i was born in prison essay

How Girl Who Was Born in Prison Defies the Odds by Making It Into Harvard

Against all odds, this young girl, born in a prison and abandoned by her mother, has surpassed expectations and achieved something truly incredible. Her determination and strength have led her to be accepted into Harvard University, becoming a beacon of inspiration for many.

Meet Aurora, the girl who was born in prison, and pursued a surprising career.

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Texas Girl Born in Jail Heading to Harvard After Graduating at the Top of Her Class

Aurora Sky Castner plans to study law when she attends Harvard University in the fall

Academy for Science & Health, Conroe ISD/Facebook

A Texas girl who was born in jail is making a name for herself after graduating from high school at the top of her class, with plans to attend Harvard University.

Eighteen years after she was born in the Galveston County Jail, Aurora Sky Castner graduated third in her class at Conroe High School on Thursday night, The Courier reported.

Castner’s mother was in jail when she gave birth to her. She has not played a role in her daughter's life since the day Castner's father picked her up as a newborn from the prison, raising her as a single father, the outlet said.

According to the Courier , Castner opened her application essay to Harvard with the sentence, "I was born in prison."

She was later accepted into the Ivy League through early action, and the teen plans to study law when she attends the school in the fall.

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Growing up, Castner moved around a lot with her dad, but always stayed in Montgomery County, the Courier reported.

When she was in elementary school, members of the staff saw potential in her, but felt she could use some guidance from CISD’s Project Mentor program , which partners community volunteers with students.

In came her mentor, Mona Hamby, who told the Courier, “I was given a paper about her. Her hero was Rosa Parks, her favorite food was tacos from Dairy Queen and she loved to read. I thought this sounds like a bright little girl. I still have that paper today.” 

After Castner told Hamby about her parenting ordeal, the woman told The Courier she felt as though the now-teenager "needed more" than just a guide for school activities, but personal moments as well.

So Hamby helped Castner with things like picking out glasses and getting her first salon haircut, according to the outlet, while dentists, orthodontists and other community leaders helped Castner with her teeth and to enjoy important childhood experiences, such as summer camp. 

“It was a very different environment than I grew up in and that’s not a bad thing,” Castner said. “Everything that Mona taught me was very valuable in the same way that everything that I went through before Mona was very valuable.” 

Hamby and her husband, Randy, toured the Harvard campus with Castner in March 2022, which helped solidify the teen's decision to attend the university later this year. “After that trip, I saw her love for the school intensify,” Hamby said.

Alongside Hamby, the Courier reported that Castner also relied on James Wallace, a professor at Boston University, who helped her prepare her Harvard application. “He helped me to tell my story in the best way possible,” she told the outlet.

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Texas girl born in jail graduates top of class, heading to harvard in the fall.

A Texas teen who was born in jail exceeded all odds as she graduated from high school at the top of her class and will be attending Harvard University in the fall.

Aurora Sky Castner graduated third in her class at Conroe High School Thursday night 18 years after she was born in the Galveston County Jail, the Houston Chronicle reported .

“I was born in prison,” is how the new grad opened her application essay to the Ivy League school before she was accepted through early action, according to the newspaper.

Castner’s mother was incarcerated at the time she gave birth and was not a part of her life since the day her father picked her up as a newborn from the jail and raised her as a single dad.

With the help of the community in Conroe, Castner was able to reach her dream of getting into Harvard, where she plans to pursue a career in law.

Her elementary school staff introduced her to a community mentorship program where adult volunteers grab lunch with young students at least once a week and advise them on their needs, goals, fears and futures. Many of the mentor-student pairs form years-long relationships and Castner’s was no different.

Mona Hamby has been a part of Castner’s life for a decade, according to the Chronicle.

“I was given a paper about her. Her hero was Rosa Parks, her favorite food was tacos from Dairy Queen and she loved to read. I thought this sounds like a bright little girl,” Hamby told the newspaper. “I still have that paper today.” 

Like Castner, Hamby did not have a mother in her life.

“She told me ‘I’ve been to jail.’ I said “No, that can’t be right,’” she said of the then 8-year-old. “I knew that I can’t just go eat lunch with this kid once a week, she needed more.” 

Hamby took Castner to her first haircut at a salon, helped her get glasses and even took her to tour Harvard’s campus in March 2022, the publication reported.

“After that trip, I saw her love for the school intensify,” Hamby said.

The teenager said she found value in her life both before she joined the mentorship program and after.

“It was a very different environment than I grew up in and that’s not a bad thing,” Castner told the Chronicle. “Everything that Mona taught me was very valuable in the same way that everything that I went through before Mona was very valuable.” 

Others in the community looked out for the teen as well — from helping her get dental care to gifting her the experience of summer camp. A Boston University professor, James Wallace, even advised Castner on her Harvard application, according to the paper.

“He helped me to tell my story in the best way possible,” she said. 

But Castner’s academic rigor was self-motivated. She grew up a strong reader at an early age and joined her high school’s Academy for Health and Science Professions, which helps prepare young minds for careers in science and mathematics.

“There was something satisfying about having all As and having that accomplishment,” she said. “Grades just meant a lot to me.” 

Castner said she is interested in studying psychology and philosophy at Harvard with her sights set on a future law degree in a post shared with other incoming Harvard students.

“I am beyond excited to be attending Harvard College in the fall,” the teen wrote. “… I cannot wait to meet my fellow classmates so do not be afraid to reach out!”

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She was born in prison, but now she's going to Harvard!

Some people have had rough starts to their lives but have overcome them. People like 18-year-old Aurora Sky Castner.

This Texas girl was born in jail and is making a name for herself after graduating from high school at the top of her class, with plans to attend Harvard University!

Eighteen years after she was born in the Galveston County Jail, Aurora Sky Castner graduated third in her class at Conroe High School last Thursday night, The Courier reported. Aurora's mother was in jail when she gave birth to her. Aurora's mom has not played a role in her daughter's life since the day Aurora's father picked her up as a newborn from the prison, and then raising her as a single father.

According to the story, Aurora opened her application essay to Harvard with the sentence, "I was born in prison." She was later accepted into the Ivy League through early action, and the teen plans to study law when she attends the school in the fall.

Way to go Aurora! 

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Born in jail to her incarcerated mother, teen is now Harvard-bound

Texas teen Aurora Sky Castner was born in jail. She graduated with top honors on Thursday, May 25, 2023, and set to attend Harvard University in the fall.  (Academy for Science & Health, Conroe ISD)

CONROE, Texas - She was born facing great odds, entering into the world in a jail. And now she’s ready to embark on her dream to attend Harvard University.

On Thursday, Aurora Sky Castner graduated from Conroe High School in the Greater Houston area of Texas with top honors. The 18-year-old, draped with a stole and cords marking outstanding academic performance, walked across the stage to receive her diploma to cheers when her name was called.

Aurora Sky Castner graduated on Thursday, May 25, 2023 from Conroe High School in Conroe, Texas. (Conroe High School/Conroe Independent School District)

Her journey here has been a remarkable one, as she’s being celebrated for her hard work and success, despite the odds she faced from the day she was born.

Her mother delivered her while serving time in the Galveston County Jail. Her father brought her home from the jail and raised her as a single parent, according to the Houston Chronicle .

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Even in her younger years, she stood out as an exceptional student. She was identified as a good candidate for the Conroe Independent School District’s (ISD) Project Mentor program. The program worked to connect students with mentors in the community to help "promote positive youth development so that students can successfully navigate school and life," Project Mentor's website said.

Castner was matched up with Mona Hamby. 

"I was given a paper about her. Her hero was Rosa Parks, her favorite food was tacos from Dairy Queen, and she loved to read. I thought this sounds like a bright little girl," Hamby told the Houston Chronicle. "I still have that paper today." 

Over the years, Hamby has remained among Castner’s biggest cheerleaders and supporters and even traveled with her to tour Harvard last year. 

In the teen's essay as part of her application to the Ivy League, she no doubt caught the attention of Harvard's college admissions officials with her powerful opening line. 

It began with the statement: "I was born in prison."

Castner's impressive story and high marks in school landed her an offer through Harvard's early action process. She reportedly planned to study law at the university.

Her story of her odds-defying accomplishments has been shared widely. And Castner’s mentor has been among those who have been chronicling the teen's successes.  

On Instagram, Hamby boasted about the standout student she's cheered on, as she's watched her go after her dreams. "Girl set a goal to go to Harvard in elementary school despite being born in poverty," Hamby shared proudly. "Received full scholarship to attend Harvard in 2023."

This story was reported from Oakland, Calif.

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Texas Girl Born In Prison Graduates Top Of Her Class, Now Set To Study Law At Harvard University

Born in the confines of the galveston county jail in texas, aurora sky castner emerged from an unlikely beginning to defy expectations and forge a unique path. while her birth occurred within the prison walls, castner's indomitable spirit and unwavering determination propelled her to accomplish an impressive feat—graduating high school as the third-ranked student in her class..

Born in the confines of the Galveston County Jail in Texas, Aurora Sky Castner emerged from an unlikely beginning to defy expectations and forge a unique path.

While her birth occurred within the prison walls, Castner's indomitable spirit and unwavering determination propelled her to accomplish an impressive feat—graduating high school as the third-ranked student in her class.

Now, as she sets her sights on a future in the legal field, Castner is preparing to embark on an awe-inspiring journey, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to join the prestigious ranks of Harvard University in the upcoming fall semester.

Castner's determination and academic abilities propelled her to rank third in high school despite her challenges.

Following her birth in prison, Castner's father took on the role of a single parent and has been there for her ever since.

Reports indicate that Castner exhibited exceptional academic prowess from a young age.

To support her dreams , she was encouraged to participate in a mentorship program, where she met Mona Hamby, who has remained a significant presence in her life to this day.

