The FIRST PrisonCare Compassion Team

If you want to get technical, the FIRST PrisonCare Compassion Team was just me.

I always tell people that you can adopt a prison by yourself , and I have beta-tested that model for you! It really can begin with just one caring person.

J had begun to tell me about some of the people he was getting to know, and some of these people had been great sources of encouragement to him in the dark, early days of his sentence. I asked him if it would be okay if I wrote to a couple of them, doing my dorky mom-thing, thanking them for being nice to my kid. He said that was fine with him, so I did.

Just maybe 3 or 4 letters at first. 

And they wrote back.

And I wrote back.

And so forth. Shampoo, rinse, repeat.

I enjoy writing, and I enjoy people, so I was enjoying writing to people who enjoyed writing to me.

But I noticed that the tone of the letters was really special. These people sounded surprised by my encourager language. I routinely responded to things they told me about themselves with words like, "So cool that you know how to _____, and that you're willing to teach others how to do it. I respect the willingness to share your talents with other people," or "It sounds like you really enjoyed travel before you were incarcerated. I can imagine it's hard to have lost that." 

Some of them told me that they could tell I thought of them as an actual person. 

(Read that sentence above one more time, please.)

(The fact that it would feel unusual for someone to think of you as an "actual person" is tragic.) 

I shared about this with a couple of friends, and they agreed that this looked like an opening for me to do something good in the wake of something catastrophic in my own life. Writing to people in prison and choosing to be a cheerleader in their lives was a good fit for my personality and for my longing to build something beautiful after crawling through so much rubble. 

And then came COVID-19. The prison went on lockdown. For months and months and months they were on lockdown. They couldn't go to programs. They couldn't go to yard. But they could still receive letters. 

So I asked my church community if there was anyone who would like to come alongside me and write to these guys I had begun to get to know, alleviating the boredom and depression the long period of lockdown was causing. I got a few takers.

The next piece of things was where the idea for PrisonCare was actually born: my friends from church, willing hearts in their bodies, and pen and paper at their disposal, asked THE question:
WHAT DO I SAY?????

I realized that because my initial point of connection had been my kid, I started writing to friends of J's, so it had made those awkward first letters much easier for me to write. I did a little research on best practices (and asked my incarcerated friends what they liked and didn't like in a first letter), and got to work on a "first letter template" that would help my friends from church break the ice. 



With a little bit of broader connection now in place, we asked our pen-pals on the inside for suggestions of other people who might like to get a letter, and they created introductions with new friends. In a very weird way, COVID and lockdown was a gift to PrisonCare, because it took things out of my personal, solo sphere and moved them into a collaborative effort.




​And then came the next piece of the PrisonCare vision: the determination to view our prison as a neighborhood, and to care about the CO's and other staff there, as well as the incarcerated residents. 

I had become hungry for an education about life inside prisons, and I was doing lots of research about Correctional Officers. I wanted to understand these people who lived in close proximity to my kid, and who had charge of his custody, care, and control.

One day, I saw a profile picture frame on a CO's Facebook that slammed me:

Around the CO's picture was a frame that said, "I can't stay home to save lives. I'm a corrections officer."

I can't effectively put into words what that moment did in my head and heart, but it was something profound. I began talking to our little team of pen-pals about the tremendously challenging lifestyle a CO leads, and we learned so much that we had never known before. There was so much that we felt we should have known about these essential workers, and we realized that we had never given prison staff a moment's thought before now. 

We began brainstorming ways we might be able to show support and appreciation for staff in the prison. We're still trying to figure that part out, to be perfectly honest; this has been the most difficult part of the puzzle to work.

​Connecting with staff is suspect (for good reason...I get it), and because PrisonCare is committed to caring for EVERYONE on the inside of a facility, the fear of inmates manipulating staff is always there. The Us vs. Them world of prisons makes a group like PrisonCare sound like an oxymoron.

People have to be on one side or the other, right? You can't be supporting people in both kinds of uniforms.

But our vision not ridiculous. It's challenging, but it's not impossible to care for everyone inside a prison neighborhood, and as we connect on the national level with more and more professional organizations for corrections officers, staff, and administrators, we are learning more about this delicate, nuanced relationship, and how it might work well in the future.

In the meantime, we continue to care for staff BY caring for residents!

The more connected residents are, the healthier they are. The more they are encouraged to work toward personal goals they have set for themselves, the more hopeful they are. The more they are supported in learning to communicate effectively, to do solo work in trauma recovery even when no counseling is available, to grow in emotional regulation skills...all of this resident growth means the neighborhood's environment will become that much less toxic.

A less toxic environment means a safer workplace for COs and caseworkers, and safer is better. So while I continue to look for opportunities to do more in direct support of staff, we'll keep supporting them from inside the cells. 

And that's the story of the FIRST PrisonCare Compassion Team!

Do you have an origin story to share? How did YOU begin caring for a prison neighborhood?

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