In 1999, over 700,000 women in prisons or jails were mothers to nearly 1.5 million children. Many women who have been incarcerated re-enter their children's lives upon release, but few services exist to help keep families together while women are incarcerated, or to help them make the transition back into society.

In January 2001, Connect for Kids interviewed Susan Galbraith of Our Place, a Washington, DC organization that helps women, many of them mothers, get back on their feet after being incarcerated.

A social worker by training, Galbraith worked in the addictions treatment field for 10 years, specializing in alcohol and drug-dependent women and children. She has also worked as a program administrator and as a policy analyst in Washington, DC. Today Galbraith is the program director of Our Place.

Read the interview and voices of women trying to find their place after getting out of jail.

CFK: Can you tell me about your background and how you came to found Our Place?
SG: I came to Washington from Maine 17 years ago with the expectation that there would be enormous resources here for women in comparison, but there were no gender-specific services in DC when I arrived.

I went from working in direct treatment to working in public policy for 15 years. But I always kept a focus on my work with women. I was involved in organizing a coalition of national organizations to address issues of drug use during pregnancy. At the time, there was a lot of movement to criminalize drug use during pregnancy. The efforts of the coalition were really to shift the focus to a public health intervention.

Through that work, I got to know one advocate in particular who does a considerable amount of work with women who are incarcerated. She took me out to Lorton [a Virginia federal prison], and what I quickly saw was that due to changes in sentencing policy, mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, women with the same profiles of women I had seen in treatment 10 years ago were ending up locked up...So there had been an enormous increase in the incarceration rates among women, and the lion's share of those women were ones who had committed non-violent drug offenses. And what they really needed was treatment, if anything was really going to change in their lives.

CFK: What were the needs you identified for women being released from prison?
SG: I was stunned by the lack of support for people coming out of prison and jail—that a woman could be released from DC Jail at two in the morning with no street clothes and no money to call anybody and no way to get anywhere. I was stunned that they didn't have basic identification or the means to pay for it. At Our Place, we provide people with clothing, money for transportation and money to get identification so that a person has a fighting chance.

From my work in treatment I knew the power of gender-specific intervention, where women were in an environment where there were models for recovery or women who had walked before them and been successful. A non-punitive approach that didn't involve sanctions but rather involved women taking responsibility for themselves with the resources to help that happen could make a major difference.

So I set out to raise the money for opening the center. It took about a year. I set up a board of directors, looked for a site, hired a staff and here we are a year later and we have had contact with over 500 women since we opened. I would say 95 percent of the women we see walk through our doors of their own volition. They're self-referred. No matter who the woman is, she has a choice of whether she wants us to become a major support service center for her, or whether she wants to get her clothes and leave.

CFK: What are the particular needs of women in this population?
SG: We're in a very peculiar situation in DC because most of the DC women who are incarcerated aren't physically here. They're in Danbury, Connecticut, they're in Alderson, West Virginia, and now more and more are in Troy, Virginia, which is right outside Charlottesville. One of the first problems we had to deal with was how do we get the word to women who are more and more dispersed. So we put together a newsletter called "Finding our Place," and put a lot of resources into making that a nice publication because we wanted to communicate that we were a very top rate, professional effort and that we would bring to bear the best resources available to them, knowing that this is a group of women who are used to getting the least we have to offer.

CFK: How does Our Place help to strengthen the ties between mothers and children?
SG: The first time we went into the correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, we asked women, "What is the single most important thing we can do for you?" They said, "You can bring our children to see us." They're six hours away from Washington, DC, and many haven't seen their children in years. So clearly it was the uppermost thing in their minds.

We raised the money to implement a transportation program where we'd take families up to the federal prison in Connecticut once a month so that families had the opportunity to stay connected. We know from the research that one of the single determinants of whether people will be successful when they come out is the extent to which they've been able to maintain their connection to their families. That connection is really important, and that's led into our family work.

CFK: What happens when a woman walks through the door at Our Place after she's been released from a prison or jail?
SG: We would greet her, ask her how she heard about us, what she needed, offer her something to eat or drink. We would take her next door to our full clothing boutique. If she wanted more, we have a legal services clinic, a connection with community health center? we have one of their nurse practitioners on site here four hours a week, so if she needed any medical attention whatsoever we could make that referral, or if she needed substance abuse treatment, housing or food, we could make that referral, too. We would invite her to come to our Thursday evening support group, which is open to any woman who's been incarcerated. We're in these institutions quarterly, urging women to get their birth certificates and social security cards before they're released, so more and more the women that come through the door have already had contact with us.

CFK: What are your plans for the future of Our Place?
SG: We're partnering with a very good social services organization in the city whose specialty is families and children, and they have written a grant to be able to provide parenting support as well as a children's support group here on this site. If they get it, we'll work with them to implement some of the services here. I think the extension of our family services is a major priority for us.

Some of things that we're kicking around is having a Saturday in which we'd provide both therapeutic services as well as recreational stuff for kids and respite care for caretakers so they could drop kids off and they could have a day just to themselves, which can be hard to come by. The other thing is housing. There's just no housing in this city for people who have very low incomes. I think long-range that's something we'd want to take on—or we'd want to partner with an organization that works on housing.

Julee Newberger is assistant managing editor of Connect for Kids.