For mothers incarcerated in Illinois prisons, staying connected to their children can feel almost impossible. But through the Reunification Ride program led by the Women’s Justice Institute, families are finding hope, healing, and precious time together.
On Community Voices, listeners met Tierney Brosamer, an incarcerated mother at Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln, her mother Alison Behle of Lincoln, and Alexis Mansfield of the Women’s Justice Institute. Together, they shared how monthly Reunification Ride visits help preserve the bond between mothers and children during incarceration.
Tierney’s daughter Allie was not yet one year old when her mother entered prison. Now approaching age three, Allie still lights up every time she sees her mom. Thanks to the Reunification Ride, those visits happen in a family-centered setting filled with crafts, games, meals, and room to simply be together — a dramatic contrast from traditional prison visitation rooms.
Unfortunately, when somebody's sentenced to prison, we don't really track what happens to their kids.Alexis Mansfield, Women's Justice Institute
“It’s a couple of hours where we’re just being moms,” Tierney said.
The Women’s Justice Institute says more than 80% of incarcerated women in Illinois are mothers. Yet many children affected by incarceration are never formally tracked, leaving grandparents and caregivers to step in quietly behind the scenes. Alison, who now raises Allie full-time, said consistency and connection have been critical for her granddaughter’s emotional well-being.
Founded in 2016, the Reunification Ride now serves hundreds of families through monthly visits and special family events. Organizers say maintaining parent-child relationships reduces trauma, strengthens families, and reminds incarcerated mothers that they are still parents first.
“Children need their moms no matter where their moms are,” Mansfield said.
Transcripted by AI with human review for readability and accuracy.
Randy Eccles:
This is Community Voices on 91.9 UIS. I'm co-host Randy Eccles. We like to get to know our neighbors. Today we are going up to Lincoln into Logan Correctional Center to talk with one of our neighbors. We are going to be speaking with Tierney Brosamer, also her mom, Alison Behle, and Alexis Mansfield, who is part of an organization called Women's Justice Institute. What is the Women's Justice Institute, Alexis?
Alexis Mansfield:
The Women's Justice Institute is a think and do tank focused on ending the epidemic of the mass incarceration of women. We look at how we can promote decarceration, reduce the women's prison population, as well as to improve well-being and outcomes for women and their children.
We do a lot of policy work, as well as a lot of things like supporting people during reentry, helping people who are incarcerated.
We also are the home of a program called the Reunification Ride, which is a monthly program that brings guardians and children to visit their moms at Logan Correctional Center. As part of that, we have annual family fun days in addition to a monthly bus for the Reunification Ride, where we have an outdoor field day for moms and kids inside of both Logan and, this year for the first time, to Decatur Correctional Center.
Randy Eccles:
How many moms are incarcerated and need to see their kids?
Alexis Mansfield:
Far too many. Unfortunately, most statistics are on a national level. About 60% of women in prison are mothers of minor children. In Illinois, about 80, 82% of... of women are mothers. We don't have the exact number who are mothers of minor children. Unfortunately, when somebody's sentenced to prison, we don't really track what happens to their kids. We don't have this data that says this is how many children somebody has, this is the support they might need, this is where they're going when their parents are taken away. In fact, we lose a lot of children when their parents are taken away or we don't even know what happens to them.
It's really important to keep those bonds to help promote safety for children and to make sure that they know not abandoned, that they are still part of a family, and for their moms to also be able to be together with their children however possible.
Randy Eccles:
Tierney, you're incarcerated at Logan. For how long are you going to be there?
Tierney Brosamer:
I'm going to be incarcerated for close to a year longer. I've already been incarcerated for over a year. Altogether, close to two years, I'll be incarcerated.
Randy Eccles:
You have just over a two-year-old daughter?
Tierney Brosamer:
I do. I have a daughter who will be 3 next week. When I became incarcerated, she was not 1 yet.
Randy Eccles:
How frequently have you gotten to see her?
Tierney Brosamer:
I've gotten to see her at least twice a month in person. There may have been one month that I've seen her once.
I'm always so grateful to see her with the Reunification Ride. Our visits are a little different when it's with the Reunification Ride opposed to just the regular correctional center visits.
Randy Eccles:
How is that different as opposed to coming to visit? Reunification Ride makes it different in what way?
