Prisoners of Love: A Guide for Anyone Wanting to Cultivate, Maintain

By T.K. Cyan-Brock

Prisoners of Love 10th Anniversary edition is for the families and friends of the incarcerated and those who want to be supportive to someone going through this situation. It was written by families of the incarcerated with professional insights and advice on topics common to incarceration. Prisoners of Love is empowering but does not sugarcoat the reality of waiting for someone while they are incarcerated. It offers hope, inspiration, and how-to information designed to help the reader navigate through this often heartbreaking situation. Prisoners of Love will help you overcome obstacles and use this time to grow closer and grow better as individuals instead of let the system and situation break you down. When my fianc was sentenced to serve time in prison, I felt lost and alone. After reading Prisoners of Love, I realized that there was still hope for us. Prisoners of Love gave us the encouragement and guidance we needed to bring us through the most difficult time of our relationship.Margaret M. This is a wonderful book for the millions of people who have loved ones on the other side. I keep a copy by my bedside and refer to it when I need encouragement.Sharon, North Carolina T.K. Cyan-Brock is the founder of www.prisonersoflove.com a website helping the families of the incarcerated since 1996. She has filled the 10th Anniversary edition with even more information that has kept her own family and other families going during times of incarceration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 11, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450039604

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Copyright © 2011 by T.K. Cyan-Brock.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2010901748

ISBN: Hardcover    978-1-4500-3959-8

ISBN: Softcover      978-1-4500-3958-1

ISBN: E-book         978-1-4500-3960-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

Cover photographs generously contributed by the very talented photographers;

Jenny Terasaki and H.Koppdelaney

Author photograph by Brad Barton

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

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www.Xlibris.com

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

1.   Walls Don’t Stop Love, People Do

2.   Remember Me

3.   Pledge of Friendship, Pledge of Freedom, Pledge of Love

4.   Planting the Seeds of Love: Cultivating Relationships with the Incarcerated

5.   When Out of Sight Can’t Become . . . Out of Mind

6.   When Pen and Paper and Stamp Are All You Have to Say it All Mail Call In The Penitentiary

7.   The Importance of Letters

8.   Do to time

9.   But I Don’t Have the Time

10.   Intimacy Inside Prison Walls

11.   I Know it Sounds Crazy but We Want to Get Married

12.   Of Players and the Game of Love

13.   Divorce and Separation During Times of Incarceration

14.   Salvation

15.   Repairing a Broken Relationship with Anyone

16.   Death, Dying, and Grieving from Both Sides of the Walls

17.   My Hero Died While I Wore These Prison Chains

18.   On the Other Side of the Walls . . . Greg and Anne

19.   A Word about Suicide and Incarceration

20.   The Land of the Living Dead

21.   A Navigable Distance

22.   Trip Budget Planner

23.   A Voice on the Other End of the Phone

24.   I Can’t Do This Alone

25.   Depression and the Incarceration of A Loved One

26.   Inside Chaplaincy

27.   The Jailhouse Conversion For Beginners

28.   Happy Holidays?

29.   Illiteracy and the Prison Family

30.   Making of a Monster:

31.   Barbed Wire Parenting

32.   The High Cost $$$ of Love

33.   To Move or Not to Move

34.   One Woman’s Story of Anger and Redemption

35.   I’m So Angry! Creative Anger Management

36.   A Warrior’s Response To Anger

37.   The opportunity of Incarceration

38.   Our Last Kiss

39.   What Do You Mean You Don’t Know Where She Is?

40.   The fight for freedom

41.   Parole Packets and Parole Attorneys

42.   One Family Meets Parole Success One Day at a Time

43.   About Parole and Release

44.   Take Your Medicine

45.   Are You Blocking Your Own Good?

46.   Using the Time to Make a Better Life

47.   Choose a Side, any Side

Reading List

Epilogue

This was the cover of the original Prisoners of Love book published in 2000 by Dream Catcher books.

image 1.jpg

Dedicated to my beautiful, loving and caring mother, Raquel Chavez.

Art by Ceaser Chavez.

