By Malika McCall
I have family portraits in my living room from almost every year since my children were born. I grew up bouncing around the foster care system, so family is especially important to me. But in the photos taken over the last decade-plus, there are stretches of years where one or both of my sons, who are now 31 and 35, are missing.
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Since the time they were each around 16, my sons have been in and out of New Jersey’s prisons and jails. Thankfully, both of them are home this year and we’ve had the chance to celebrate birthdays and holidays together. This year, in fact, we’re looking forward to a reunion with extended family my sons haven’t seen in a long time.
But historically, with them gone much of the time, the days when families traditionally gather, like Fourth of July, were always particularly rough. See, every parent wants the peace of knowing her children are healthy and safe.
The instinct to protect your children — even when they’re adults — is the very essence of parenthood. But when your sons are incarcerated, worry is your only constant companion. Trauma and desperation make prisons and jails dangerous.
My boys, who were just children when they went in, witnessed gruesome fights in the adult penal system. I regularly had nightmares that one of them would get hurt. Just hearing my sons’ voices would calm my perpetual anxiety, but calling them came at a very high price. The cost of a 15-minute call was close to $5 at the time.
With two sons in separate facilities, that added up to well over $3,000 each year. The financial responsibility for these calls fell on me, a working-class, tax-paying woman of color, a mother and a grandmother, like it often does. At the time, I was a baggage handler for an airline and that was no small part of my take-home pay as an hourly employee.
Predatory prison-telecom corporations — multimillion-dollar behemoths like Securus and ViaPath — charge these inflated rates to boost their bottom line. With Black, brown and low-income people incarcerated at disproportionately high numbers, these corporations have built their entire business on exploiting disenfranchised communities.
The costs are so egregious that one of every three families goes into debt trying to maintain contact with a loved one inside. My family was one of them. I wanted to know my sons were safe and I wanted my grandchildren to have a relationship with their fathers, who love them madly, but there were days I didn’t take their calls simply because I couldn’t afford to.
I was already stretched thin covering rent, gas, and household expenses while raising my two daughters and pitching in to help with my sons’ young children. Other times, my boys didn’t call at all because they felt bad burdening me with the cost. The guilt — compounded with the financial stress — took a toll on their mental health. And mine.
I see the same story playing out over and over in my Newark community. As founder and executive director of Team Resurrection, a nonprofit focused on community outreach, I come into contact with many mothers and fathers who make tough sacrifices every day just to hear their incarcerated child’s voice. Days when we see people gathering with families puts our own children’s absence in stark relief and, quite frankly, breaks our hearts.
New Jersey has a chance to make a change that will bring relief to mothers and strengthen families. Assembly Members Herb Conaway Jr. (D-7), Reginald Atkins (D-20), and Sterley Stanley (D-18) recently introduced Assembly bill 5195 to make communication free in prisons across the state.
New Jersey would join Connecticut, California, Colorado, Minnesota and several cities and counties that have passed free prison and jail communication laws. And for what it’s worth, we all would get something out of it, not just those with incarcerated loved ones.
Communication with family is a lifeline for incarcerated people that makes the carceral environment safer for corrections officers and others inside and improves the chances of success upon reentry, increasing public safety.
If the legislature passes A5195, it will put an end to the financial concern that keeps mothers up at night and families from staying connected. Parents, children, grandparents and grandchildren can establish and maintain strong bonds, which can help alleviate some of the mental and emotional hardships endured not only by those behind bars but those outside who worry.
Passing this bill can help ease parents’ distress, not just on holidays, but every day.
Malika McCall is a mother, grandmother and small-business owner in Newark.
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