Mona Hamby reportedly said, "I was given a paper about her. Her hero was Rosa Parks; her favorite food was tacos from Dairy Queen, and she loved to read. I thought this sounded like a bright little girl."

When asked about Hamby , Castner said, "Everything that Mona taught me was very valuable in the same way that everything that I went through before Mona was very valuable."

Aurora Sky Castner had a rare encounter with her birth mother at 14, marking their first meeting since her birth in prison. In her impactful Harvard application essay, she boldly began with the words, "I was born in prison."

As per reports, Castner took Mona Hamby and her husband, Randy, on a memorable tour of the Harvard campus in March 2022.

Castner decided to pursue her education at this prestigious university during this visit.

Aurora Sky Castner's journey from being born in the Galveston County Jail to achieving academic excellence and securing admission to Harvard University is nothing short of remarkable.

With a passion for studying law, she is poised to begin her next chapter at Harvard in the fall.

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Prison Born

What becomes of the babies of incarcerated mothers? Research suggests that having nurseries in prisons leads to lower recidivism rates for moms and better outcomes for their kids.

A lyssa mayer was four months pregnant the day a police officer showed up at her motel room in Kingston, New York. It was late afternoon in August 2013, the sun dragging toward the Catskills on the west side of town. Earlier that week, her boyfriend, who’d been sleeping at her place since he found out about the baby, had missed a curfew check. Both of them had recently gotten out of prison on parole, and weren’t supposed to be around anyone else with a criminal record. With the authorities looking for him, they could both get in trouble. So they’d packed some clothes and driven to a Super 8 and hoped for some idea of what to do next. Mayer was going out to pick up a pizza when she ran into the officer in the hallway.

She and her boyfriend had grown up together around Kingston. The area had been a manufacturing center for IBM until the company started laying off workers in the early 1990s, around the time Mayer was born, leaving not much more than strip malls and fast-food joints, along with rising crime rates, in stretches of the Hudson Valley. After Mayer’s parents split up, when she was a toddler, her mother worked two jobs and would return home seeming distant. Mayer spent a lot of time at her grandmother’s house and, later, on the streets in the rough part of town. In high school, she moved in with a cocaine dealer she met one day at a gas station. He bought her new clothes, manicures, anything she wanted. By the time the relationship ended, she was making sales of her own.

In 2009, when Mayer was 18, she fronted six grams to a friend who had just gotten out of prison. He told her he was broke and needed to make a quick deal. As it turned out, he had already made one with the local narcotics team. Some time later, the cops kicked in the front door of her apartment, and she ended up with a three-year felony sentence.

When Mayer learned she was pregnant, in the summer of 2013, she had already returned to prison twice for parole violations. She called a clinic to make an appointment for an abortion. She knew she wasn’t in the best position to be a parent—she had started a new job and believed she could turn her life around, but she wasn’t sure that her boyfriend wanted to do the same. She didn’t want her child to be raised without a father, like she had been. Once her boyfriend found out, though, he swore to her that they would work things out. So she didn’t show up for the appointment, and instead got a tattoo across her collarbone that read Blessed . Not long after that, they went on the run.

The officer who handcuffed Mayer in the motel didn’t seem to care when she told him she was pregnant. Neither did the parole judge, who charged her with fraternizing with another parolee and skipping curfew and ordered her back to prison. As she stripped down at the intake facility and stepped forward to be searched, she faced the question that thousands of American women do each year: What happens to a baby born in detention?

O ver the past four decades, as the inmate population in the United States has grown into the largest in the world, the number of children with a parent in custody has risen to nearly 3 million. For corrections officials and policy makers, those relationships can fade into the background. But not when a child is born on the inside.

For as long as women have been doing time, prisons have had to contend with the children they carry. In 1825, a pregnant inmate named Rachel Welch received a whipping so severe that it was suspected of causing her death not long after she gave birth. Nearly 200 years later, the clashes are less violent but perhaps no less consequential: the vast majority of women who give birth while incarcerated in the United States must hand over their baby within a few hours of delivery, to family, friends, or the foster-care system. For some mothers—even those with short sentences—these separations turn out to be permanent. And with a nearly 800 percent increase in the number of women in custody since the late 1970s, the births are happening on a scale that is hard to ignore. An estimated one in 25 female inmates is pregnant when the prison doors lock behind her.

In recent years, the flood of women into the correctional system has prompted a growing number of states to create programs known as prison nurseries, which allow women to keep their newborn children with them behind bars. Inmates who qualify can raise their babies for a limited time—ranging from one month to three years, but in most states 18 months—in separate housing units on prison grounds. Eight states now offer prison nurseries, all but one of which have opened in the past two decades; Wyoming recently finished constructing a facility that will bring the total to nine.

Research associating participation in the programs with lower recidivism rates among mothers has helped make nurseries a rare shared cause for prisoner advocates and officials looking to manage costs. The idea, though, is more than 100 years old. First popularized around the turn of the 20th century, nurseries flourished for a time, but started to close about 50 years ago, as correctional attitudes became more punitive and prison administrators began to question the costs and the effects on children.

Today, as nurseries return to prisons teeming with an unprecedented number of inmates, the questions are even more pressing. Should institutions that limit so many basic rights allow inmates to be active parents? Most important, what does spending the first years of life in prison mean for a child?

I nside the barbed-wire enclosure of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security women’s prison an hour north of New York City, about a dozen of the newest residents played within the confines of a three-foot-high baby gate. The morning program was under way in the prison’s Infant Development Center, where sunlight slanted through flowered curtains. A small boy with a pacifier banged a drum. Staff in smocks and stocking feet circulated, some rocking babies, while a toddler sat in pajamas and surveyed her options: a row of dolls on a shelf, piles of board books, crates of balls and squishy blocks. A menagerie painted on the back wall—a lion, a koala, a monkey swinging from a banana tree—stood out brightly against the cinder block.

Bedford Hills is home to the country’s longest-running prison nursery, which opened with the rest of the facility in 1901. Set amid the colonial estates and horse pastures of Westchester County, the brick buildings sit on a rise surrounded by maple and oak trees, whose leaves were just turning when I visited in October.

The prison is the reception center for all female inmates in New York, so Mayer had learned about the nursery when she landed in Bedford Hills the first time, before she was transferred to a lower-security facility upstate. While at Bedford Hills, she could sometimes see mothers and babies in the yard during their recreation period, or a row of strollers parked outside the Infant Development Center. But as she waited in the county jail a few years later—facing just over a year of additional time, and entering her third trimester—she didn’t know whether she wanted to keep her own baby in prison. “I didn’t want my son to experience what I did,” she told me. “Being locked up all the time.”

Working with an advocate she met through her lawyer, Mayer looked into community programs that would offer an alternative to prison, but none would agree to take her while she was pregnant. She ran through the list of who could take custody while she was gone. Her boyfriend had ended up with extra charges for a gun the officer had found at the motel, and was going to be locked up for another seven years. She didn’t want to ask her family, either: she and her mother still weren’t close, and she didn’t want to burden her grandmother, who had already raised several children and grandchildren and was now caring for her aging husband. So when Mayer arrived again at Bedford Hills, in December 2013, she filled out an application for the nursery. Two months later, she gave birth to her son at the local hospital. She named him DeVanté, after his father. They rode back to the grounds together in a prison van.

I first met Mayer outside the Infant Development Center, where she was picking up her son, who had just turned eight months old, at the end of her morning shift sorting packages and cleaning in the visitor-reception area. Now 24, she wore a pink T-shirt over her prison-issue pants, and her curly brown hair hung loose over the tattoo on her collarbone. DeVanté was propped on her hip, a diaper poking out of his elastic-waist jeans, sucking down a bottle.

The two of them were living with 12 other mothers and their babies in the nursery’s housing unit, one floor in a building set apart from the general population. Although Bedford Hills is a maximum-security facility, most inmates in the nursery program are less serious offenders—the screening process tends to eliminate women with a history of violent crime or involvement with the child-welfare system—and the unit looks more like a college dormitory than a cellblock. Mothers with newborns live along a corridor of double rooms, moving into singles once their babies are four months old. (The age limit for children at Bedford Hills is one year, but women who will be out before their babies turn 18 months old can apply for an extension so they can leave prison with their child.) Mayer and DeVanté shared a small room with pastel walls and a window looking out on the trees beyond the prison fence. Her narrow bed stood a few feet from his crib, photos of her boyfriend taped to a metal locker between them.

After Mayer put DeVanté down for a nap, we sat on couches in the unit’s rec room. Light filtered in from an attached sun porch, where decorations for an up-coming Halloween party were spread across the floor. The mothers spend all their time in the self-contained nursery, except while they are attending their daily programs—GED classes, substance-abuse treatment, career training—when their children are watched in the Infant Development Center. The unit has its own dining room, and a kitchen where the women can cook. They go outside for recreation in a private yard. In the evenings, they play together or watch Netflix in the rec room. DeVanté liked to settle in with a book. “He just wants to sit on my lap,” Mayer said. “He’s a mommy’s boy.”

Despite the toys and bright paint, the nursery is recognizably a prison—a fact made clear by the corrections officer stationed just inside the entrance. The seclusion makes for a sense of community—the women trade advice and babysit for one another when someone wants to go to the gym or the library—but also isolation. And the sleep deprivation that every new mother endures gets worse when all of your neighbors also have newborns crying at night. But Mayer believes that the experience has created a special bond between her and her son. “Nothing has made me want to change before,” she said. “Kids make you want to change.”

They don’t, of course, guarantee that you can. Many nursery participants have older children back home. But administrators point out that the program provides support and structure that women might not have had on the outside. “We’ve had mothers say, ‘I have two other kids, and I didn’t know the color of their eyes,’ ” Jane Silfen, the nursery director, told me. “They can connect with their babies here. If they were on the outside, they’d be doing everything but that.”