The writing in this book is dedicated to you and

Anne Rose-Pierce

Tony Coleman

Kenneth Malone

Jose Robles

And all my other fellow prisoners of love

who passed while we waited

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank God for answered prayers, lessons learned, and teaching me the true definition of family. I am indebted to all the inmates, their families, organizations, and correctional officers who made this book possible. Without their support, this book would still be a dream. I would also like to thank the academic community for embracing this book and using it as part of their course materials. Training the next generation of criminal justice professionals is the first step leading to positive, more innovative, and proactive changes in the future.

Thank you to my mother, Kathleen I. Rodgers, for dealing with the unexpected blessings that come with having me as a daughter and helping us when times get tough. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Thank you to our daughters Jezebel (Shannel) and Kendahl, who licked envelopes, folded letters, slept in tents and cars on long car trips, shared their feelings, and encouraged me in writing the book. I would also like to thank them for their sacrifices, sacrifices that wouldn’t have been necessary had I married someone with a 9-5 job on the outside.

Thank you to my husband and lifelong friend, Johnny, for having the courage to dream of a life and future, while still in chains, and inviting me to be his wife. Thank you also for the times during our marriage when you put my needs ahead of your own and offered me my freedom. You have added poetry and a special meaning to my life and showed me myself in a more flattering light.

Thanks to Carl Staley for being a good friend and financing me when I over-extended, buying stamps, and copies for the book instead of gas money and for driving my moving truck 1,200 miles so I could be closer to my husband.

Thanks to Tina Thrasher for riding in to save the day by helping me pull this all together, in the final days of writing the book the first time around, and for helping me retype the manuscript, this publication. Thank you to Eric Long for befriending me and doing some of the editing on a variety of other prison related stories I have written. Thank you to Larry R. Preddy who seems to believe in my greatness when there is a total lack of evidence to support that idea. I would also like to thank him for engaging in shameless promotion of both the book and other writing. I would like to thank Stan Crump, the web master for www.prisonersoflove.com, who has patiently waited for me to earn enough money to pay him for his web mastering of the website, which has helped thousands of people since 1997. He has been a Godsend. He is a good man.

Thank you to Kairos Outside, Kairos, Angel Tree, and all the other people who have helped us along our journey.

Thank you to all the people whose letters were received in numbers so great I could not respond.

Thank you to everyone at Dreamcatcher Books in Amarillo, and all the people who thought this project—a dream really—was worth contributing their time and money to make this book a reality and publish it for the first time.

A special thanks to the Center for Therapeutic Justice and Penny and Morgan for their support and belief in me and for allowing me to learn from them and participate as a facilitator and speaker in their programs. Thank you to Centerforce for their support and kindness in including me in their seminars.

Thank you to Tom Lagana for including me in his book, Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul.

Thank you to the people who put their jobs and families on the line to speak out in love. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Michael Bruno Ph.D. and Susan Bruno B.S., M. Ed Addicitons Therapist for final editing. Thank you everyone!

Rejoice in your hardship, for from hardship comes endurance, from endurance comes character, and from character comes hope, which does not disappoint us . . .—Romans 5:3-5

PREFACE

Your loved one has just been put in prison or juvenile detention and will be away for a very long time. Because no man is an island, you are affected too. In ways that surprise you, your world is crumbling. If this has happened to you then you need to know more about how to cope during this time, and you need to know that you are not alone.

In short, the friends and families of inmates need direction. They need companionship. They need to know how others overcame similar circumstances and kept their ties strong . . . They want to know about people around the country like themselves. This book strives to give them the information they need to keep going in these difficult times.

This book sprang out of our own family’s needs. This was the book I wished was around when our time began. In the beginning I wasn’t very supportive, not because it wasn’t in me but because I had no clue about prison life. What I didn’t know could fill volumes. I didn’t know that contact with incarcerated loved ones was even possible. I didn’t know how to locate them once I found out it was possible, and even if it was appropriate to tell my loved one about certain things happening in our lives. I didn’t know what to expect when I heard back from them.

In my extended family, the few people who went to prison went alone. No effort was made to seek family support for them, and often we were told that the family member was working out of state. That made giving support impossible. I was lost and didn’t know where to get started and because of that, my loved ones went years without hearing from me even though I thought about them every day. There came a day when being lost and letting a relationship fade was no longer an option because now my children and I know first hand the pain of separation and the challenges of having a loved one incarcerated. My husband is currently serving his 14th year of a life sentence.

