things happen when there is a need. Share on X

It would help me. Up to this day, it helps me as I am in the golden years. If I then have the contact with all these wonderful people out there, I’ve made lifelong friends from, as we call our programs, Prison Families and Carolyn’s InterNational Prisoners families, we become families. We may not be biological families, but we’re certainly extended family. There are people that you care about because you go through an experience that could be the worst thing that ever happened to you in your life. We survived it together, the strength and just hanging on to one another. If hanging onto a world, if nothing else, I can get through it because you got through it. I say that it’s a ripple. You throw a stone in the water and it ripples, you help somebody. They go back to their sister, to their child. You never know how many people you’ve affected, but one day at a time, hopefully, while you’re waiting to change the world, you can change it one person at a time.

Thank you.

I’m delighted to do that and appreciate the opportunity to always share about the conference. Thank you for having me. The conference is a spin-off of prison family support groups. We had a program for children of prisoners. We did a lot of work with children. We had a support group for them, as well as for their loved ones, their caregivers who were taking care of them during the time that their parent was in prison. We were doing a lot of support for them, giving them a lot more confidence, tearing down some of the stigmas that they were all dealing with. What we were noticing though is that the community was not very supportive of them. It came to me one day is that if we wanted the community to support them, we had to introduce these families more directly to the community.

It was because people don’t know the families of prisoners. They don’t even know that they know someone who’s been in prison that they don’t accept them. They don’t understand who they are. They’re afraid of them. It came to me like, “How can you introduce prison families to the larger community?” For some reason, the idea of having a conference and inviting people from the larger community came to mind. Unfortunately, the plan didn’t work. When you invite people from the community, from different social service organizations, from different religious organizations, we directly invited them for years to attend, and rarely did anyone come forth that was not directly involved with incarceration. It’s still that way to a certain extent. Although we made some breakthroughs in the past years, with the legal community. We think we’re going to be having more people from the criminal justice system join us in this. Hopefully, that will mushroom out into the larger community where businesses and grocery stores, or just anybody out in the community will get to know who these people are that have been affected by incarceration.

The important thing is that has been for many years is that this conference has meant so much to the families that come, to the caregivers of children who are taking care of children while their loved one is incarcerated, to people who provide social services. We do have a number of people come that attend that are in education. They are educating people to become criminal justice employees in the future. There’s a different take on it once they come to the conference. They then realize that prison families are human beings with all the attributes of any other person, and they could teach that in the classroom. Most of them are university professors who come. Maybe they come at first to get more points for their education, more CEUs as they were. What they find when they get there, Barbara just mentioned, the amazing, beautiful people that we have met through these conferences. It was extraordinary.

Some of the best people I’ve ever met in my entire life met at this conference. When I say the best, I mean, the most caring, the most intelligent, the most supportive people that I’ve had come into my life I’ve met through this conference, and others feel that way, too. Barbara started using the term extended family. I have been using it myself. It’s that they have become our extended families. People from all around the world now because we’ve become an international conference. People have come to us. With the COVID-19 problem that we’re having right now, we’ve had a bit of a kibosh on that. People have come from Europe, from Africa. We have all the continents that have been represented at the conference. In 2020, we had to go to a virtual conference. We were very concerned about that because one of the great things about the conference has been the opportunity to provide hands-on support to one another, to listen to each other’s problems and concerns.

If people needed to cry, they cried. They needed to laugh together, they laugh together. You could reach out and give each other a hug during the difficult times. We thought that wasn’t going to be able to happen with the virtual conference. We were wrong about that. It turned out to be a very interactive conference. It’s a lot of fun. When it was over with, people were saying it was just like being there. You couldn’t tell if you’d never been to the conference before the difference. People enjoyed being able to share with one another, whether it was virtual or live. It’s that opportunity to provide support, care, concern and then awareness. Educating one another about the best ways to deal with certain difficult issues of being a prison family.

The educational part of the conference is there, but the supportive part is what makes it a very special place and brings us together as a large extended family. We have to keep it going. We’re already planning for our 2021 annual conference. We already know it’s going to be another virtual conference because we’re not going to wait around and try to figure out if we’re going to be able to have a live conference. Until we’re forced to have a virtual conference, we’re just going to go ahead and do it as virtual. I hope that in the years to come, we’ll come back together as a live conference. We do continue to support each other, but it’s more informal than having a weekly or a monthly group that formally comes together. Between conferences throughout the years, we do get together in different ways. We sometimes have the Zoom meetings. Now that we can do this, we have a newsletter that goes out, approximately maybe once a month. Another thing that this conference has gained the opportunity to do is have a real formal advocacy.