Tierney Brosamer:
It begins with the atmosphere. When the ladies come with the Women's Justice Institute's Reunification Ride, they come with the intention on a visit geared towards children and families and connection. In our visiting room for a regular visit, we're held to the standard of sit in one place and try to keep the noise level down. It was a tense environment. To be able to have a couple of hours where we're just being moms, the normal interaction with our kids, that's the main difference. So our Reunification Ride visits are in a large gym, opposed to at a table with a few toys in the visiting room. We also are able to get up, move around. My daughter, she's almost three, she likes me to play with her on the floor. We sit on the floor and play with toys. I chase her around a little bit. She's not very fast, but she loves to be chased.
Randy Eccles:
Has she been to both types of visitations? How does she react to the more formal?
Tierney Brosamer:
She's been to both. She's still young, so she's learning. She follows our lead. She does enjoy the community feeling we get with the reunification visits. There are other kids, there are toys, there are crafts. We love to do arts and crafts together. That's another main difference. We've got different activities, and for a child as small as my daughter, her attention span is short. To share those moments, it's really important.
Randy Eccles:
Alison, you're the grandma, the mom, and you take care of getting Tierney's daughter to Logan. How has that been for you?
Alison Behle:
It's actually been rather nice. Maintaining that bond between her and her daughter is extremely important. Family to us is everything. Maintaining that bond and getting her there to see her mom is incredibly important. As for all of the family that gets to see their loved ones.
Randy Eccles:
Are you taking care of Tierney's daughter on a daily basis?
Alison Behle:
Yes. We've been taking care of Allie since she was 10 months old. She's been in our care. She certainly knows who her mom is and that I'm her grandma. We just keep the bond connected as much as we can. We do video visits as well once a week. It's a strong connection for sure.
Randy Eccles:
It's a key moment in life, those first couple years, to get any visitation would seem to be pretty critical on both ends.
Can you see the difference it makes to Allie when she gets to see her mom?
Alison Behle:
Yeah, the first few years are extremely critical in maintaining relationships. She knows her mom. She always has. This little girl has always been super connected and very close to her mom, where she shies away from other individuals. Even if there's a week between or two weeks between, she still cannot wait. She lights up and cannot wait to see her mom. We just keep that connection strong.
Randy Eccles:
Does she understand how her relationship with her mom is a little different because of the incarceration?
Alison Behle:
I think she's too young to understand the difference at this point to really understand that. But I think she questions on the other hand. She goes to school, she goes to daycare every day, and moms show up, and then g-mama and papa shows up in place of her mom, and she has questions, but she knows mama will be there soon. We just keep that gate open.
Randy Eccles:
Alexis, does the Women's Justice Institute have any advice for parents and people involved in taking care of the children as this type of relationship evolves? Obviously, this is a pretty young child in this case. Some are older, they're all developing and have different reactions to what they're being exposed to.
Alexis Mansfield:
We have a lot of suggestions. Especially as this is the 10th anniversary of the Reunification Ride. We've had hundreds of visits, hundreds of bus visits. We've had thousands of individual visits. We have some advice from what we've learned. As a former school teacher, before I was a lawyer, I see a lot of tha,t even in my former students who had parents who were incarcerated.
Some of the things that we suggest are keeping parents involved as parents. Making sure that they know what's happening in school, kids can do homework over the phone, can send coloring pages home where sometimes parents do half and the child does half. There's always something.
We hear sometimes from people, "Well, I don't want to bring kids to visit because they're going to act up afterwards." What we've discovered is that kids act up when they don't know when the next time is. If they think this is a one-time thing that I'm seeing my mom and I'm not going to get to see her again, they're more likely to act up. But when you have something scheduled, even if it's I'm going to see her in two months or I'm going to see her again on this date, we find that kids don't act up in the same way because they're not worried about not seeing that parent again.
I've seen that with Allie and Tierney, that those first visits, it was a little more stressful. And now that they see each other all the time, Allie can't wait to snuggle and to fall asleep in her mom's arms and to run around and do all of those things because it's about that consistency and being able to see each other.
We forget that children need their moms no matter where their moms are. We see again and again, children come in maybe after not seeing their moms for even years and disclose abuse, disclose what's happening outside because they haven't been safe until they're able to be with their parent. Even in this environment, that's their safest time is when they can be with their mom and touch and hug her and tell her what's happening.