We have maintained our relationship and weathered some tough times, as individuals and as a family with our two children from a previous marriage.

I did learn how to keep love alive and I am regular pen pals with several inmates, both female and male, in the United States. I am also pen pals with several families and close friends of inmates. We have gained a great deal from our friendships.

I have found that prisoners and their families are one of the last acceptable groups to persecute. I hope this book will serve to give families strength.

I am using the quilt as a metaphor for the book. I envisioned the book like a quilt: colorful, a patchwork of different people’s writings and ideas. Like the quilt the book is patterned after, Prisoners of Love will provide a comfort and beauty as well as serve, giving the families resources and places to turn to for information, comfort, and warmth.

Toni Cyan-Brock

October 3, 1997

Flagstaff, Arizona

That was my hope in 1997 as I started to write this book. It is hard to believe this is the tenth anniversary of the publication of Prisoners of Love (POL). It has been an incredible journey. Like most incredible journeys, it was wrought with ups and downs, disappointments and victories. When I set out to write this book, it was because I needed it. Ten years later, I still need it. I forget how to confront one situation or another, I grab this book and read what some of the writers did or what I used to do but have forgotten about, and it helps me. Like the quilt I was patterning the book after, there is no logical order to the placement of the stories because all of us find ourselves in different circumstances at very different times in the process.

I have learned a lot since the first edition was published. I was so naive when I set out to help the prison family community. I had no idea how the weight of even a fraction of the estimated 2.4 million incarcerated and the average of 10 people waiting on the outside would feel. It was almost unbearable to be confronted with that much pain and desperation without the resources to do anything about most of that heartache. I put everything I knew in this book and hoped it would be enough. I didn’t have anything more to offer.

My goal was to help myself cope with my husband’s incarceration and then use that information to help other people with their own families. It didn’t sound like a huge cause or too much at the time. I had the website www.prisonersoflove.com, and I thought that the families would get together there and help each other and the site would be a depository of practical advice. It worked. We would give to each other. It would be a place we could just vent. For a couple of years I had a newsletter, but I eventually couldn’t afford the postage required to mail it to everyone. I posted it on line for a while, but I wasn’t getting enough submissions from other writers and I couldn’t write it by myself and maintain a job and take care of my own family. Since then other support groups have popped up and I am thrilled. There is another site called prisonersoflove but it is not our site, ours is still the first one that pops up in search engines and is the oldest in existence. Our site ends in, .com. I failed to buy all the endings to the web addresses to protect the prisoners of love site. Since then I have bought up some of the domain names so it would make it easier to find ours.

I had no idea that I would get so much mail. I would get mail from prisoners and their families from all over the world. I had letters from England, South Africa and India; as well as from every state in the union. Most of the letters said the same thing: they had the same problems, different crimes, different relationships and different countries but the same struggles. I received so many requests for free copies of the book that I could not even afford the postage to write the people post cards to tell them I didn’t have the money to send the books out for free. I felt I had accidentally bitten off more than I could chew and there was no way to undo the situation. I had letters stacked in piles everywhere, largely unopened. I didn’t need to open them, I knew what they said and I couldn’t bear to hear of their heartache and not be able to do something to help. I would settle for praying for the people who wrote the letters and anyone they knew and feeling the guilt of not being able to send each person a book. That never seemed like enough, but I didn’t have any other choice. I donated some copies to institutions and churches along the way, but it was only a drop in the bucket.

In the meantime my own family was dealing with illness, parole turn downs, legal battles, the loss of jobs, and eventually our car and our home, as the parole turn downs ate away at my own health and ability to survive under the pressure. Still the letters for help rained down on us. I am not special; I am just a woman trying to keep her family together while going through the same things other families go through, when a member or members are incarcerated. I just keep putting one foot in front of the other and press forward.

