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OVERCOMING BARS TO MOTHERING
Ex-convict Ida Robinson works to reunite prisoners and their
children, if only for a few bittersweet hours
Chris Jenkins
Friday, February 19, 1999
©1999 San Francisco
Chronicle
URL:
When Richmond resident Ida Robinson was released from the Federal
Correctional Facility in Dublin in November 1995 after 10 years behind
bars, she knew it would not be long before she returned.
Robinson was right. Less than a year later, on an overcast summer day
in 1996, she went back to prison. But instead of being in the custody of
armed guards as she was after her conviction in connection with an
airplane hijacking, she led three buoyant and excited children inside the
prison's walls.
The children -- fresh off a plane ride from Los Angeles with tickets
that Robinson had sent, and rested after a night's stay at a local motel
that Robinson had arranged -- were at the prison to visit with mothers
they had not seen in more than five years.
The emotional afternoon that followed became the first of many visits
between incarcerated mothers and their children facilitated by Families
With a Future, an organization Robinson founded in April 1996, just
months after being released from a halfway home.
``One of the most stigmatized groups of people in our country are
women in prison,'' Robinson, 47, said. ``And not only are they
stigmatized, their children are stigmatized and isolated from them.''
Later that year, Robinson arranged 15 more visits, including one for
a Native American family of seven, led by an elderly grandmother.
They drove a 1970s Buick from Wyoming to participate in a reunion.
Families With a Future not only paid for the hotel, gas, tolls and food,
but it also helped repair the family's car when it broke down outside of
the prison -- totalling more than $600.
But sometimes the trips Robinson arranges are shorter. On a Friday
last fall, Jana, 15, a lanky ninth-grader from East Oakland, could not
sit still the morning of her first visit with her mother in five years.
``She called me at least three times double-checking what she could
and couldn't bring,'' Robinson said. ``She was so excited.''
Carrying a bag of school books, a sweatshirt and music tapes, Jana
hugged her grandmother and Robinson goodbye before joining Alex Atley, a
Families With a Future volunteer, in making a six-hour round trip to
Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla.
The visit lasted half the travel time. But to Jana, even the simplest
of conversations with her mother face to face was worth the long ride.
``We just caught up with what was going on with the family, with my
schoolwork and how she was doing,'' Jana said.
She noted that her mother ``needed her hair done,'' and added: ``But
I was still real sad. I didn't cry when I was leaving like I did last
time I saw her. She cried.''
Robinson started Families With a Future0 with less than $100 in the
bank and a tiny office in Berkeley, equipped only with a rotary phone, a
gray desk and a few fold-up chairs.
Soon she began recruiting volunteers, often close friends, to drive
to prisons when she could not. She raised money working the phone -- from
$25 cash donations to a single $1,000 contribution. But even though her
resources were modest, Robinson said that from the very start her vision
was clear.
working the phone -- from $25 cash donations to a single $1,000
contribution. But even though her resources were modest, Robinson said
that from the very start her vision was clear.
``I didn't know the first thing about business,'' Robinson said
during a recent interview, her dreadlocks coiled neatly in an orange and
green kente cloth wrap. ``What I did know is that this organization had
to happen.''
After three years, Families With a Future, now with a San Francisco
office, has completed more than 40 visits to federal and state prisons
throughout California.
Robinson has developed a weekly support group at Martin Luther King
Jr. Middle School in Berkeley for children of imprisoned parents. She
helps teach a women's studies course at San Francisco State University on
the conditions of women in prison. She coordinates a program in the San
Francisco county jails that assists incarcerated mothers in locating
their children.
`A SPIRIT OF HOPE'
``What Ida's work has done is help solve some of the biggest barriers
facing mothers who are in prison,'' said Ellen Barry, founder and
director of Legal Services for Prisoners With Children, an advocacy group
in San Francisco.
As the population of women prisoners in California rises, Robinson's
work takes on an added significance.
According to the California Department of Corrections' statistics,
the state's female prison population has grown 864 percent since 1980 to
11,575. A report released by the National Council on Crime and
Delinquency, a prison advocacy group based in San Francisco, estimates
that almost 80 percent of those women reported having an average of two
dependent children.
The group's study also found that more than half of these children
had never visited their mothers during incarceration.
``This is an area that is largely neglected -- the children of
incarcerated mothers,'' Robinson says. ``I think when you open up this
whole issue you're also saying something else. What are we doing to our
society? Who's paying the cost of all this? Children are being negated
from the experience of having their parents, wherever they are.''
MAINTAINING A BOND
Robinson admitted that visits are often bittersweet, because they
sometimes open up a lot of wounds in the children. But some children who
visited their mothers sometimes only once a year said it was important
for both mother and child to keep a physical bond even though the
encounters are often filled with mixed emotions.
``It's great to see your mom, especially when it's been a while,''
says Sarah, 16, a 10th-grader from Sacramento, whose mother spent three
years at Dublin. ``But then you get really sad because you don't really
want to tell her the whole truth of what's going on in your life because
you don't want her to worry, since there's nothing that she can do about
it.''