“The long-term goal is that women leave better off than they came in,” Karen Graff, the nursery manager, told me. In addition to doing administrative work—ordering baby wipes, coordinating visits from a lactation specialist and a pediatrician, overseeing clothing donations from Westchester residents—Graff, who is a trained social worker, helps mothers with daily challenges that range from soothing a baby who won’t stop crying to navigating tensions with corrections officers. “A lot of my job is just listening,” she said. “So many women have a long history of extreme trauma.” She tries to get them to reflect: How did you get here? How do you want to parent your children while you’re here? What happens when you go home?

The program seems to be working: research has suggested that women who participate in the nursery at Bedford Hills are significantly less likely to return to prison than inmates in the general population. Results like these have drawn interest from other states. A few weeks before my visit, a group of legislators and corrections administrators from Connecticut came to tour the nursery. Members of the state’s general assembly had raised the possibility of starting a similar program at the Connecticut women’s prison, York Correctional Institution, and the delegation had traveled to Bedford Hills to talk with administrators and inmates.

Eric Coleman, a co-chair of the Connecticut legislature’s judiciary committee, told me that he first learned about prison nurseries a few years ago, from a legislative clerk. The clerk had been translating for a group of prosecutors visiting from Russia. When the conversation turned to corrections, the prosecutors expressed surprise at the American policy of separating mothers from their babies. In their country, they told the clerk, children born to inmates could stay right there with them. Why didn’t prisons in the United States allow the same?

Much of the rest of the world manages to uphold public safety without routinely taking newborns from their incarcerated mothers—some with accommodations that would be unthinkable in an American prison. At the Preungesheim Prison in Frankfurt, Germany, women can keep their children on the grounds until they are old enough to go to school. Mothers with older children at home are allowed to spend days with their family as a kind of work release—cooking and cleaning and tucking their kids into bed before checking back into prison for the night.

According to a comprehensive survey from 1987—the low point for American prison nurseries—the U.S. was one of only five responding United Nations member countries (along with the Bahamas, Canada, Liberia, and Suriname) that did not generally provide accommodations for a baby born during a woman’s prison term.

T his was not always the case. The country’s first prisons exclusively for female inmates opened after the Civil War, built on the idea that specialized attention, rather than warehousing in the attics of male penitentiaries, would be more likely to successfully reintegrate law-breaking women into society. By the 1900s, a new model of detention for women, the reformatory, had cropped up in some 20 states. Whereas the penitentiary model focused on restricting freedoms, reformatories—which mostly held women for moral offenses, like prostitution and “manifest danger of falling into vice”—made it their mission to correct behavior, instructing inmates in everything from physical fitness to table manners to vocational trades.

Reformatory administrators focused on rehabilitating the women in their charge. “We must guard against institutionalizing them,” the board of directors at the Connecticut State Farm for Women declared shortly after the facility opened in 1918. “Our training here must fit them for the work they are to do when they go out.” That training often included child-rearing. Many of these early women’s prisons provided separate facilities where young children could stay with their incarcerated mothers.

Estelle Freedman, a historian at Stanford, told me that prison nurseries had originally been guided by an ideology of maternalism, the belief that innate virtues accompany motherhood. The presence of children in prison, the thinking went, could have a virtuous effect on “fallen women.” But as decades passed, that optimism waned. Drug use increased, as did the population of black inmates in the Northeast and Midwest, where the reformatory movement had concentrated, and Progressive-era reformers gave way to a generation of “corrections officials,” whose attitude toward incarcerated women was fast becoming, as Freedman put it: “There’s nothing we can do about them.”

In the 1960s, a pair of social workers who visited a nursery in West Virginia—where a prominent activist once called the presence of children “a pleasant humanizing influence”—signaled what would soon become the new correctional mind-set: “Prison is no place for a child.”

Over the next few decades, as lawmakers answered Richard Nixon’s call for a war on drugs with zero-tolerance policies and mandatory sentencing minimums, prison terms got longer, and judges were given less discretion about how to dole them out. Women—particularly women of color—counted high among the casualties. Since the 1970s, the female incarceration rate has increased twice as fast as the male rate. At the same time that incarceration became the main answer to a slate of the country’s social problems, the states that still had nurseries stopped operating the programs and repealed the laws that governed them. Through the ’70s and into the early ’80s, every facility except Bedford Hills closed; administrators cited concerns about security, insurance costs, management problems, and child welfare.

As nurseries disappeared, the prison explosion of the 1980s flung families even farther apart. Farming and manufacturing jobs were drying up across the country, and small towns and rural areas competed for prison-construction contracts and the employment opportunities they would create. New facilities were built far from the urban centers where many offenders lived, so inmates who were parents usually ended up more than 100 miles from their families—and because there were so few women’s prisons, many mothers were even farther away. Most did not see their children until they were released. And those reunions, in many cases, were brief: by the early ’90s, the rate of inmates, male and female, re‑arrested within three years of release had reached nearly 70 percent. More than half would return to prison.

Corrections officials were unprepared for the influx of women, many of whom were unmarried mothers of young children. In 1992, the National Institute of Corrections held a training to address the growing population of female prisoners. The superintendent of Bedford Hills stood up to speak about the nursery program, catching the attention of an audience member named Larry Wayne.

Wayne was then the superintendent of the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women, which had a visitation program that allowed children to stay with their mothers a few nights each month. The program not only provided an incentive for good behavior but also had what Wayne called “a therapeutic effect” on the whole population. A nursery seemed to promise even more benefits. Two years later, using Bedford Hills as a model, Nebraska’s corrections department opened a nursery of its own.

Administrators in Nebraska invited Joseph Carlson, a new hire in the criminal-justice department at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, to evaluate their program. His first results, published in 1998, showed a 13 percent drop in misconduct reports among women who joined the nursery. He also found, based on early data, that only about a third as many nursery participants returned to the prison compared with inmates who had been separated from their infants before the program started. “The potential for rehabilitating and training the mother inmate far exceeds the costs to the state and taxpayer,” Carlson wrote. He calculated that nursery supplies, staff salaries, and medical expenses would total about 40 percent less each year than foster care for the babies who would otherwise end up there, and predicted more-significant savings from a decline in recidivism. “If this trend keeps up, the program would pay for itself over time.”

Other corrections departments soon followed Nebraska’s lead. South Dakota opened a nursery the same year that Carlson published his report, and Washington State followed in 1999. When Ohio opened a nursery a few years later, prison administrators cited the promising results in Nebraska. New York released its own data in 2002, reporting that the recidivism rate for participants was half that of the general population. In 2009, Carlson published the 10-year results of his study, which showed that while 50 percent of mothers who had been separated from their newborns had returned to custody, only 17 percent of nursery participants had. By that time, nurseries had opened in Illinois, Indiana, and West Virginia.

Policy makers were interested not only in reducing the number of women in prison but also in improving outcomes for their children. Some research suggested that children of incarcerated parents were at elevated risk for academic, behavioral, and emotional problems, as well as future involvement with the criminal-justice system. More than half of the mothers in Nebraska’s nursery program reported to Carlson that their own mothers had been incarcerated. “The cycle has to be broken,” he wrote, “and education of the mother is one of the first places to begin.”
When Wyoming passed a nursery-funding proposal in 2012, the warden of the women’s prison at the time, a former employee of the Nebraska prison, told a local newspaper that he saw the impact of a nursery reaching down generations. “We want [the mothers] to be successful at raising those children,” he said, “so those children don’t repeat the sins of the parents.”

The claim that nurseries could benefit children as well as their mothers has a radical extension: children not only should be allowed in prison but might be better off there. That idea is, unsurprisingly, controversial.

“I don’t think any children should be in prison,” James Dwyer told me last year, as legislators in Connecticut considered a proposal for a nursery. “Period.”

Dwyer, a family-law professor at the College of William & Mary and the country’s most outspoken critic of prison nurseries, disputes the idea that advocates of the programs have child welfare in mind. Screening inmates for fitness as parents based on a history of child abuse or violence, he told me, is missing a larger point: incarceration itself is a marker of unfitness. In a paper published last year in the Utah Law Review , Dwyer further argued that allowing mothers who have broken the law to keep their children in prison is not only unwise but unconstitutional:

There would likely be widespread public outrage if any state began putting mentally disabled or senile adults in prisons with incarcerated relatives in the hope that this would reduce recidivism and provide some benefits to those incompetent adults.

Objections to putting innocent children in prison go back to the heyday of nurseries. “If we were more than three degrees removed from the level of the chimpanzee,” a writer for the Newspaper Enterprise Association declared in 1930, “the bare announcement that thre [ sic ] was even one baby in prison, anywhere in the land, would stir us to a yell of protest that would rock that prison to its foundations.”

The shortcomings of raising a baby in prison are probably most obvious to those actually doing it. DeVanté was an easy infant, Alyssa Mayer told me, even taking naps when they were closed in their room for the twice-daily attendance count. But now he wanted to crawl around and explore. He had started scooting up and down the corridor outside their room and lurching around the rec room, holding on to couches for support. He would be 14 months old when she was up for release, and she was already thinking about how much catching up they had to do: he had never seen the ocean, never been on a swing. “Sometimes I think I’m selfish for keeping him here, even though he doesn’t know what’s happening,” she said. “If he was home, there’s so much more he would experience.”

Those who advocate on behalf of incarcerated mothers are also quick to point out the drawbacks to parenthood in prison. In February, the Women in Prison Project at the Correctional Association of New York released a report finding that pregnant inmates were routinely shackled during labor and recovery—sometimes with waist chains after a C-section delivery—despite a 2009 law restricting the practice. Other problems are more subtle. Gail Smith, the founder of Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers, served on an advisory committee for the Illinois prison nursery a decade ago and recalls the “control-oriented thinking” that permeated the early planning process. “Staff members were discussing the ‘parameters’ of breast-feeding and when mothers would and would not be permitted to feed their babies,” she told me. “I was appalled that these administrators could think … that it was appropriate to deny a hungry infant sustenance until the scheduled time convenient for corrections officers.” Advocates argue that funding could be better invested in community-based alternatives to incarceration, where women can parent their newborns without all the restrictions inherent to the prison environment.

