Inmate group at jail empowers women to make real changes and get a fresh start in life

They couldn’t be more different.

Shakira: a young, poor, pregnant unwed mother with a penchant for getting involved with the wrong guy, caught up in a culture of drugs, alcohol and crime.

Ellen: a middle-aged, middle class businesswoman who had no prior involvement with the criminal justice system.

But worlds collide at 100 Center Drive in Riverside, within the razor-fenced confines of the Suffolk County Medium Security Correctional Facility. The iron gate that slams shut with a clanging thud is the great equalizer. Inside, everyone’s all the same.

“That was the hardest adjustment,” Ellen said of her 12-month incarceration on a second-degree manslaughter plea. “Your dignity is just totally taken away. You’re stripped of everything. You can’t make any decisions about anything in your daily life.”

“You can do absolutely nothing,” Shakira said. “You have to do whatever they tell you, when they tell you to do it. When to eat. When to sleep. How to sleep. It’s horrible.”

Shakira, a 28-year-old Westhampton woman who served four months on an attempted burglary charge several years ago, returned after her conviction on a drug possession charge. She’s confident she’ll never go back.

“I have obstacles,” she said. “Especially now that I’m about to have another child. But I’ve learned to take care of myself.” Shakira and her daughter are living with her mother. She’s clean, sober and enrolled in a drug program.

“Things are different this time,” Shakira said.

The difference is a women’s group she joined while in jail. The group, dubbed “women’s empowerment,” was founded three years ago by volunteer Liz Stokes of Riverhead. Stokes had been volunteering at the jail with the Riverhead Council for Unity, which was running sessions for male inmates aimed at reducing gang violence in the jail.

Stokes got to know a couple of corrections officers and they began talking about running a group for women. That’s how the women’s empowerment group was born.

“The men come in talking about how tough they are. They can’t get away from that,” Stokes said. “The women come in and immediately lose that tough exterior.”

The group meets for an hour every Wednesday evening. Stokes, circulation manager at Riverhead Free Library, decided to run the group “sort of like a book club.” She brings them books to read and they come together for a book discussion. At least that’s the pretext.

The group consists of about a dozen of the 150 or so female inmates at the county jail in Riverside, which houses inmates serving out sentences of one year or less, as well as inmates held while awaiting trial. Stokes, Sgt. Noreen Fisher, a 24-year veteran corrections officer, Kristen McKay, who handles public relations for the sheriff’s office, and Riverhead social worker Theresa Drozd all volunteer their time to the women’s group.

On a recent Wednesday evening, the women, clad in green jumpsuits and clutching copies if The Lost Wife, filed into the jail’s chapel for their weekly meeting. Stokes and Drozd bring candy along with the paperbacks and composition notebooks, used for anonymously journaling about surviving their incarceration. The inmates and their mentors sit around a table and talk for an hour. Stokes, anything but shy, asks pointed questions and freely dispenses advice, as the women talk about what’s going on in their lives, the status of their cases, their families and their future.

For all but two of the inmates, drug use is the common denominator in the life journeys that landed them inside the drab cinderblock chapel that night.

“For the first time, we have two nurses in the group. They get hooked on prescription painkillers and end up using heroin,” Stokes said, shaking her head. “They’re seeing more and more of that in jail.”

The women are nearly all young — in their 20s and early 30s — attractive and well-spoken. With one exception, they are all high school graduates. Three have college degrees, while many others have attended college.

The mothers among them talk about what’s going on with their children, who are staying with relatives — usually the inmate’s mother. One inmate’s two-year-old son is hospitalized, a fact she has learned in the week since the group’s last meeting. He’d already been in the hospital nearly a month, but she wasn’t told by her mother, who has custody of the boy and is angry with her daughter.

Frustrated by her inability to speak directly with doctors and get information about her son’s condition, Kim was worried and scared — especially since she was scheduled to be sent to an upstate prison the following week to serve out a two-year sentence. She was hoping to get permission to visit her son in the hospital before going upstate, but wasn’t sure how that could happen. She dissolved in tears as she spoke of the guilt she feels over her baby’s sickness — she used crack during the pregnancy. Soon many of the other women at the table are crying with her. They pass around a roll of toilet tissue, tearing off sheets to dry their eyes and blow their noses.

“The drug takes over,” Fisher told her. “The drug hurts you and it hurts the people you love.”

The guilt and the tears are healthy, Fisher says. “It means you realize the consequences of your actions. It means you’re coming to terms with what you’ve done.”

The women talk about their actions and their charges. They talk about navigating the legal system, about trying to get their lawyers’ attention, and learning to live day-to-day, not knowing what the future holds.

They talk about coping with the way life goes on and events continue to unfold in the outside world while they are behind bars and out of touch.

Ellen’s husband was killed in a car accident one Saturday night, three months into her sentence. She called him at home that Sunday morning and got no answer. She tried his cell. No answer.

“I knew in my gut something was wrong,” she said. He would never miss their calls, she said. She tried reaching him throughout the day, to no avail.

“At 4:20 in the afternoon I got called down to medical,” she recalled. “I knew. I was telling myself: All right. Hold it together. When I got downstairs, they sent me to mental health. They sat me in an office. An officer in a white shirt came in and said, ‘I regret to tell you your husband has died.’

A judge gave her a two-day leave to attend her husband’s wake and funeral. Upon returning to the jail, she was placed in “21-hour lockup” for 10 days. “It’s standard protocol, she said. “They keep you in a cell for 21 out of 24 hours so they can watch you. It was horrible.”

Yet Ellen, 53, believes being in jail when her husband was killed actually helped her better cope with the tragedy. “I think if I was on the outside, I would have crumbled,” she said.

“We were like two peas in a pod. We did everything together,” she said of the man she’d been with for 14 years, 11 as husband and wife. Upon being released from jail this spring, returning to an empty home and a life alone, Ellen said she had to go through the grieving process anew. It hasn’t been easy, but the friends she made in the women’s empowerment group — including the volunteer mentors — help her go on, she said.

“I stay in touch with all of them,” Stokes says of the more than 60 former inmates who have participated in the group and have since transitioned into the outside world.

Stokes and Fisher speak to their “graduates” on the phone, meet them for coffee and chats, and stay involved in their lives. They are each given a 20-page resource booklet titled “Where to Find Assistance When You Leave the Suffolk County Correctional Facility.” It contains advice and a ton of resources, Stokes said.

But the weekly empowerment meetings give them inner strength and resolve, key things they
need to cope “on the outside.” It also gives them the support of friends with whom they share a unique bond.

It all works, Stokes said. “I get to see the after-effect. And it’s such a gift to see the changes.”

Only three of the women who’ve been in the group have come back to the jail on new charges, Stokes said.

“That’s a pretty good result.”