This is also about health overall. keeping families together but also giving children that safety. Making sure that kids know that it's okay to love their parent wherever they are and for the parents to know that they don't need to be ashamed in seeing their children, that they still should see them. It used to be common for parents to lie about where they were, to say I'm away in college or I'm working. We found children saying things like, "I don't want to go to college because it means I'll never get to see my family." That they started to come up with these ideas of, "My mom must love her job more than she loves me if she's not coming to visit me."
Instead, we try to make this a supportive environment where kids and moms can love each other, can bond together, and not worry about feeling any societal pressure or shame that has negative consequences in the end.
One of my favorite things to do are some arts and crafts, Tierney's family is very gifted with art. One thing that we recommend for parents who are incarcerated is what we call send a hug. Draw a picture of something a child loves. Like what's something Allie loves?
Tierney Brosamer:
Allie loves to trace her hand. She loves that.
Alexis Mansfield:
Allie loves hands. She loves little go-karts. She's always pushing carts. Then draw two pieces of paper with two thin lines, then mom trace's her hands. Then ask the guardian, ask grandma, because it is usually grandma taking care of kids and over 50% of times when mothers are incarcerated, to put the thing that the child loves in the middle of the two skinny lines on the two papers, then the hands on the end so it looks like arms reaching out. Then every night at 8 p.m., whatever time, I'm going to wrap this around you, and that's your mom inside, wherever she is, sending you a hug at this moment. Those little things keep families bonded.
Randy Eccles:
The Women's Justice Institute has been making the Reunification Ride possible. How much work does it take to get these set up? Are most of the prisons open to it?
Alexis Mansfield:
We specifically work with the women's facilities, Logan Correctional Center and Decatur Correctional Center. The Reunification Ride occasionally has gone to Decatur, really focused on Logan Correctional Center, which is in Lincoln, Illinois, as many listeners might know, because it is the largest women's facility in Illinois. It also has the most people from around the state, whereas Decatur has more people from central Illinois percentage wise in the facility. But Logan is about three times the size of Decatur in terms of how many people are there.
It costs a lot. This is not something that is easy for us to do. It takes a lot of volunteer and staff hours too. We started this in May of 2016 with crowdsourcing online with a GoFundMe, thinking that we would do one month. 10 years later, we just couldn't stop, too important to stop. There is a monthly cost as well as the overhead cost of staff, insurance, all of those things. The monthly cost is about $3,500. That's the bus. That's the arts and crafts. It's the food because one thing that's really important is that we eat together. We have a big meal together. There's that cost and we are always seeking donations to help with the overhead and the monthly costs.
Randy Eccles:
Tierney, how difficult is it when you see Allie and then she leaves?
Tierney Brosamer:
Having something scheduled helps. If I'm able to tell Allie when she's leaving, Mama will see you on Monday on our video visit. Or we'll be celebrating Mother's Day next month. I'll see you next month at our visit. That helps a lot.
Now Allie, she's small still. It takes a little bit of phone calls between visits to remind her we will see each other again. There were some visits towards the beginning of my incarceration that were super tough. Crying with her arms out, not wanting to go. Me also not ready for the visits to end. The consistency, knowing that Reunification Ride will be there on the third Saturday of the month, that helps ease the anxiety on my end, which I can then help and my mom help Allie to remember, this isn't goodbye. We will see each other again. I it's wonderful. There's no better program in this prison right now than the Reunification Ride program.
Randy Eccles:
Tierney, how are you doing?
Tierney Brosamer:
I'm doing well. I'm doing better than I have earlier in my time. I know that I'm over halfway through my incarceration. I'm ready to be home with my family. I miss my daughter. I could see her every single day and still miss her.
I've been in the WestCare addiction program for close to 15 months now. I'll be leaving next month from the program successfully. I've worked really hard in it. Along the way, I've learned a lot of really valuable things that I'll carry over from my substance abuse treatment stuff into my role of being a mom and into my role of being a functioning member of society. There are a lot of things that I've been able to accomplish during this incarceration.
Randy Eccles:
Alison, as grandma, how are you doing?
Alison Behle:
There's been challenges, I'm not going to lie. Starting all over this phase, it's been difficult, but you do what you have to do.
They both hit the nail on the head with consistency. Consistency is key. Maintaining and developing a relationship between Tierney and Allie early on because she was so young when Tierney went away. It's been important.
