The day before Misty Presler went to jail in Minnesota, she asked her ex-boyfriend if he would look after her children, who were six, five and two years old.
“And the answer is yes,” she said, he told her. “I’ll take all three. I can deal with it. Whatever we have to do.”
But once she got to jail, Presler made a few phone calls and quickly realized he couldn’t make it. She was beside herself.
Today, despite bipartisan support for criminal justice reform, women are the fastest growing group of inmates. Most of them are mothers – and often the primary caregiver. This means when mothers go to jail or jail, someone else has to take care of the children. Typically this meant family or friends or government foster families.
But often women don’t have family or friends who can help. And having children in foster care can sometimes result in losing custody. Lori Timlin, the education coordinator at Minnesota Women’s Prison, said this is a major concern for the women she, like Presler, works with.
“I’m away from my kid,” Timlin said, women tell her. “Does that mean Child Protection will kick in and I’ll lose my rights?”
However, there is another alternative, a sort of unofficial foster care system that temporarily takes children in and tries to help mothers retain custody.
“The goal of our organization is family preservation,” said Lucy Olson of Together for Good, an organization that works with churches in the Twin Cities to find volunteer host families.
Families will take in a child for weeks or months while the mother finishes her sentence or thinks of other options for the children. Although the host families are Christian, they accept children of all faiths.
“We don’t want a mother to have to choose between the safety of her children or the care system,” Olson said.
The host families provide the children with meals, provide them with accommodation and ensure that they go to school and doctor’s appointments. They also help the child keep in touch with the mother through phone calls and visits.
In the regular system, the state gives a stipend to foster families to pay for these things. With programs like Together for Good, the hosts pay for the costs, even if the churches can help. Olson said that like the state foster care system, her organization conducts background checks on families and trains them. But not all do.
Presler said she was initially afraid of sending the children to families she didn’t know while she was in prison, but she eventually decided it was her best bet. “I will lose my children. I have no other options,” she said.
The three children went to families who kept them for more than a year until Presler was released.
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