Some of the visits Robinson arranges will be the only opportunities
for many mothers to see their children. In the fall of 1996, Families
With a Future sent three plane tickets to an inmate's two sons and mother
so that they could travel from New Orleans to California. The family flew
to Los Angeles, where they joined two more family members and drove up
the coast to visit with a mother who is facing a life sentence at Dublin.
``The hardest visits are the ones for the lifers,'' Robinson said.
Sometimes the help Families With a Future provides goes beyond arranging
physical contact. At Dublin, between 35 and 40 percent of the inmates are
from other countries, according to Legal Services for Prisoners With
Children. Much of Robinson's efforts also center on the children. Once a
week she meets with a group of Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School
students who all have a parent in prison.
GIVING KIDS A VOICE
``It's important to give children a way to speak about their parent's
condition in a nonthreatening place,'' Robinson said. ``I think it's
healthy for them to speak about it. We owe them some space.''
With that in mind, in the fall of 1996, she approached Jan Sells, a
school counselor and psychotherapist at King who runs the School-
Community Partnership for Mental Health Program. Robinson started by
meeting the children individually, periodically working with them in a
group setting.
``Ida really has helped the kids get in touch with their feelings and
open them up to their expressing the actual pain that they feel,'' she
said. ``She tries to take the negative and turn it into a positive.
Sometimes it is very difficult for the kids to come to terms with the
stigma of having mother in prison.''
Robinson encourages the kids to write letters to their parents, even
if they won't be sent, as a way of expressing their emotions. Many of the
children, according to Sells, have constructed stories that they share
with the outside world about their parents' whereabouts, rarely admitting
the unpleasant truth.
Shauneka, 11, an initially quiet King fifth-grader who says she wants
to play in the WNBA as an adult, has been attending one-on-one sessions
with Robinson for more than a year. She said their discussions at first
helped her express feelings of embarrassment that her mother was
incarcerated.
``I didn't know what to say to my friends when they would ask me
about my mom,'' she recalled. ``I felt like, `What am I going to do, tell
that that my mom's in prison for drugs?' So I just used to lie about it
and say she was away on vacation, or away at school. Ida always used to
tell me it was going to be hard for awhile, but I should stand up for
myself.''
Now that her mother is out of prison, Shauneka says that she still
goes to the sessions with Robinson because they now talk about the
sometimes difficult adjustment that Shauneka faced when her mother
returned home.
``I feel like she's a different person sometimes,'' she said. ``I
didn't feel comfortable around her.''
BRANCHING OUT
Robinson hopes to replicate her King project in two other schools, as
well as start a nationwide center with other Bay Area activists that
trains child advocates to work children of incarcerated parents.
``When I started doing this I was totally overwhelmed with the amount
of children who needed advocacy and counseling about the criminal justice
system as it pertains to their family,'' Robinson said.
To Robinson, this is more than just meeting with kids and taking them
to see their mothers. ``They become part of your life,'' she said. ``Once
we've opened up to each other, here's no turning back.''
ROBINSON'S JOURNEY FROM HIJACKER TO HELPER
For Ida Robinson, reuniting and nurturing families is part of her
long-standing belief in social justice. She came of age in the Hunters
Point section of San Francisco during the 1960s, a time when she says
many young people believed that revolutionary social change was a
heartbeat away.
Associated with the Revolutionary Nationalist Army, a group that
derived much of its platform from the Black Panthers, Robinson, then 21,
was involved in hijacking a plane bound for Los Angeles on Jan. 7, 1972,
with an RNA member. Although she says she was unaware that her partner
was planning the hijacking, she admits to her participation.
According to newspaper archives, she and her partner hijacked a
Pacific Southwest Airline midnight shuttle and dropped off the 138
passengers in Los Angeles. The plane then flew to Tampa, Fla., and to
Havana, where Robinson lived for four years before returning to the
United States.
After living on the run for 10 years, Robinson said she sent three of
her five children to San Francisco to live with her mother, experiencing
the pain of separation and guilt firsthand. ``My daughter says she has no
memories of me before the age of 6 or 7,'' says Robinson. ``Knowing that
couldn't make me want to (work with the children of incarcerated parents)
even more.''
Ultimately, her concern for her family led to Robinson's capture.
Worried about her mother, who was having trouble raising her teenage son,
Robinson returned to Northern California and took him in. The strained
relationship did not last long between the two. After an argument over
chores, he called the police, telling them his mother's location. Within
minutes, scores of officers descended upon their home.
In 1986, was Robinson was sentenced to 20 years in jail. She spent 10
years at Dublin before being paroled and remains estranged from her son.
When Robinson was imprisoned she began to plant the seeds for her
later work, advocating for her own children.
WHERE TO CALL
Ida Robinson and Families With a Future can be reached at (415)
255-7036, ext. 320.
©1999
San Francisco Chronicle Page 1
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
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