We have what is called the Advocacy In Action Coalition. People that have attended the conferences and joined the conference formally. They’re all listed on our website as supporters of the Advocacy In Action Coalition. There’s a task force that has formed outside of the conference. We meet once a month also to do active advocacy. If a family is having a serious problem with say the medical care at a certain prison, we put our name behind that and say that, “We, as a coalition, are very concerned about the inadequate medical care that’s being provided that people have and are actually dying as a result of the lack of medical care in our prisons.” We can develop some documents that validate the advocacy that we’re doing, the research for doing that advocacy. We developed research that tells us that this advocacy is valid and needed, and we need the prisons and the criminal justice system as a whole to make some modifications. It’s a system that if it was doing its job well, would be closing itself down. As we all know, the prison system has grown and grown. There’s no sign that it will ever stop growing.

What it should be doing is lessening the need for incarceration. We see that it’s not doing that. We advocate for more humane treatment of all people. It doesn’t matter who they are. We should be treating our people as humanely as possible. We should be encouraging the involvement of families in the incarceration process. We should be encouraging that because families should be seen as a support, as a resource for the prisoners to prepare them to come home and be successful. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the way that it’s been. Families have been ousted from the criminal justice system. They’re a bothersome group because we do advocate for our loved ones once they’re incarcerated. There’s a lot that we’re doing, educating, advocacy, support and encouraging one another. The conferences are a resource in many ways.

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That was how the advocacy component of the conference started. I wish I could remember all the numbers. The first step we took toward advocacy was to have the people present at the conference, sit down and talk about how the relationship should look between the criminal justice system and the individual families of the incarcerated people. That was where we came up with the idea that we should be treating our families humanely. We knew that, but the system didn’t seem to know that family should be treated as a resource and not as a bother or as trouble.

I have it here in my book, “As affirmed at the 2012 National Prisoners Family Conference and formally adopted at the 2013 National Prison Family.”

Thank you for the dates. It’s moving into several years that we started that. That was the beginning of advocacy. We have the Advocacy In Action Coalition, which makes mentally to develop even more resources for advocacy.

As a historian, I guess I can speak of the criminal justice system. When I became involved with this many years ago, there was no place to turn. There was no one out there. It was totally underground. I never knew anyone who had been arrested. Most of the people who I was meeting through going visiting and trying to expand our base of people, felt alone. I am so thrilled because as I see the conference and so many young people coming, spreading the word, talking about it, and you have on Facebook, the Facebook groups. Many of these people met at your conference, Carolyn. That’s wonderful to know that no one will ever have to go through this experience by themselves because of the resources out there that you, Julia, and Carolyn, and the people that I’ve met throughout the years are taking the reins. They’re doing something particularly the advocacy. When I was first involved in this, everything I did, I did by myself and it was scary. It was frightening. I’m happy that will never happen again.

We have a whole lot more power, I would say to use that word, because it’s not about power. It’s about being empowered, but we have a lot more clout, if you will, when we do things together. One of the things that the conference has done is bring various support groups together from all over the country, from other countries. The more of us that come together and support one another in our actions, the more power we have as a whole. We’re able to say that the criminal justice system and what needs to provide better medical care. We need to be treating people more humanely as a whole. When one organization or one individual certainly doesn’t have the power to say that, to have any great effect.

As if we’re saying that as a collaborative, we’re saying that as a body. I remember when I first got involved in this, there was a group that decided that they were going to climb the steps of the Supreme Court building in DC and chain themselves to the pillars outside of it to draw attention, to say the death penalty or anything. We might all agree about the topic and may be there’s a place for that draws attention to it. That’s not for all of us. Not all of us are going to climb the steps of the Supreme Court building and chain ourselves to the pillars.

To give another aspect of advocacy, a different group of people will hear the different ways that we advocate. When we advocate as a body, as opposed to one little individual group, we have more power. We have more clout. We become more credible. We have people in the education field who are doing the legitimate research, who are validating the advocacy that we’re doing. We had someone come to the conference, for example, who is a professor at a credible university who has done research on how COVID-19 has affected the prison family because of the loved ones that are in prison that can’t escape the COVID. It’s right there with them. Many have already died from it inside of prisons. They did actual research. Thousands of families have been interviewed and question and that gives credibility to our advocacy. It gives us a validation that we have a need that is legitimate. We can do that as a group whereas we can’t get that validation as individuals.