Such alternatives, though, remain scarce for pregnant women—and many have no better places for their newborns to go. Most incarcerated mothers, unlike incarcerated fathers, were primary caregivers for their children before getting arrested, and family members or others who take custody are in many cases poor, sick, or overburdened. Researchers don’t know exactly why children of inmates might be at elevated risk for behavioral problems, but evidence suggests that the disruption of family life could play a significant role. For Dwyer, this is a reason for prison officials to encourage adoption.

But short of that extreme, prison nurseries may actually be the most stable environment for babies of incarcerated mothers. New York implemented a legal standard in 1930 for nursery admission matching the one that guides custody decisions outside prison: the best interests of the child. In 1973, an inmate in a New York jail named Kathleen Apgar, who had given birth while awaiting trial for murder, brought a suit against the local sheriff for taking her newborn son from her at the hospital. The state supreme court, ruling in Apgar’s favor, wrote that in addition to adequate food, shelter, and medical care, a child’s best interests included “the constant care and attention of its natural mother”—even if the mother was an accused murderer. That notion, which is at the heart of the disagreement between nursery advocates and critics like Dwyer, is only now being researched in depth for children starting life inside prison.

I n 1945, an austrian-born psychoanalyst named René Spitz conducted a seminal study of childhood in incarceration. He used a 16-mm camera to film two groups of babies and toddlers—one being raised by their mothers in the nursery of a penal institution for delinquent girls, and the other by the staff of a “foundling home,” a shelter for abandoned youth. His findings revealed developmental gaps. Even the oldest children in the foundling home, who were between 18 and 30 months old, were incontinent. Few could walk, talk, or eat without assistance. Even though the facility was kept clean and a physician visited every day, more than a quarter of the children died from a disease outbreak.

Which makes what Spitz found in the nursery especially striking: Children who were less than a year old could already speak a few words. They were so mobile that without close supervision, they would shimmy up the bars of their cribs and dive onto the floor. The biggest challenge, Spitz reported, was “how to tame the healthy toddlers’ curiosity and enterprise.”

Spitz searched for an explanation for the contrast. Food and housing conditions in the two institutions were similar, and the children in the foundling home came from more-favorable family backgrounds. The most significant difference? The “nursery provides each child with a mother to the nth degree,” he concluded, “a mother who gives the child everything a good mother does and, beyond that, everything else she has.”

Seventy years later, Spitz’s proposition has gained support from the first longitudinal study of prison-nursery outcomes. Starting in 2003, a team of researchers led by Mary Byrne, a professor at the Columbia University School of Nursing, followed 100 children and their mothers as they went through the nursery program in New York and reentered their communities. (The study participants were drawn from Bedford Hills and a neighboring medium-security facility, where the New York corrections department had opened a second nursery program in 1990. The two programs consolidated a few years ago.)

Byrne’s research is based on attachment theory—a line of thought that surfaced about a decade after Spitz’s study, holding that children develop a secure sense of themselves and others through the stability and attentiveness of caregivers in the first stages of life. The theory suggests that early caregiving can have profound implications on everything from brain development to the quality of future relationships.

For a paper published in 2010, Byrne’s team interviewed nursery mothers and found that only a third had formed secure attachments to their own parents. So what the researchers discovered when these mothers’ babies reached their first birthday was surprising: 60 percent showed signs of secure attachment, on par with a comparison group of children growing up in stable middle-class families outside prison, and a significantly higher rate than that of sample groups of at-risk children. “Their children should be in trouble,” Byrne told me. “But they’re not.”

Looking more closely at the results, the researchers found that children who stayed the longest in the nursery had the best outcomes. About half of the mothers had less than a year left on their sentence when their baby was born, and had returned home by the time of the assessment. The rate of secure attachment among those children, while still not significantly different from the rate for the comparison group of middle-class children, was lower than among their peers who had stayed in the nursery for a full year. Byrne hypothesized that rather than being harmed by the correctional setting, the babies actually benefitted from the structure the prison provided—particularly the restriction of drugs and alcohol, as well as the parenting support their mothers got from staff and other inmates. (The longitudinal study included parenting guidance from a nurse practitioner, which Byrne believes also contributed to the outcomes.)

James Dwyer points out that the attachment findings might be optimistic if extrapolated to nursery participants as a whole. The results included only children who were with their mothers at the time of assessment. As Byrne documented in a subsequent paper, more than 40 percent of pairs in the longitudinal study were separated before the mother left prison, in most cases because the baby reached the age limit or because of disciplinary action against the woman. Byrne noted that the misbehavior in those cases did not seem to pose any obvious threat to the children. (At Bedford Hills, the kind of mistakes any sleep-deprived new mother might make—leaving an extra blanket in the crib, drifting off with your baby on your chest—can become grounds for losing custody. The safety and well-being of the babies is the program’s primary concern, administrators told me, and behavior that puts them at even slightly elevated risk cannot be tolerated.)

Although separation in the first year can be damaging, experts say that babies who form secure attachments to their mother early on may be better off even if they are later split up. A study led by a member of Byrne’s team and published last year compared a group of 3-to-5-year-olds who had spent between one and 18 months in a prison nursery with a group of children the same age who, as infants or toddlers, had been separated from their incarcerated mothers. Most of the children were living with their mothers at the time of the study, but some in each group were with alternate caregivers. They faced comparable amounts of trouble at home, measured by the adults’ drinking and drug use, reliance on public assistance, and harsh treatment. But the preschoolers who had lived with their mothers in the nursery displayed significantly lower levels of depressed, anxious, or withdrawn behavior. The study concluded that participation in a nursery program may be a “buffer” against environmental risks when children leave the prison.

Byrne is now starting to analyze how the children in the longitudinal study fare as they go through grade school. What her team has found so far, she told me, is that children raised in the nursery perform no differently from other kids across a number of measures. The study design is limiting; for example, her team couldn’t randomly assign women or children to the nursery. But Byrne’s research suggests that prison nurseries could provide children of incarcerated mothers a better starting place than any existing alternative.

A lyssa Mayer and DeVanté left Bedford Hills at the end of April. Her mother—now the closest family she has in the area, since her grandmother moved out of state—came to pick them up the day they were released. It had been an emotional morning: saying goodbye to people who had become like family to her and her son, and not knowing what would come next. DeVanté had never ridden in a car without bars on the windows. They stopped at a grocery store on the way home, and he gaped as they moved through the aisles, picking out fresh fruits and vegetables. After dinner, she curled up in bed with him to watch TV—for the first time, just the two of them.

Three weeks later, when I visited Mayer at her mother’s house—a tidy split-level about half an hour from Kingston that she bought several years ago—DeVanté seemed to have settled into life on the outside. He swiped on an iPad and babbled at Siri, toddled between rooms playing peekaboo, helped himself to a bowl of candy. His hair had grown out in thick curls, and he had a gap between his front teeth that showed when he smiled. Mayer lifted him onto the kitchen counter and pulled up a Barney sing-along on YouTube. He bobbed his head and pumped his small hands toward the ceiling. She laughed. At Bedford Hills, she’d had a radio that she would play so he could dance, but only a couple of stations came through. “That’s what happens when he listens to hip-hop.”

Mayer told me DeVanté had brought her closer to her mother. “His bond with her is keeping my bond with her,” she said. And she knew she was lucky to have a place to go. Still, she looked forward to getting a job and moving into her own place in the city. She had always wanted to be a nurse, but knew that her record could keep her from getting a license. For now, she was open to anything that would pay the bills. At Bedford Hills, she hadn’t had to worry about things like food and shelter, diapers and child care. Leaving the program, she knew her choices mattered for both of them.

“It’s not like I can just get up and decide, Tonight I’m going to go to the bar ,” Mayer said. “He gives me that second thought I should have had a long time ago.” That weekend, her mother had offered to babysit so she could go out with friends, for the first time since she’d come home. They were planning to go to a restaurant in the next town: she wanted to stay away from the nightlife in Kingston. She had broken things off with DeVanté’s father, who was still in prison upstate, because she’d heard he was keeping contacts in the streets. “You can’t be in the middle of picking yourself up and pick somebody else up at the same time,” she said. “I feel like I have more-important things to put my effort into.”

Before I left, she picked up a potted plant from the kitchen window, a ruby globe with spiny ridges on a corrugated green stalk. “It’s a moon cactus,” she said. “It was originally just a regular green cactus, but this happens”—she pointed to the globe—“when it lacks chlorophyll.” The mutation that gives the moon cactus its bright color also keeps it from thriving on its own, so the seedlings have to be grafted onto another succulent so they can grow. She and DeVanté had bought the plant for Mother’s Day. She set it back on the windowsill, where it could soak up the light outside.

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I Was Born In Prison

Author of PRISON BABY: A Memoir

Excerpted from my memoir Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison :

Mother grounded me for some violation I can't remember. She insisted Jonathan, my older brother, and I call her the formal Mother. We're both adopted. I wanted to call her Mama but couldn't let the softness out.

What else does a twelve-year-old girl do when she's grounded but sneak around the house? I listen a second to make sure I'm alone, then grip and twist the knob. A ray of Seattle's noon sun slants through the glass of the patio door on the far side of the room.

If they come in, I'll slip my slim five-foot frame out the sliding door and escape.