I tried all sorts of things trying to get the books or information to the people who needed them including giving talks, addressing criminal justice committees, writing letters asking for prison reform, going on television and being interviewed on the radio and writing articles that people could use to start their own books, or campaigns, or groups to help in their own communities. I searched for organizations that would publish the book, and distribute it if I gave them the rights, to no avail. I even facilitated groups in jails, talked to classes of criminal justice majors, and taught classes in juvenile detention centers thinking that maybe in some small way I could stop the tide of incarceration by just one person, and save one family this heartache. For all that, I cannot tell you that anything, aside from this book, had a positive effect on anyone. I did, however, learn that the problems faced are more difficult than anything I ever imagined at the beginning of this journey and the answers are far from simple. I also know the book you hold in your hand has helped me and helped a few thousand other people who have read it. I hope it empowers you to do what you can do and not be paralyzed by what you cannot do.

Keep Strong!

Like the weed that breaks through the sidewalk to bask in the sun, our letters, calls and visits defy the walls that separate us and keep love alive.—T. K. Cyan-Brock

Return to Agape

Return to making the effort.

Realize that it’s true . . .

Even worthless creatures to man

. . . are God’s creatures too.

One-on-one forgiveness is a golden ray.

After all, pain too is inflicted in this way.

Return to Agape a love that’s true

A forgiving love

Is the love I feel for you.

A love of exclusion is fostered by these walls.

A whole society of men and women are lost within these prison halls.

Return to Agape and turn a tide that’s due

And replace its annihilation with a love that’s true.

—T.K. Cyan-Brock

This poem was inspired by a submission entitled "A Meditation on

Agape and signed only by A fellow prisoner." It touched me deeply.

In addition, you will find portions of this anonymous gift throughout this book.

image 2.jpg

Russell Walker III, Mecklenburg County Jail

WALLS DON’T STOP LOVE, PEOPLE DO

Are you like me? If you’re like me, you have seen one or two undercover investigations on television this week. The story details the get-tough policy on crime or the way that over 2.4 million men, women, and children are incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. Maybe the talking head exposed to the chagrin of the nation of television viewers how prisoners have it easy. If you are like me, maybe you have, in passing, heard people talking at the next table. They were saying that all criminals deserve what they get or that they don’t get enough of the bad they deserve. If you’re like me, just for a moment you feel your body tense, and you try to justify what you know with what you have just heard.

A silent scream of anguish choked off at the throat yells, What about me? What about my family? I’m serving time too, and I have done nothing! You suppressed the words because you know the reply already, He/She should have thought about that before committing the crime. You lower your head for a moment, Yes they should have . . . That didn’t happen and you raise your head and continue on with your day . . . with your life.

If you are like me, then sometimes you and your family are watching your favorite TV show only to hear a character spouting pop psychology with an air of knowing, Spouses of prisoners are ill, and seeking some sort of subconscious Band-Aid™ from an impossible love, they say. You swallow just for a moment and hope you don’t have to confront questions from your children, children who don’t understand why their family is singled out as defective. If you are like me, no matter how many times this happens . . . it can’t matter, guilt or innocence or the gravity of the crime can’t matter because a member of your family is incarcerated. Someone you love is not home tonight and someone you care about is in danger twenty-four hours a day, held behind bars and glass and razor wire.

Men and women wearing uniforms and badges watch someone you love. They are people sworn to uphold the law; and if you are lucky, and you pray that you are, those men and women take their oath seriously. Because you know from what your loved ones tell you, along with the people whom you encounter on visiting day, that some aren’t there to uphold the law: they are there because in that environment they can wield absolute power.

If you are like me, on those visits to see your loved one, you hold your head up high, against the judgment of people who think they know you. They don’t care if you are a good citizen, if you attend church, if you are a mother, son, or a friend or a criminal in your own right. You can tell at a glance that, to some, you are Trash visiting trash. You come up with ways to boost how you feel about yourself in their presence so that you don’t look down, or downtrodden, when you see your friend or relative. I am a worthy human being, You may think. Oh, it may take different forms, I make more money than you, I’m closer to God, I’m more loved, I’m more educated, or a thousand other things, anything to keep that uniform with power over your family from eating away at your pride. As you go through the visiting process, you hand over your identity, walk through the gates and make the walk to the room where you will see someone you deeply love in chains. You might hear your husband, son, wife, daughter, mother or father, even your friend, called by a number, a last name or worse, Inmate or Offender. You wait and try not to imagine what the other visitors are like outside the prison walls. Some are frightening in appearance and look more like television convicts than visitors and that may disturb you. At the same time, you may feel pride that you are in a room with these people. You sit next to a wife who has remained faithful to her husband for all the years he has been incarcerated. A father, closer to the grave than he is to his youth, who has visited his son regularly for twenty-four years. A handful of children smile at their parents through glass, teenagers talk on telephones to a parent they have grown up loving while never being able to feel their touch.