The more voices out there, the more effect we’ll have. I like to mention the off-Broadway performance. For the voices of the families, we’re doing an off-Broadway performance. Hopefully, when the COVID becomes more manageable, we’ll be on Broadway. We have a theater, one block off-Broadway, but it’s called Shared Sentences. It talks to the public about what it’s like to share a sentence with somebody who was incarcerated. The general public, the more they know, then they might be more inclined to listen to us and to see us. That’s so important that they see us as people and not as the wife of a prisoner, the kid of a prisoner. Hopefully, that will make some impact, but there are various ways of trying to reach our goals. The one thing that I’ve found with this group, with the InterNational Prisoners Family Conference, we found that we can do it together. We have the same goals. We may go about reaching them in different ways, but our goals are the same. We never would have known one another, the three of us here.

That’s so important, Barbara when you mentioned the play and the different ways that we can humanize the prison family. We’ve authored books, yours is more biographical than mine is a more social service type of book, how to navigate the system. People are lecturing in classrooms. People are visiting classrooms. It used to be that someone would get out of prison and never talk about it again. They’d never wanted to talk about prison. They’d never want to acknowledge that even been in prison. For decades, nothing happened with regard to addressing some of the shortfalls of our criminal justice system. Now we have people going into the classroom and saying, “I was in prison.” We have many people coming out of prison that are becoming attorneys so that they can correct some of the flaws with the criminal justice system. We also have people that are writing poetry. One of the ladies that comes to the conference has written some powerful, emotionally driven poetry about what it’s like to be the wife of a prisoner. That humanizes the wife of a prisoner, just telling their stories in so many different ways on radio shows, on television shows. People are seeing more people come out and talk about it in public.

One of the things I most enjoyed was going to the colleges. Any time I went to speak and I always went to criminal justice classes, the people who will be the future police officers, correction officers, attorneys, whatever, I always tried to bring a formerly incarcerated person with me. It made such a difference. I was going for a number of years to a class taught by our police commissioner here in the county I live. He has since passed away. Every semester and I would not only go with families, but I bring someone. I would bring a sex offender. Let them look at this person as a human being. I’ve tried to explain to them that when you arrest someone, when you go into the home, think of the family who’s there. You go in and push them aside, but there’s much to be done and so little time left to do with.

I think of a sheriff that a former sheriff actually in town, I used to live in. We had done some work with where he was working after he retired as sheriff. We were telling him that we were working with children of prisoners and how painful it was for children to have a loved one, a parent, a cousin, sometimes an uncle or aunt in prison. The sheriff, the tears began to well up in his eyes. I said, “I didn’t mean to upset you.” He said, “No.” He said, “It’s reflecting back on all the harm we inflicted on children when we burst into their house, crashed into their windows, and walked over their beds to get to the person we were trying to arrest. We never gave a thought to the harm that was caused in the children that were in that house.” I think about him often and how talking about this brought that to his attention way too late for him, but not too late for him to explain to other people the harm they were causing. They weren’t taking into account that these were human beings, that these children had feelings, that these children were now traumatized for life because of some of the ways they treated them when they went in and to arrest their parents.

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I also liked speaking to the Bar Association, to the attorneys who are out there, collecting the money from the families and often, will say, “You’re not my client. I don’t have to talk to you.” Yet we’re the ones paying you, bringing that to their attention, and also telling them how they should speak to the families of their clients. I told them, and I tell them when I can, “You remind these people that they need that HIPAA form. Remind them.”

They’re not going to talk to them. I put the HIPAA reminder in the newsletter because every six months the prisons are telling the families, they won’t give them information because the inmate did not fill out a new HIPAA form. It’s a big secret that they’re getting medical care.

These are the important little things that the families don’t know. That’s something else that we share at our support group meetings. I say our meetings are information, strength and hope.

The prisons and I got this from an attorney. An attorney who has done very little of any criminal justice prior to one client, he undertook because he had befriended the family at their church. He had tried to get medical records. He had tried to get behavioral records to help this client of his, he called her a client, the inmate to try to help her with her parole. He was not aware that the prison had lied to him. They told him that he couldn’t have that information. He was her attorney and they couldn’t have that information. It’s because he’d never done criminal justice stuff before, he didn’t know he did have the right to have it. There were a lot of things I had to educate him about. It was a real eye-opener to him to realize how much he’d been duped. They had treated him with great disrespect. He’d gone to visit the client and they made him wait three hours to bring her down to see him, which was unheard of.

The states are different.

I tell them, “You have a right to call the prison.” They don’t even think that they have that right. Those walls are up there not just to keep people inside, but to keep us out. They will do anything to keep us out. We are a pain in the neck. We cause people to have to work. I’m not saying that correction officers are all don’t want to work, but their lives are easier. They also blame the families for the contraband.