Check the dresser! For no reason other than I'm not supposed to pry into my parents' belongings, something drives me to do whatever I'm not supposed to do. I creep across the room, around my parents' footboard, and face my mother's dresser, tucked next to her nightstand where a bird book, two novels, and three volumes of poetry pile high against her alarm clock.

I slide my mother's top dresser drawer open.

The scent of Mother's French soap collection wafts out of her drawer. She collects soap bar rounds the size of silver dollars wrapped in parchment paper to perfume her drawers filled with neat stacks of folded underwear and stockings bunched in a pile at the back.

Nothing here. I nudge the top drawer closed to move on to the one below but a corner of white catches my eye. A crisp white piece of paper peeks out from under the pink drawer liner, plastic printed with miniature roses.

I peel up a corner of the liner.

I unveil a copy of a typed letter only a paragraph long, lodged under silky slips and parchment-wrapped bars of soaps, under softness and the scent of perfume, stashed like a rumpled stowaway in a first-class cabin.

Must be important if it's hidden. I already know I'm adopted so it can't be about that. Maybe it's about my race, or races. No one's explained to me why I'm brown in a white family, why my skin is caramel colored, often a sienna brown from the sun. Could this letter answer the mystery?

"Can you please alter Deborah's birth certificate," my mother asks in the letter to the family attorney, "from the Federal Women's Prison in Alderson, West Virginia, to Seattle? Nothing good will come from her knowing she lived in the prison before foster care, or that her birthmother was a heroin addict. After all, she was born in our hearts here in Seattle, and if she finds all this out she'll ask questions about the prison and her foster homes before we adopted her."

I read the letter over and over, these new truths imprinted into my memory.

My spine tightens as if someone just jammed a rod down it.

Impossible. Read it again. Everything blurs.

Foster care? I had no idea about anything before my adoption or even how old I was at the time or where I lived before then.

I step back a few paces and sink into the folded comforter at the end of my parents' bed.

Born in prison? No one's born in a prison.

The worst word, the worst place, the worst of the worst: Prison.

I tuck the paper back under the liner and walk from the dresser into my parents' bathroom. I end up in front of the mirror over their sink, my body in overload. Time and space distort inside me. I don't know where I am. It's as if my feet lift from the earth, my body and brain separated by some wedge where I'm suspended in mid-air, disconnected from my house, from my neighborhood, from earth, from humanity.

It can't be true. How am I lovable if it is true? Who loves anyone from prison? If people find out my secret, then what?

My skin itches as if tiny ants crawl along the bones in my forearms and I scratch so hard, red streaks rise on my skin. I splash water onto my burning face but give up. None of it washes away what I know isn't there, but I think I'm coated with grime on my cheeks, hot to my hands. I can't stop splashing my face to get rid of the gritty scratch in my eyes and to rinse the sourness in my mouth.

Born in prison? Nobody's born in prison.

Then something sinks in. My "real" mother's an addict and criminal. My "real" home is a prison. While I don't understand until decades later, the trauma of learning about my prison birth sent me into a deep dive, an emotional lockdown behind a wall which imprisoned me for almost twenty years. The letter forced me into an impossible choice between two mothers, two worlds far apart. One mother in prison, behind bars, a criminal, a drug addict, a woman who tugs at me, her face and voice, images and her sound buried deep in my subconscious. The other mother, the one I face every day, the one who keeps fresh bouquets of flowers on our teak credenza. I don't connect with this mother.

I'm not hers. Not theirs.

It's the first and last time I read the letter, and I've never seen it again. I don't need to, for every word is imprinted in my brain and it's given me all the proof I need. I'm not the daughter of the mother and father who toss Yiddish quips back and forth, the mother who spends her Saturday afternoons throwing clay with a pottery teacher, then comes home with darling miniature ceramics vases. The mother who writes poetry with a Mont Blanc fountain pen and uses the same to correct her students' papers, the mother who cans cherries and whips the best whipped cream ever. The mother who says, "I love you, Pet," so many times I want to smack her. The mother I remind more days than not, "You're not my mother anyway," as I push her away when she tries to hug me.

The mother who waits for me in my ballet training every Saturday.

Don't think about it. It's not true, none of it happened. Not even the letter.

Some things we need to unthink and erase, just to keep living. To even stay alive. But the secrets we bury stay with us forever, glued to our insides like sticky rice.

Everything moves in slow motion as if on a conveyer belt at dinner the night of the letter. The voices of my family sound faint, like an echo far away. I forget I've ever read the letter, forget everything in it. Gone. Zip. Out of my mind and never shows up until another flash in another month. Maybe not a month, maybe eight. I forget this too. It never stays in my brain or anywhere inside me long enough for me to grasp it, but something this big can't hide for long.

I convince myself, "If I don't think of it, then it's not true. It never happened. I never read the letter. I wasn't born in prison."

But that doesn't mean it's not there. It seeps out of me like poison trapped in the pus of a balloon-sized blister.

My life-long battle begins when I force my brain to divorce from reality. It's the only way to metabolize what I've just learned. I was born in prison.

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'I was born in prison but now I'm going to Harvard after wowing them with 4 words'

A texas teenager who was born in prison has defied the odds after graduating third in her class to secure a full scholarship to the prestigious harvard university.

• 01:10, 28 MAY 2023

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A teenager who faced an incredibly tough start in life when she was born in a Texas prison has received a full scholarship to study at Harvard University.

Sky Castner's mother was serving a sentence at Galveston County Jail when she was born and her father took custody and raised her as a single parent.

However, the 18-year-old has defied the odds to graduate third in her class at Conroe High School near Houston.

READ MORE: 'People think I'm dumb because I'm on Page 3 – but I'm doing degree at Harvard'

Castner's application letter to Harvard opened with the bold line "I was born in prison" and clearly captured the attention of the admission staff.

After earning straight As at High School, she now plans to pursue a law degree.

Castner credits her mentor, Mona Hamby, for her success. Their journey together began when they were matched through her school's mentor program.

Recognizing Castner's passion for reading, Hamby became an integral part of her life, providing care and guidance beyond their weekly meetings.

She said: "I was given a paper about her. Her hero was Rosa Parks, her favourite food was tacos from Dairy Queen and she loved to read.

“I thought this sounds like a bright little girl, I still have that paper today.

"She told me 'I've been to jail', I said 'No, that can’t be right'. I knew that I can’t just go eat lunch with this kid once a week, she needed more," Hamby told the Houston Chronicle.

To stay up to date with all the latest news, make sure you sign up to one of our newsletters here .

Sharing the news on Instagram, Hamby celebrated Castner's acceptance into Harvard, while the Ivy League school will also be providing a full scholarship.

"Girl set a goal to go to Harvard in elementary school despite being born in poverty. Received full scholarship to attend Harvard in 2023," Hamby wrote while sharing an image of her mentee.

Hamby also took Castner on a tour of Harvard's campus, further fuelling her passion for higher education.

Castner said: "It was a very different environment than what I grew up in, and I am grateful for the opportunities."

While Castner has had minimal contact with her birth mother, having spoken to her only once at the age of 14, her father, who raised her single-handedly, faces his own challenges with bipolar disorder.

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Why Write About Life in Prison?

Because every story needs hope..

This essay is excerpted from The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting A Writer’s Life in Prison, a recently released collection of essays from Haymarket Book and PEN America. Edited by PEN America’s Director of Prison and Justice Writing, Caits Meissner, the book weaves together insights from over 50 justice-involved contributors and their allies to offer inspiration and resources for creating a literary life in prison. 

It started out just another day in prison: I shuffled the deck for a game of spades. My opponents had either been cheating or were having one hell of a lucky streak. Or maybe I just sucked at stacking the deck. I was certain I’d gotten all the cards just where I’d wanted them, when everyone stopped talking, eyes wide.

With my back to the window, I smelled the acrid stench of old insulation and smoldering cloth before turning toward the flames. Outside, grown men with faces covered in towels and T-shirts ran every which way. Prisoners were laying waste to the building’s weak points: the windows and doors. I’d later hear that some officers—fearing for their own safety—opened doors and stood back as their prisoners revolted in response to the warden’s lockdown orders. A billowy plume of smoke rose from where the chow hall used to be. A brick exploded against the metal grate barricading the window, and glass shards cascaded through the room. As my opponents rushed out into the chaos, the cards fell to the floor, the king of spades staring up.

The entire prison began to riot.

The year was 2009. The aftermath was Kentucky’s costliest riot in history. A friend of mine asked if I could help him put the experience into words for his family. For the first time since my imprisonment, I sat down to capture the havoc and devastation on paper. With pen to paper, my words flowed like the tears I was too ashamed to cry.

I’d never before been asked to describe the hell of prison. Why had I resisted depicting my environment for so long? I’d always wanted to be a creator of worlds, an author, an artist with words. Only somewhere along the way, I’d become convinced I wasn’t smart, educated, or articulate enough to say anything someone else would ever give a damn to hear. My dream of being an author was beat down by the poverty I was raised in, my inability to focus on my teachers, their lessons, and my grades, and eventually by the drug addiction I used to mask my inadequacies.

Three years into my incarceration, I was asked, “When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

It was then I decided to do something different. My pursuits turned to writing. I’d ask any and everyone for help. I’d finally dream. I’d change! But there was the nagging thought: Would anything I put down on the page make a difference? It was discomforting to not know where to begin, or what I wished to say.

Who was I as a writer? I found myself emulating all of my favorite authors in an attempt to locate my voice. But everything I wrote received the same critiques. Despite my imitation, I wasn’t making the progress I wanted. I still needed to work on my dialogue, characters, and plots. Discouraged, I stopped showing anyone my work. For a time, I stopped writing altogether.

It was only after my success with the riot piece that I felt comfortable enough to want people to read my work again. I felt validated, even if only temporarily. By then, the piece had been published on prisonwriters.com, and now all I had to do was wait. Someone would recognize my greatness, I thought to myself. And someone did—just not in the way I’d imagined it.