You look around and see happy faces in the visiting area. You hear laughter, and you see warm embraces. Embraces that in some cases have to last a lifetime. If you are like me, at the moment you see your loved one, all the unpleasantness and rude remarks fade and are replaced by a sense of peace.

This time your loved one looks healthy and you breathe a sigh of relief. A few minutes earlier, another inmate came out with a blackened eye. He greeted family with a smile that defied the evidence of a broken face. You swallowed hard hoping you never have to shore up the tears like that woman and smile while all the while her heart is breaking.

If you are like me, you are proud to stand next to that woman and hope that if your loved one ever greets you like that, you will handle it with that kind of grace. If you are like me, you know no man or woman with family or friends serves their time alone. You too are serving a sentence, a sentence on the outside, and if you are strong, you serve your time easy, but when you are weak, you serve your time hard. It is better to be strong. Even the strongest have moments of weakness and crumble under the pressure.

The pain of separation is the hardest on the children who run around the visiting room. A child always serves their time hard. I have seen the parent on the other-side try to separate their children from the reality of their jailed parent’s incarceration, but it is seldom successful. Even a loathed parent is sometimes missed. Sometimes, in missing that parent, they seek to become like the parent just to be close to them in their mind, even for a moment. They emulate their incarcerated parent . . . even in breaking the law. Sometimes it is better that they face the mistake of the elder and learn to make other decisions based on counsel from behind a glass panel.

If you are like me, you know someone whose relationship with a loved one is actually better when that person is incarcerated. I have listened to one friend tell me of her hopes and dreams when her husband is incarcerated. He writes her and tells her a fairy-tale they both wish were true. They underestimate the power of his addiction to drugs and alcohol. They forget its lure when life throws you curves, as life often does.

The heaven they share during times of incarceration soon turns to a living hell when he is released. The devotion that is appreciated when he is in, the love they share, is eclipsed by the need for drugs, and that need turns him to crime and with it paranoia and secrets. A chasm opens between them until he is picked up again. He is incarcerated, and gets cleaner (I say cleaner instead of clean because anything you can get on the street can be found in lockups.) He becomes a loving, caring husband and father once again and hopes and dreams build anew, and we hope that this time they will come true. Sometimes they do.

However, prison sentences are becoming longer and mandatory minimums keep some inmates in past the point when addiction loses its grip and long past the point where a prisoner has family to come home to and dreams to share with them.

If you are like me, you feel there has got to be a better way. A man at a vending machine greets you, smiling, and his smile fades. You go first he says, I can’t make up my mind what to get . . . He pauses, then continues as you deposit your money in the machine and hear it clink. It just occurred to me as I was looking at my 19 year old son that I will be dead long before he is released, . . . and so will his mother. Who will be out there for him in forty-five years? Catching himself, he regains his happy demeanor and says, That looks good. I think I’ll have one of what you’re having. He slips his coins into the machine with shaking hands and smiles as you walk away. His hands are stained with dirt from years of hard work. Under normal circumstances, you may not have noticed him. His hair is fading, his face creased from sun. He isn’t like you. He isn’t like anyone you really know, or maybe he is just like you and you just noticed. The pain you share is your only bond. This pain can only be understood by those with whom you share the visitor’s waiting room. Only here for this limited time, you are not unique. Here you are among others who see and know first hand that it is truly, Crime and PUNISHMENT, not rehabilitation, not reform.

You may believe in right and wrong. You probably believe that violence, drugs, or stealing should stop, could stop. You may have even voted for tougher laws, but you look around and in an instant you know that this is not the way to do it. This, for all the money invested, is not working, not in the long run, not for your family, not for the victims and not for our future as a nation and world . . . this is not building . . . this is destroying the future for the convenience of today. For small crimes this doesn’t prepare someone to be a better citizen, and for the larger crimes, there is no retribution, for it is impossible to get back what has been taken.