 

To the visitors in general.

I’ve said it for many years, as a matter of fact, an article I wrote was read into the constitutional record many years ago about contraband and how much of it is being brought in by the employees of the institution. I know that none of my moms who come to my support group meeting would ever. We’re delighted that “He stopped drinking for the first time in years.” He’s not using drugs. We are not going to bring it in. I don’t argue with the fact that some of the young kids go to visit their boyfriends, they’re manipulated, and so on. It’s not the families in general.

It’s rare that they’re not the ones that primarily brings stuff there.

A part of that book was written by an inmate who provides some interesting and informative information about what goes on inside the prison and what families need to be aware of if they’re going to help their loved one come out and have a very productive and successful future.

When we advocate as a body, as opposed to one little individual group, we have more power, more clout, and we become more credible. Share on X

It’s another way of reaching out to the public to develop that awareness is through documentaries. There are other documentaries I would like to know about more of them. People bring them to the conference that we can be able to show them so that we can even further humanize the prison family.

There are so much. I think about Barbara because she’s been doing this for so many years. I’ve been doing this by myself. I didn’t even think about how long for 45, 50 years as a social worker. I didn’t even have any family members affected by the system until after I got involved professionally. Now, I have some family members, including my mother, who at the age of 60 was falsely arrested and incarcerated, but that was after I was already involved. I had some knowledge and knew how to address some of these issues. It didn’t stop her from being permanently traumatized by the system, but at least it probably minimized it in some ways.

I was able to stop some things from happening because I already knew about them. It doesn’t hurt to know about and educate yourself to the criminal justice system, whether or not you have been involved. People that haven’t personally been involved, don’t want to know. They’re doing themselves disfavor because the system just continues to grow. We could go into that. It’s important to grab what people like Barbara and myself, and pretty soon you too, Julia have to offer because we’re not going to be around forever. It becomes more evident every day, I guess that we’re not going to be here. We want to leave behind as much of the information that we have. I’m not speaking for you, Barbara, but I’m sure you feel that way.

Very much so. As a matter of fact, every day as I approached the later years of my life, every phone call I get is I can tell Julia. I can tell my friend, Serena, who has a group working with the women. It’s a great burden off our shoulders when we know that we don’t have to be the only conduit for this knowledge.

 

We’re seeing some younger faces come into the system. I remember I had lunch one day with a friend of mine that was very involved with the criminal justice system through her church, as a matter of fact. She looked across the table at me and she said, “It’s just us little old gray hair, ladies.” Some of us don’t have gray hair. I started thinking about who came to our meetings, the support meetings, the advocacy meetings? It was very mature people who came. I started thinking we need to pull in some younger blood, some fresh faces to be able to carry this on, but they need to educate themselves to take advantage of the information that we’ve gathered over these past many years to carry on into the future.

Carolyn, I think we both left legacies.

I certainly hope so. I believe so. It wasn’t my intent in the beginning, but it became more and more my intent as time went on is to leave it behind and to leave some good information behind.

My intent at the beginning was to survive, just to get through this, and when there’s the time to get to the other side.

Thank you for having us.

Important Links:

• Prison Families Anonymous
• InterNational Prisoners Family Conference
• Al-Anon
• AA
• Advocacy In Action Coalition
• Prison Family Bill of Rights
• The Unvarnished Truth about the Prison Family Journey
• Doing Our Time on the Outside
• Prison: The Hidden Sentence
• The Faces of Mass Incarceration

About Barbara Allan

Barbara Allan was a schoolteacher, wife, and mother who had no contact with the criminal justice system until 1966 when her husband was imprisoned. As she tried to deal with her feelings of isolation and confusion, she found there were others out there that were experiencing the same pain.

She founded Prison Families Anonymous (PFA) and has helped thousands of people over the years. Barbara published her journey in “Doing Our Time on the Outside”. She’s spoken before legislators, senate committees, and commissioners.

She wrote articles and one was published in the Congressional Record. Barbara has been a leader in the community advocating for change to help those affected by incarceration.

About Carolyn Esparza

Carolyn Esparza is founder, president and conference chair of the InterNational Prisoner’s Family Conference. She started the conference in 2008 in an effort to bring people together to educate, support, and bring awareness to the impacts of incarceration on the prison family: those incarcerated and those on the outside.

Through her work as a social worker, she helped many people that were affected by incarceration. She has helped thousands of people over the years and continues her work.

Carolyn is also a speaker and author. She published “The Unvarnished Truth About The Prison Family Journey.” Carolyn has been a leader in the community advocating for change to help those affected by incarceration.

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