The friend who I’d written the riot piece for signed me up to join a group from Pioneer Playhouse, a local theater bringing the arts to prison. I was less than thrilled. Though I had zero interest in acting or writing plays, the prison offered nothing else.

I took the risk and joined the Voices Inside program.

“Write about what you know,” said the instructor. “Write from the gut.”

“I’m not writing about prison. Nobody gives a damn about prison,” I replied.

As it turned out, though my prison riot piece had been published, aside from pats on the back from a few of my fellow inmates and a small fifteen-dollar payment for the article, no one else said a thing about it. I’d bled on the page, and no one seemed to care, or even notice. The other twenty inmates of the very first Voices Inside class all agreed—no one wanted to write about the hell we all woke up to every morning. Instead, we showed up with our knockoffs of popular sitcoms, SNL skits, and all too many thinly veiled retellings of Romeo and Juliet.

The work was uninspired. The plays we would go on to write and perform in class all suffered greatly for our avoidance. With excuses of writer’s block, procrastination, and sheer refusal, we were lying to ourselves.

In attempting to tell stories—any stories—to avoid the topic of prison, we weren’t being true to our stories. I decided to set down the heavy sack of shame that I’d lugged around everywhere since my conviction. I wrote a new play in which I spoke of my own incarceration, not as something that had taken my life from me, but as something that had allowed me the time, separation, freedom to examine “my life.”

I wasn’t dead. None of us were. And though we’d all been stripped away from our families, our comforts, our routines and were confined to this “new normal,” our lives had not come to an end.

My first prison play involved the very people I’d spend the next twenty-five years locked away from: my children. With myself as the protagonist, I used my children’s hypothetical questions, blame, and confusion over my absence as the antagonist to reveal every truth I’d once steered clear of. Ultimately, guilt and innocence aside, it was my own poor choices that had put me in a prison of my own making.

I staged the play in the crowded classroom we used each week. Desks were moved aside to make an improvised auditorium with a few rows of plastic chairs. The play took place in the span of a visit with my now-grown children—strangers to me, with the names and once-familiar faces of the young people they’d been fifteen years before.

I wrote them as tragic characters who’d missed out on the father who had never put down roots, never truly loved their mother, never even attempted to be the man his children needed him to be. In the play, my daughter, the eldest, arrived on the scene to confront me with her anger. How could I ever leave her alone with two small brothers and a drug addict for a mother? Had I been the one to put the pipe to her mother’s lips, the needle in her veins? Did I know about the overdoses? All the strange men who’d found their way into my daughter’s bedroom in the middle of the night? Did I know all of the pain my being incarcerated had caused? Was I happy? Did I know all of the terrible things my children had grown up hearing about me? Did I know?

The man playing my daughter slapped me in the face with her last question before rushing offstage in tears. A voice from the audience called out: “Fucking go after her, man!” But the play ended with my character being restrained by an officer’s single hand.

Afterwards, I sat devastated and exposed. But as I glanced around the room, everyone’s resentment toward the man playing the officer was clear. I could feel them stewing on the same question. How do we begin to comfort the loved ones our decisions have taken us away from?

“That child needed her father,” said the man beside me. “I hate prison,” he said, placing his own comforting hand on my shoulder. “That really happens.”

Eleven years later, I still hear my fellow prisoners complain of having to share the details with those in their lives who know nothing about the realities of prison. No one wants to relive the grief of their incarceration. Ripping off scabs is painful. Their reticence is valid. I am patient. They have to find the courage on their own terms, within their own voices.

Why write about prison? Every story needs hope.

In our stories, we may have started out the murderers, rapists, thieves, and addicts, the monsters, the bad guys, the adversaries, the villains, the defendants, but prison does not have to be the end of our tale. If we don’t write our own endings, we hand our pens over to the legislators, owners of privatized prisons, and propagators of the lies behind mass incarceration.

I write about prison because there are more people in prisons in America than populate some small countries.

Because my experiences are the experiences of countless others. I write because there is truth in our stories that cannot, must not, be denied: the separation from our families, the toll on our loved ones, all the wasted time, the warehousing of our bodies, and our fruitless efforts to prevail against a flawed reality of incarceration.

That is the story I dare everyone to acknowledge. And only people behind bars can tell it as it truly is.

My Cellie Was the Father I Never Had

“prison was where i grew to love one of the finest human beings i have ever known.”.

Editor’s note: This week, we’re running a special Life Inside series about fathers and incarceration. Read the previous essays about next-cell neighbors , dancing in the prison gym and a surprise meeting .

I was born in 1964 on the South Side of Chicago . I grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes, where poverty, crime, gangs and drugs shaped my perception of life. At the tender age of 11, I began smoking weed, drinking wine and hanging out with the street toughs in my neighborhood. I joined the notorious Black Gangster Disciples, a large and violent gang in my neighborhood.

Looking back, I believe I was trying to fill the void that the absence of my father left in my life. My father and mother married as teenagers. Three months after I was born, my father was gone. I’ve met him, but we are virtually strangers. The gang became my surrogate family . The leaders in the gang were our uncles; some even treated us like their sons. Decades later I would realize that what I mistook for love and acceptance was really just manipulation and exploitation.

Predictably, I dropped out of school, and became more involved in criminal activity and drug use. By age 24, I was on death row for murder. In 2003, the governor commuted my sentence to life without parole .

I arrived at Stateville Correctional Center in January 2003, after 16 years on death row. The “Ville” is known for violence, mayhem and degradation, yet in this “hell on Earth,” I met a kindly old man whom I came to love as a son does his father. Charles “Doc” Smith and I met in the spring of 2005 in D House. I was placed in the cell with him early one morning, and by 2 p.m., we were drinking coffee and playing chess.

When I walked into the cell, Doc’s first words were, “I hope you aren’t gonna be a problem, young man.” Doc never called me by my given name. I was either “Sonny” or “youngman.” I resented this initially, but in time I came to see that he used these labels affectionately.

Doc and I were cellmates for about three months, but then I got a job and wouldn’t see him again for six or seven years. In just those three months, Doc developed enough of an appreciation for how I treated him that it would lead to us being cellmates again seven years later.

One morning after all those years, while I was exercising in my cell, an officer came and told me, “Pack your property. You’re moving today.” I was mad because I didn’t request a move, and was comfortable where I was. I would learn later that unbeknownst to me, Doc had pulled some strings and had me moved in with him.

When I got to my new cell and saw Doc sitting on the lower bunk, I exclaimed, “Who is this old codger in my cell?” He smiled and said, “You just try to live long enough to be an ‘old codger.’”

We shook hands, and Doc explained how I came to be his cellie. “Man, I had a cellie who was crazy!” he said. “He was stealing my stuff and when I confronted him, he threatened to beat me up. Now I ain’t no chump, sonny, but I’m too old and too sick to be humbugging.”

I asked Doc: “So you had them move me—why me?”

“You were one of my best cellmates,” Doc replied. “You’re clean. You’re respectful. And I figured I’d live with you til I transfer to Dixon.” (That’s a medium-security prison for the aged and infirm.)

I quickly learned why Doc needed a cellmate of a particular disposition. He had cancer and sometimes soiled himself. Additionally, he was in the beginning stages of dementia. He would go to the toilet but sometimes urinate all over the floor or defecate and get all the feces all over the toilet. Needless to say, this did not endear him to his less compassionate cellies. I, on the other hand, liked and respected Doc. I did not like cleaning up his mess, but one day I’ll be old too, and I would hope someone would show me a modicum of kindness.

The first time it happened was somewhat comical. I was asleep and awoke to a horrendous odor in the cell. I got up and turned on my lamp and there was Doc, pants half-down and feces everywhere. I said, “Damn, Doc! What did you do?”

He looked so embarrassed, and sheepishly replied, “I’m sorry, youngman. I had an accident. Don’t be mad. I’ll clean it up, I promise.” Doc was on the verge of crying, he was so ashamed.

I looked at this man who was so pitifully not the man he’d once been, and I was determined to help salvage his dignity. “Don’t trip, Doc. I got you. We’ll clean this up, and nobody will even know,” I told him. It took close to two and half hours to clean Doc and the cell but with bleach, soap and disinfectant, we got it done.

We had a few more episodes like that but with time and patience, we developed a system, and Doc had fewer and fewer accidents. He would also forget to bathe, so part of my morning routine became helping him wash up, brush his teeth and shave. I think he was grateful because I never made a big deal out of it. I’d jokingly inquire each morning, “Doc, can you tell me what today is?” to which he would reply, “Yes, Sonny. Today is …” then whatever day of the week it happened to be. I’d say, “No sir, Doc. Today is ‘Let’s wash Doc Day!’” and we’d both laugh.

Life with Doc was far from a burden. Doc was educated, cultured, well-read and wise. He’d tell me about his dentistry practice in Oak Park before his incarceration. Doc was one of the first black men to own and live in neighboring River Forest, another prestigious suburb of Chicago. He had met the elite of black society, including Mayor Harold Washington. He’d regale me with tales of parties he attended, women he dated, places he’d been.

Doc and I mutually loved chess and tennis and boy, did Doc know a lot about the sport. His favorite female player was Chris Evert, and on the men’s side, Andre Agassi. Doc knew the history of tennis and would talk to me for hours about it.

In 2016, Doc finally got approved for Dixon. The night before his transfer, we stayed up all night watching tennis and playing chess. The next morning, before he left, Doc did something he never did. He hugged me real tight and told me, “Sonny, it has been an honor and a privilege to know you.” I was so shocked cause Doc absolutely abhorred any type of physical affection. He’d shake hands and that was that. That morning, he hugged me, and it felt like a father hugging his beloved son.