If you are like me, you leave with an emotional firestorm barely hidden behind your eyes. You know more than ever that you are all your loved one has, and you want to support your family or friend and you search for words, search for ways. This book is for those people: people like me who want to love through the bars, make the time apart count, and hope for a better day.

We Are Doing Time:

The family of an incarcerated individual also does time. The absence is felt deeply. I am not saying every incarcerated individual is loved, because prisons are great depositories for the unloved of society. The families and friends that find their loved one ripped away from them for years at a time are hurting.

One day I was working on this book, and a man came up to me. This man had been very kind to me when I needed some help with a computer question a few weeks earlier, I was pleased to see him. He inquired about the book and I told him. He immediately told me that the incarcerated person should have thought about the hurt they would cause their families by committing their crime, before they did the crimes. He also said the families should suffer as part of the punishment of the prisoners. He said the families should turn their backs on the inmates. I looked at this man, a well-educated man with an above average income, and all I could think about was his ignorance. He tried to engage me in a debate, but the subject is without debate, and I excused myself to write, more convinced than ever that this book was needed.

The biggest question I have to deal with is what to say when people ask where my husband is. I want to be able to say, My husband is incarcerated, and move on, but there are people in the world to whom it is not safe to tell my truths. I think we all have those people in our lives. For the most part, I try to avoid them. Sometimes that isn’t possible, and I choose to tell the truth with or without explanation or avoid the topic. On occasion I lie. What do you do? When people’s attitudes make it unsafe to tell your truth, then it may force you to lie. Lies hurt people, mostly the person who tells them. What do those lies do to your family? I have been caught lying. When confronted I say, I lied because it was none of your business, and I didn’t want to be so blunt as to tell you. I resent loving in secret. My family deserves better. I deserve better.

What does your television tell children about their parents, or siblings? Seldom does a night go by that prisoners aren’t the butt of a joke, or a convict’s character is assailed with sweeping generalizations that could very well be seen to apply to our loved ones behind bars and our families . . . us. We are dysfunctional, our children more prone to crime, our love misguided and dysfunctional. How do you deal with that?

I remember watching one of our favorite shows with my children, and they described women who marry convicts as unable to commit to real relationships. They called them victims in a small paragraph of dialogue that assailed me in front of my children. I swallowed hard hoping that maybe they hadn’t been paying attention. My youngest daughter turned to me and said, Boy Mom I bet that made you feel great. I could barely nod in agreement after having been humiliated in my own living-room. What do you do in a case like that? I am proud of our family, every member, and the message I get from the media and society is that I’m not supposed to be.

What You Can Do:

1.)       Talk to your children about television shows and the images they see. Ask them how they feel it reflects on their family. Stress the distinction between bad actions and bad people. God didn’t make stick figures, and all people have good and bad qualities.

2.)       To combat the negativity one must be aware of what children are being told in school or church, and possibly by well meaning friends and family members. This means that time has to be made to talk with your children. Ask questions and be prepared to listen. It isn’t always easy. Word questions in a way that the question cannot be answered with a simple, Yes or No. For example: What did you learn in school today? Instead of, How was School today? The best questions to ask are the ones you wish your parents would have asked you. Listen. Listen. Listen.

3.)       Let your children know in as many ways possible that they have choices and so did their family member, and the one bad choice doesn’t mean that you have to continue to make bad choices. Teach them about the consequences of their actions and personal responsibility.

4.)       Reprimand the action without attacking the intelligence or heart of the child. When they have been wronged, make the time to stand beside them and see it through, and when they are in the wrong, tell them that their actions were wrong, and that they need to be willing to accept the consequences of their actions good or bad. Help them accept those consequences knowing that you still love them and continue to stand by them.

