MOVING BEYOND THE BARS

“Jail’s hell,”Jessica says, a dirty-blond ponytail falling over her shoulder. “Especially when you’re sitting in there and you don’t have anybody.” Between foster homes, juvenile detention centers, group homes and jail, Jessica Bowley has spent her whole life in the system.

During a stint in Cumberland County Jail, she decided to turn her life around. Twenty-one, behind bars for drug trafficking, and hoping to reclaim custody of her one-year-old daughter, Jessica needed help. She picked up a brochure for My Sister’s Keeper, a Cape Elizabeth, Maine, non-profit that links volunteer mentors with incarcerated women, and was soon paired with Ann McDonough. When Ann arrived at the jail’s pre-release center, Jessica wasn’t sure how a grandmother of eight from an affluent seaside town could understand her situation. But during their first conversation, she realized Ann knew plenty. 

In the playroom at the McAuley Residence, a Portland-based transitional housing program, Jessica slouches, sinking into the couch cushions. Long sparkly earrings flash above her collar. With a baby face and easy smile, she doesn’t appear hardened, but her lack of emotion while recounting painful memories suggests otherwise. Her blue eyes, accented by thin liner and pastel-colored shadow, hold steady and her voice maintains an even cadence as she details a tumultuous childhood riddled with violence, abandonment and addiction. Teenage years of trouble in school and on the streets gave way to drug trafficking. She had a baby at 20 but when the State took her away, the tailspin worsened until, she says, “there was a point where I just fell off that cliff.” Losing permanent custody of her daughter while behind bars was rock bottom.

Ann, in a turquoise and black tracksuit, sits beside Jessica, clasping her hands in her lap. At first glance she is a wife, mother and grandmother. Behind thin-rimmed glasses, her eyes don’t hint of years with an alcoholic ex-husband; her smile framed by fine etched lines says nothing of her son’s adolescent substance abuse; and her tidy silver hair gives no clue of her daughter’s mental illness and current imprisonment in a Connecticut penitentiary. But there, below the surface, lie traces of 40 years of family battles with addiction and incarceration.

It’s this life experience that Ann considers her greatest asset as a mentor. “What I’ve gone through with my daughter,” she acknowledges, “has helped me a lot as far as understanding people that are coming out [of prison] or in, and the lack of help that they get.”

Jessica agrees: “Once [Ann] started telling me about her daughter, I was like, you know, she’s not clueless. She knows what this is like.”

This mutual empathy has fostered a unique friendship. Though rooted in Jessica’s need for—and Ann’s willingness to provide—guidance, it’s more than that. In Ann’s view, “counselors, psychiatrists, probation officers, DHS—they’re all coming at her and demanding certain behavior … [I’m] somebody that has no authority over her.”

For Jessica, “I can just call her up and be like, ‘This is what’s going on,’ and she’ll just listen … It’s a different type of relationship.”

And it’s just the relationship Jessica needed. “I didn’t know what I was gonna do,” she recalls, “[to] put pieces of my life back together.” Like Jessica, many offenders are lost upon release. Without a support network, it’s easy to gravitate back to the source of troubles. However, research shows that the presence of pro-social relationships can reduce the chances of recidivism. Currently in Maine’s correctional system, there is a trend toward holistic rehabilitation strategies, which help establish community connections. A mentor or role model—a contributing member of society not involved in drugs—can impact offenders’ successes. Jessica struggles to integrate new people into her life. There are “friends that I still, you know, need to ... have boundaries with,” she admits. “It’s a transition getting back to the normal people.”

Ann, too, benefits from their friendship. “It gives me a good feeling,” she says, “because it’s like I’m helping [my daughter] indirectly.”

In the playroom, Jessica’s 18-month-old son teeters toward the couch. Jessica never regained custody of her daughter, but gave birth to Amari while in jail. With the bulk of a child twice his age and chubby arms outstretched, he offers a toy first to Ann, then his mother. Both women lean in. Ann pats his tight dark curls and as he babbles, Jessica offers him a spoonful of applesauce. All three of them laugh.

Over the past two years, Ann and Jessica have passed many afternoons together: feeding ducks with Amari, chatting over coffee and discount shopping. Other meetings are less relaxed. When asked, Ann goes along to Jessica’s probation appointments and even counseling sessions—a gesture Jessica still finds novel since “motherly” support is something she has never truly felt before. When Jessica can’t think of any recent progress to share with her parole officer, she turns to Ann. Smiling she says, “[Ann] will sit there and remind me of what I’ve accomplished and how far I’ve come.”

Jessica finds herself at an unfamiliar place in life: sober, off the streets, relishing motherhood, completing high school, looking toward college and career. But the transition is ongoing and temptations are within easy reach; she knows few people who aren’t involved in drugs and trafficking. Occasionally Ann won’t hear from Jessica for days, weeks even. Once she disappeared for several months, only to resurface after another spell in jail.

Ann, of course, worries. But she has been through this before and realizes “people in this situation often fall back.” Though they are close, there are limitations to their relationship. “I’m there to help her, so if she doesn’t feel she needs to call me, that’s fine,” she says. When Jessica is ready to try again, Ann is willing to help. Shrugging, she says, “You do what you can do,” then adds, “I would never give up on her.”

In six months, Jessica will be off probation: No more strict rules set by parole officers. No regular drug tests. No three years of mandatory jail time hanging over her head if she slips up.

It’s a freedom that, for Jessica, is terrifying. Without these boundaries, she worries she may succumb to the pressures of her old friends, old habits, her old self. “When it comes down to it, it was me who made those decisions,” she admits, but knows her choices have everything to do with who and what surrounds her. “So if I start putting people like Ann in my life,” she hopes aloud, “then things change and it works out.”the end