In less than a month, Dixon sent Doc back to Stateville. His cancer was terminal, and he did not have long to live. Doc died that winter, and I mourned him like we had known one another for a lifetime. When you think of bonds of love and familial cohesion, you don’t think of prison—but that was where I met and grew to love one of the finest human beings I have ever known.

William Peeples, 55, is incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, where he is serving a life sentence for murder and aggravated battery.

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I was born in 1958

Barraillier, mario francisco.

NO TITLE I was born in 1958, been down 22 years, I'm not entitled to altruism, and have little hope left. Yet I wonder if you have hope for yourselves. The Cuban missile crisis – seconds away from nuclear war,. Then the longest bloodiest war in Southeast Asia, prejudice, civil rights struggles, riots, assassinations, political crimes in the 60's and 70's, ... were thought to be the darkest days I experienced – I was wrong. This country is in a megalomania crisis that nobody seems to know or care about. There is a crazy instability not only here but abroad. This makes us weak as our adversaries observe. This is serious business and the worse is yet to come, unless a collective full on participation effort to revive the degenerate status quo that's bound to collapse all around you. Humanity demands interaction, wisdom and efficacy. Making a knowing intelligent right choice in the voting process while evaluating its legitimacy with scrutiny is a start in zapping the life back into the country. Not questioning and exposing systems of power with bad intentions is dangerous. Most of my time was spent in solitary lock-up units: with limited choices of books – I took what I could; leaving me without the liberty of academic studies, and with all the time in the world I did my best. With one eye on the worlds panoramic view, and the other within, pondering past, present and future. I recall a beautiful cornucopia bestowing rich fruits to the pristine environment; that is no more. I now see a challenged global population that accelerated in a depleted environment. A tattered overflowing basket of dehydrated putrid fruit while dim-witted flies hover about not knowing what to do. While the saintly-few in number observe and evaluate, sharpening their critical skills are duty bound to recover and preserve, but this "few" just isn't enough. The end game depends on all. The flair for expression was unknown to me, until the muse who believed in what I had to say prompted me to start my book, but as change demands I will write this. – Staring out the window in sorrow and disgust I watched the beautiful terrain of Folsom be smothered in smoke and disappear. The dark smoke came from this awful inferno in nearby "Paradise". The media sensationalized it at first showing the horrors, and acts of kindness. Over 80 people perished, countless livestock, property, infrastructure and town left in a lifeless wasteland of ashes, leaving survivors left with nothing and no-where to go. People desperately drove through monstrous flames fueled by wooded areas leaving them breathless, disintegrated melted tires with nowhere to go. After the interest for drama subsided. The town of paradise was forgotten. After the fire was fully contained, the skies finally decide to cry rain drops. Natural disasters, political disasters exist more than ever. Complacent high crimes in high places are the new plagues sucking the life out of the environment and soul of the country, ... beginning at the White House. Although California's governors, senator and mayor are duty bound to revive the environment mitigating climate change despite resistance. A high stakes spiritual war exists more than ever, individuals are at war with themselves. The environment, political ideals, trade, domination, space, artificial intelligence, and race supremacy. Enter – China's ongoing discipline and determination to dominate technology, global markets by any means necessary. Artificial intelligence is a new tactic entered in their art of war. Racism and war will always exist, but now it reached China, .. striving to be the new superior race. I've been psychologically misdiagnosed and defamed as a mad man by the press, but having vanquished all the demons of the past, I now understand and recognize madness. The super power megalomaniacs are in a dangerous game of "winner takes all." Intimidations and bluffs only go so far, because at some point the moment of truth will come. One should tread lightly around mad men in power, considering emotions on edge. Critical thinkers with a higher order of sensibilities are needed in such times. Disrespect of rule of law, humanity leaves our principals and priorities out of whack – for the world to see as a weakness. The lawlessness, lies, dereliction of duty and cowardice that create internal stress and conflict are obvious. Before making challenges abroad, the home front should be stable, secure, functioning and connected – this isn't the case. The summit of denuclearization negotiations? Who's kidding who? No one trusts each other. Their envy ignorance and hate adds fuel to the fire. If the masses can't see, it's because they choose to overindulge in attractive distractions of social media which devour discipline, reality or purpose. The cravings and compulsions are like the opioid epidemic. The techno elites and CEO's like to keep people stuck on stupid. So peoples priorities principles and realities are distracted, not noticing or caring about the world crumble all around. These avaricious elites put democracy at risk.. violating citizens rights of privacy and security. In the dark web they allowed disasters, terrorism to be conceived and carried out simply by profiteering motives, with no accountability so far. One of these CEO's was investigated in Congress for allowing peoples identities to be stolen and bartered for criminal purposes and allowing Islam extremist terrorist propaganda showing gruesome offensive recruiting tactics. If these high stakes games continue lady luck –will keep 'em winning keeping their monopoly upstream with the claims of "innovation and progress" while they become philanthropist spreading pocket change around as a vested interest that keeps them on top. Artificial intelligence and information access technology has its benefits, and if I had knowledge or access to it, I would use it, but if I can't discipline myself with noteworthy information and not allow myself to get sucked into frivolous amusements, I would have to throw it away. I can't stay stuck on stupid especially in this day and age, when humanity is at the apex of civilization. I have no vested interest in the fate of this planet. Because times are-a-changing, and so long as I live, I wouldn't miss the outcome for anything. On 1/17/19, in amazement I watched Cardi-B express her concerns of the times with intensity: and though she lacks erudition – this young lady's message came out with devoted passion – I have to say "bravo" to her, because she really showed how much she cared. I hope her viewers took her message for what it was worth. It takes certain people to recognize the hidden dimensions of reality and just won't turn a blind eye away from transgressions. The world is full of people attached to their vices and ambitions, .. they don't even look at each other anymore, not even themselves, let alone care about what is real: they're stuck in conscientious exhaustion, moral responsibility, ethics and efficacy is washed down with deceit. – enter, the energy/infrastructure Corporation that is now being sued for starting the Paradise fire; this is a multi-billion dollar class action tort. Thereafter, the Corporation filed for bankruptcy and following that, the CEO walked away with 2.5 million severance pay. This malpractice or dereliction of duty probably could have been avoided, if the ones responsible for the malfunction would have been mindful of their duties rather than being distracted, complacent. Motives of profiteering at all costs even have these ingenious Tech CEO's oblivious to the run-away chaos they started, at the cost of the environment, lives and minds. The content of these devices/smart phones need to be re-examined, because there are few smart users, and accountability for damages duly processed by law! Government is set up by the people to secure their life, liberty and happiness. During these unpredictable scary times, ... where are you? If you surrender to the will imposed by lunatics, ... you will have no right to complain, after that. My pen is the means to escape lifelessness, and still I stand as the candle of hope burned out with pen in hand. On 1/16/19 I was outraged after standing in 3' x 4 cage with a stack of reports, documents in support of my defense for a A-1 violation for battery on a P/O with serious injury, when the Lieutenant – who I had respect and a good amount of faith in casually said she found me guilty. She knew I wasn't: the fact finding process was washed down calling lies truths and truths lies – evidence was disregarded. I felt violated, denied truth and justice. It was such a sad, sad day. This Lieutenant knew I had a "BPH" in January 2022 for possibility of parole. Since 1997, I know I wasn't considered a model inmate – more like public enemy No. 1 because of attempted murder charges on P/O's. In prison I have 8 or 9 batteries on police officers that are all false except one in 2007. Everyone knows that the odds of surviving 22 years after 8 batteries without being killed, maimed or crippled are slim. After the little shred of hope was unjustifiably snatched, I can say, I am not the only one who dreamed of redemption by literary means. While writing my manuscript I decided to tone down my controversial opinionated realities – out of fear; not wanting to piss off the wrong people, but scholarly advice urged me to hold nothing back. Or anything now. I will delve back into this cesspool of reality and report. Jailhouse politics on every level will shock the conscience of a civilized person. This rules violation of battery report was ludicrous and physically impossible full of uncorroborating inconsistencies where the preponderance of evidence should have vindicated me. I was denied automatic disclosure to show relevant causation. It was another big fat cover-up to justify use of "force," but it was straight out "excessive force." For the last year I was going out to court and back to Salinas Valley State Prison for a weapons beef. The district attorney's in Monterey Co. prosecute any felonies while in Prison nowadays because prison population dropped some 15%. The prosecutor wouldn't offer me a plea bargain for almost a year they would offer no deals only 25 to life. Then I spoke up trying to fire my lawyer and ended up with 6 years for a weapon. Now this battery on a P/O at Salinas is much serious and could fetch more life sentences. 2 months ago I received a notice from Salinas District attorney saying they declined prosecution because no jury in their right mind would prosecute me for being strapped in a gurney on my back with hands and leg shackled after having a seizure. The report says I tried to grab the doctor's hand, and when the officer jumped on my chest to restrain my hands, I kicked him in the head with my right foot which was shackled to my left one. The officer was standing on the left side of the gurney. This part is true, because he and another cop flipped me over and held my head down the left side, while I was repeatedly kneed on the right side of my face leaving me unrecognizable. I have 8 day old disfigured pictures headaches with migraines and right-eye blurry till this day. I wrote a complaint right after. I had a investigation with high ranking officers and a video like 2 to 3 months after at CHCF-Stockton. Last year 5/22/18 I have a log # CHCF-B-18-01930 for the complaint for which they haven't responded in over 6 months. Time constraints have been disregarded – in fact ... shit canned. This incident happened on 3/8/18, and once SVSP was on notice of my complaint they wrote me up for battery on a P/O ... and to add melodrama they added serious injury. They went past the time constraints again – over 32 days, which should be 15 days to write me up. Simply because the senior disciplinary officer knew their bogus write up wouldn't fly. 6 times I wrote to different state officials in Sacramento to investigate the denial of redress, but all I get back is unopened return to sender envelopes with yellow stickers saying "Temporarily away – unable to forward." So long as I have to live and die in prison, I won't stop fighting for justice and monetary compensation. Having legal counsel wouldn't be too bad to start off. Hypocrisy, lies, prejudice and cowardness are all repulsive. Supreme Court Justice "Louis Brandais" – 1900 [illegible] said: crime is contagious, if the government becomes the law breakers it breeds contempt for law, every man becomes a law unto himself, it invites anarchy. Look around you home and abroad – these are dangerous times, megalomaniacs playing power and war games. I know you see the lawyers liars and cheats in government and technology who are insanely intoxicated with power. It's gonna take critical thinkers to get out of this. The commander in chiefs mad flared up punch drunk face has officials stressed out and in shambles. The pathetic state of affairs is shamefully funny. ... The commanders current legal council who was once a mayor decades ago, publically put credit in finally putting a end to the Italian mafia with the "RICO" act in his city. Now he defends the boss of bosses running the biggest criminal enterprise the world's ever seen. Personally, I know criminal insanity doesn't end well. This madman doesn't care who he takes down with him. When defeat was close to Hitler's heels, he said: "We will fight to the end; and take half the world with us to the abyss." Hitler's military didn't have nuclear capability at the time. Surrendering your collective unconsciousness can prove to be your undoing. With all due respect and the unknown love I have for this country I leave you with this. Mario Barraillier 1/20/19