Another thing, reunification, the focus on the family first. It means everything to us. Tierney described what it's like visiting in the visiting room versus being with the reunification. It's a different feel because the incarcerated individuals, all of those women are there for one goal, and that's family. Family is the focus and it's first and foremost everything. Their goal is to see their loved ones every month. They're maintaining what they need to do to be able to go into that visiting room and see each other during reunification. We are so blessed. We're so fortunate that reunification is a thing and what it provides, the meals and the crafts and the one-on-one time, the family time has just been so important and we're so grateful.
Randy Eccles:
Alexis, you shared that a large number of children of incarcerated parents are not tracked, their destination. Is there any movement from the Women's Justice Institute or anybody else to change that?
Alexis Mansfield:
That's such an important issue and something we don't think about. We have so many children impacted by parental incarceration in this country. We don't have the data on it.
There is a report from 2012 called A Shared Sentence by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. That's some of our best data and that's 14 years ago. They found that in Illinois alone, 186,000 children in 2012 were impacted by parental incarceration. That's like if you took the city of Rockford and just filled it with children with an incarcerated parent. We don't talk about those things. We don't talk about how one in 10 children of color has an incarcerated parent or one in 25 kids in general in the country has an incarcerated parent. That's one of the reasons why the Women's Justice Institute looks at the unique factors impacting women when they're incarcerated.
When men are incarcerated, it still has enormous impacts on their families. But 91% of the time, their children are living with the children's mother when the man is incarcerated. When the father's incarcerated, the kids still have one parent that they're staying with.
When women are incarcerated, the children go to the father less than 25% of the time. That means they're displaced to a non-parent three quarters of the time. We don't know where they go. Most studies show that about 50% of the time they go to a grandmother, paternal or maternal like Alison. Thank you for all the grandmothers and grandparents who step up. Other times it's foster care. We really don't know in some of the circumstances where else kids go.
Illinois, thanks to collaboration with the lieutenant governor's office, the Women's Justice Institute and other partners, created legislation called the Commission for Children of Incarcerated Parents. That is looking at how do we get all these stakeholders to work together to make recommendations to ensure that children are not forgotten, are not blamed, are not penalized because of their parents' incarceration. informally, I think there's a lot of work being done on that as well.
Randy Eccles:
Tierney, is there any last thought you'd like to leave us?
Tierney Brosamer:
Thanks for the opportunity and thanks to anybody listening for remembering that incarcerated mothers, we're still mothers. We still love our kids. We're always looking for opportunities to connect and foster that bond with our families.
Not letting the past define your future is true in everybody's life. In this instance, this is the situation I'm in, I would never want my daughter or my mom or anyone in my family to feel shame around a situation like this.
I'm forever grateful to Alexis, to all the volunteers, to everybody who's previously been incarcerated and then volunteers to come down and help with the ride. It's amazing. These women are amazing.
Randy Eccles:
Alison, any last thoughts?
Alison Behle:
Knowledge, knowing what is out there. Reunification Ride is probably not known. This program exists. It's very pricey. It's expensive. They're doing amazing work and we sure appreciate you.
Randy Eccles:
Alexis, if people would like to learn more about the Women's Justice Institute, where should they go?
Alexis Mansfield:
Please visit our website, womensjusticeinstitute.org or you can visit our Facebook page, the Women's Justice Institute. We have a page there and we also have a Reunification Ride page as well as an Instagram. We are always happy to talk to people, and our e-mail is available there.
Randy Eccles:
Alexis Mansfield of the Women's Justice Institute, and grandmother/mother Alison Behle, and daughter/mother Tierney Brosamer. Thank you for joining us today on Community Voices and sharing this arrangement that's helping things, hopefully, be the best for your family.
Alison Behle:
Thank you. Thank you for having him.
Randy Eccles:
Thank you.
Alexis Mansfield:
I was gonna ask you, Alison. It's hard for Tierney to see Allie leave.
Alison Behle:
Yeah.
Alexis Mansfield:
Tierney's your daughter. How is it as a mom when you leave? How does that impact you?
Alison Behle:
It's difficult. She knows I put on a brave face. I just do what I have to do. We're just waiting for Tierney to get out and make better choices. That time's going to come.
Randy Eccles:
Thank you so much for being with us today.