5.)       If drugs are an issue you need to be more open than most because the many programs that are offered in public schools often characterize drug users as stupid, dangerous, and frightening bad people. They show that children of drug offenders often suffer birth defects. The problems with drugs in America are rampant. The enforcement of drug laws is viewed as an all-out war because of the destruction caused to the fabric of the nation due to the destruction of the family, rise in violence, and health crises these drugs produce. However, the self-image these anti-drug statements can generate can hurt the very people they are designed to help. The get tough on drugs programs were designed to keep kids off drugs by showing them the cost in life and property and make them an undesirable option. This is a noble idea. However, the message can take a toll on your child. If your child knows your family member is on drugs or incarcerated for a drug-related offense, the message can lead to feelings of shame and unworthiness, because these scary statements about drug abusers becomes personalized. Instead of hearing about birth defects, a child could feel that the message is that they are defective. Instead of getting the message that drugs are bad, they could get the message that their drug-using mom or their brother is bad and ultimately by association so are they. While I think these programs are fundamentally good, I encourage you to read the materials and go over them with your child.

6.)       Trace your family tree and talk about the positive things associated with your family. Even a family that has a generational history of incarceration has within it a spirit of independence and survival that can be a thing of pride.

7.)       Become active in your community and your school, and speak out when unfair labels are assigned to your family. There are ways to isolate bad behavior without labeling a person bad and treating a family as unacceptable. Unfortunately, it is up to us as individuals to protect our families from being pigeonholed into being a convenient statistic.

8.)       Join a families of prisoners group; if nothing else, you will feel that you aren’t alone and stay abreast of changes in policy that may affect your family.

9.)       There are many programs offered to the families of inmates, and some of them are listed in the appendix. They can offer counseling and friendship for family members and friends. Programs spring up from time to time, so keep abreast of what is offered in each institution. It often varies greatly from unit to unit.

REMEMBER ME

By J.R. Eide

Texas

Prison’s no place for anyone to be.

There’s no room for the meek nor place for the mild.

I toss in my bed, for the nights are so lonely.

I face the days with dread, as they’re so weary.

Grant me this prayer like you did for the thief

As you gave your life for whosoever believes in you.

Please come to this prison where I sit alone,

Surrounded by razor wire, . . . guard towers and walls of stone,

Broken hearted, forgotten and lost.

On the ash heap of regret, where my life was tossed.

Come to this prison, enter my cell,

Save me, Forgive me, in this man-made hell.

And if in this life, no home here I see,

Give me your kingdom of forgiveness,

Lord Please . . . Remember me!

PLEDGE OF FRIENDSHIP, PLEDGE OF FREEDOM, PLEDGE OF LOVE

I can help you open your cage

But I can’t make you fly.

I can show you all the knowledge the world has to offer

But I can’t make you learn.

I can show you the glory of a caterpillar’s change to a beautiful butterfly

But I can’t make you change.

The power to change is YOURS and YOURS ALONE.

You have the power at any given moment to be exactly who you want to be.

If you seize that power or not isn’t up to me.

If it were: You could fly, and learn and change but it would be to suit me . . .

Neither you nor I would truly be free.

My greatest gift to you is to give you the opportunity to succeed or fail of your own will.

To cultivate your own life and explore what it brings

It is a gift that also gives joy to me.

Because, it frees me to see what my own rich life yields,

It doesn’t mean I don’t care.

I do!

I trust you to learn the lessons living your own life will reveal.

I believe in you!

I believe you will know what is right and wrong and have the dignity not to run from your destiny if you find you are either one.

It doesn’t mean I turn a deaf ear, bury my head in the sand and pretend not to care.

It means I support you whatever comes.

I support you from my own strength without becoming your rescuer: riding in to save the day, or lecture, judge or place guilt. Instead, I simply remain the hand you can hold every single day. When we are together or oceans or years apart. The voice that you hear telling you, It’s okay.

If there is any advice, I think I need to give

My prayer is that I keep it to myself.

If I fail to do so, I hope I can count on you to look past my words to my intent

My intent is to love you in an unconditional way, to be open to receive it, in kind, when it is what you desire to give me.

Each day we live is a complete universe with infinite possibilities to grow for us to seize.

It is my hope that you and I both seize the possibilities each day that we exist.

Without fear, mistrust or blame so we can grow stronger with each passing day to live as the children God intended us to be instead of merely slaves.

—T.K. Cyan-Brock

PLANTING THE SEEDS OF LOVE: CULTIVATING RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE INCARCERATED

A lonely woman sits in her cell. Photos of children line