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Criminal Justice — The Hidden World of Prison Life in Prison

The Hidden World of Prison Life in Prison

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

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Daily routine, challenges faced by inmates, impact of incarceration.

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When and where was Nelson Mandela born?

When did nelson mandela die, what is nelson mandela known for, to whom was nelson mandela married, what publications did nelson mandela write.

Nelson Mandela

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Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, also known as Madiba, was born Rolihlahla Mandela on July 18, 1918, in Mvezo, South Africa; the name Nelson was later added by one of his teachers. His father, the chief of the Madiba clan of the Xhosa -speaking Tembu people, died when Nelson was still young, and he was raised by Jongintaba, the regent of the Tembu. Although Nelson had a claim to the chieftainship, he renounced it in order to become a lawyer.

Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013, in Johannesburg . He was 95 years old. After his death was announced, his life was remembered and celebrated in South Africa as well as around the world. Numerous memorial services were held, including one by the South African government on December 10. He was laid to rest at Qunu, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, on December 15.

Nelson Mandela is known for several things, but perhaps he is best known for successfully leading the resistance to South Africa’s policy of apartheid in the 20th century, during which he was infamously incarcerated at Robben Island Prison (1964–82). He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1993, along with South Africa’s president at the time, F.W. de Klerk , for having led the transition from apartheid to a multiracial democracy. Mandela is also known for being the first black president of South Africa, serving from 1994 to 1999.

Nelson Mandela had three wives: Evelyn Ntoko Mase (1944–58); Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (1958–96), who was also a noteworthy anti- apartheid champion; and Graça Machel (1998–2013), who was the widow of Samora Machel , former president of Mozambique (1975–86), and was Mandela’s wife at the time of his death in 2013.

Nelson Mandela’s writings included I Am Prepared to Die (1964; rev. ed. 1986); No Easy Walk to Freedom (1965; updated ed. 2002); The Struggle Is My Life (1978; rev. ed. 1990); In His Own Words (2003); and Long Walk to Freedom (1994), which chronicles his early life and years in prison. Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years (2017), released posthumously, is the unfinished draft of his second volume of memoirs; it was completed by Mandla Langa.

News •

Nelson Mandela (born July 18, 1918, Mvezo, South Africa—died December 5, 2013, Johannesburg) was a Black nationalist and the first Black president of South Africa (1994–99). His negotiations in the early 1990s with South African Pres. F.W. de Klerk helped end the country’s apartheid system of racial segregation and ushered in a peaceful transition to majority rule. Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1993 for their efforts.

Nelson Mandela was the son of Chief Henry Mandela of the Madiba clan of the Xhosa-speaking Tembu people. After his father’s death, young Nelson was raised by Jongintaba, the regent of the Tembu. Nelson renounced his claim to the chieftainship to become a lawyer. He attended South African Native College (later the University of Fort Hare) and studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand; he later passed the qualification exam to become a lawyer. In 1944 he joined the African National Congress (ANC), a Black-liberation group, and became a leader of its Youth League. That same year he met and married Evelyn Ntoko Mase. Mandela subsequently held other ANC leadership positions, through which he helped revitalize the organization and oppose the apartheid policies of the ruling National Party .

In 1952 in Johannesburg , with fellow ANC leader Oliver Tambo , Mandela established South Africa’s first Black law practice, specializing in cases resulting from the post-1948 apartheid legislation. Also that year, Mandela played an important role in launching a campaign of defiance against South Africa’s pass laws, which required nonwhites to carry documents (known as passes, pass books, or reference books) authorizing their presence in areas that the government deemed “restricted” (i.e., generally reserved for the white population). He traveled throughout the country as part of the campaign, trying to build support for nonviolent means of protest against the discriminatory laws. In 1955 he was involved in drafting the Freedom Charter , a document calling for nonracial social democracy in South Africa.

Mandela’s antiapartheid activism made him a frequent target of the authorities. Starting in 1952, he was intermittently banned (severely restricted in travel, association, and speech). In December 1956 he was arrested with more than 100 other people on charges of treason that were designed to harass antiapartheid activists. Mandela went on trial that same year and eventually was acquitted in 1961. During the extended court proceedings, he divorced his first wife and married Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela ( Winnie Madikizela-Mandela ).

After the massacre of unarmed Black South Africans by police forces at Sharpeville in 1960 and the subsequent banning of the ANC, Mandela abandoned his nonviolent stance and began advocating acts of sabotage against the South African regime. He went underground (during which time he became known as the Black Pimpernel for his ability to evade capture) and was one of the founders of Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), the military wing of the ANC. In 1962 he went to Algeria for training in guerrilla warfare and sabotage, returning to South Africa later that year. On August 5, shortly after his return, Mandela was arrested at a road block in Natal ; he was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison.

In October 1963 the imprisoned Mandela and several other men were tried for sabotage, treason, and violent conspiracy in the infamous Rivonia Trial, named after a fashionable suburb of Johannesburg where raiding police had discovered quantities of arms and equipment at the headquarters of the underground Umkhonto we Sizwe. Mandela’s speech from the dock, in which he admitted the truth of some of the charges made against him, was a classic defense of liberty and defiance of tyranny . (His speech garnered international attention and acclaim and was published later that year as I Am Prepared to Die .) On June 12, 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, narrowly escaping the death penalty .

Kim Kardashian advocates for imprisoned Menendez brothers to be released: 'They are not monsters'

Kim Kardashian is backing the Menendez brothers in a personal essay shared Thursday with NBC News, writing that “I have spent time with Lyle and Erik; they are not monsters.”

Kardashian, the reality TV star and entrepreneur who has used her celebrity platform to advocate for inmates on criminal justice issues, believes Lyle and Erik Menendez were treated unfairly by prosecutors and in the media. The brothers, who were convicted of murdering their parents, Jose and Kitty, in their Beverly Hills, California, home, “were condemned before the trial even began,” she writes.

On Thursday, the Los Angeles County district attorney said that his office would review possible evidence to determine whether the brothers should be resentenced and possibly released, officials said Thursday.

Erik Menendez was 18 and Lyle Menendez was 21 when their parents were fatally shot in 1989. 

“My hope is that Erik and Lyle Menendez’s life sentences are reconsidered,” Kardashian says.

“We owe it to those little boys who lost their childhoods, who never had a chance to be heard, helped, or saved,” she adds.

On Thursday, the Los Angeles County district attorney said that his office had an obligation to review evidence to determine whether the brothers should be resentenced and possibly released, officials said Thursday.

The brothers’ case has drawn renewed interest with  Netflix’s biopic series “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” and their lives are the subject of a forthcoming documentary on Netflix, “The Menendez Brothers.”

Last month, Kardashian met the brothers when she spoke about prison reform with inmates in a California prison near San Diego. Actor Cooper Koch, who plays Erik Menendez in the Netflix series, joined her.

Erik Menendez, now 53, had earlier slammed the Netflix series’ dramatized portrayal of his and his brothers’ lives as “blatant lies” and accused the show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, of purposefully creating a caricature of Lyle Menendez, now 56.

At their first trial in 1993, which was televised, the brothers said that their father, a record company executive, sexually abused them for years and that they acted in self-defense out of fear and prolonged trauma. Prosecutors, however, said they murdered their parents to inherit money and went on a spending spree.

The first trial ended in hung juries. When the brothers were retried together starting in 1995, most of their abuse allegations were deemed inadmissible in court. They were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Kardashian acknowledged in her essay that the brothers’ crimes “are not excusable” and that neither was their behavior after the murders.

But, she argues, there were also limited resources for victims of sexual abuse, particularly boys, at the time.

“I don’t believe that spending their entire natural lives incarcerated was the right punishment for this complex case. Had this crime been committed and tried today, I believe the outcome would have been dramatically different,” she writes.

Attorneys for the brothers are seeking to challenge their imprisonment based on evidence that wasn’t known at trial.

Kardashian has been a vocal advocate for justice reform. In April, she joined Vice President Kamala Harris for a roundtable at the White House with four people President Joe Biden had pardoned earlier in the week for nonviolent drug offenses.

Kardashian also visited the White House during former President Donald Trump’s administration multiple times, including in 2018, when she lobbied for the release of Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug crime. Trump commuted Johnson’s sentence just days after the meeting. 

In 2019, Kardashian said she was studying to obtain her law degree.

Chloe Melas is an entertainment correspondent for NBC News. 

Erik Ortiz is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital focusing on racial injustice and social inequality.