After jail, women struggle to live

When Kelly Chaplin talks about her dad, the most beautiful green eyes you are likely to see fill with tears.

The man who gave her life, and then spent most of her childhood years in prison, died of cancer after she got out of jail in October.

With her brothers also incarcerated — one doing 40 years for murder — the criminal justice system has been a constant in Chaplin's life. The only one.

"When people see my maiden name is Chaplin, they think, 'They are troublemakers, no matter what,'" the 26-year-old Staunton native says.

A litany of family offenses fills the web pages of Augusta County, Waynesboro and Staunton general district courts. Chaplin was headed down the same road, sometimes with convictions identical to her father's.

For stealing a computer and game system from Wal-Mart with a friend, she says, Chaplin landed in Middle River Regional Jail for almost two years. Now, with support from On the Wings of Angels Ministries, a new transitional program for incarcerated women, she believes she can break the cycle she grew up with.

If she succeeds, she wants to support Valley girls and women coming up behind her.

Both she and the fledgling program that's inspired her with hope face steep challenges.

"Incarcerated women are going to come back to society, and if we don't help them, they'll come back more broken than when they went in," said Wings founder T-Ann Johnson,.

In a system where rehabilitation programs for women come a distant second to those of men, Johnson, a former marketing and advertising professional, and Nancy Insco, CEO of nonprofit Institute for Reform and Solutions, have partnered to bootstrap one.

Middle River Regional Jail offers "a tremendous amount of programs" for its inmates, according to Capt. Eric Young; mainly 12-step and Bible study offerings, said former inmates. Wings is the only one that taps into women's needs for mentoring relationships.

When funded, Wings would work with a woman from her first day of incarceration to well after her release in a supportive transitional home where she can start a better life.

For now, Johnson and Insco do it as volunteers. About 90 women have participated in their 20-week program at both at Middle River and Rockbridge jails since it started 14 months ago.

And because any gains they make will almost surely be lost without ongoing support for the released inmates, the two continue to help their graduates become whole again after jail, often meeting at Insco's home.

"When they said they would be there for us on the outside, I kind of doubted it," Chaplin said. "But as I got to know them, I believe in them. They have not let me down."

GENERATIONAL LEGACY

"It's been anger, fighting and arguments my whole life."

Tomes have been written about the differences between incarcerated women and men, but one word keeps coming back: Relationships. A need to love and be loved that in Chaplin's life was frustrated in every way.

She has no memory today of being beaten black and blue by a caregiver when she was six months old. Her mom told her about it much later when the two were at the Waynesboro Kmart and the perpetrator walked by.

If she blamed her mother for not being there — a single parent supporting her kids with three minimum-wage jobs — she stuffed the feelings.

Dad was in and out of prison for years at a time. Chaplin was 15 when he reappeared in her life. "I kind of lost it, because I was so mad at him for not being there for me," she said.

But she had always been daddy's girl. Father and daughter quickly made up.

Anger — a powder keg in her family — sought an outlet, starting her down the road to trouble. She served juvenile detention for truancy. A reputation for fighting got her transferred from Shelburne Middle School to Genesis Alternative School.

At 17, Chaplin was living at home when her mom became involved with a man who drank, she says. He threatened Chaplin, brandishing a bottle, trying to pin her in a corner. Chaplin K-O'd him. Back to detention she went.

"It's been anger, fighting and arguments my whole life in my family," she said.

Visiting relatives in New York gave her a taste of the outside world. She began to think of the Valley as "a place where you could be trapped the rest of your life."

With two weeks to go before graduation, Chaplin dropped out of high school.

BABY, THINK IT OVER

No one ever expected her to go to college or have a high-powered career.

Of course she had taken the parenting classes; lugging home the plastic Baby Think It Over doll to care for over the weekend that's meant to show that having a child is a full-time job. As a Genesis student, Chaplin had to repeat it four times.

But what was that compared with the power of having a real baby to love, someone who needed her and would not judge her? Here was another life with a clean sheet of paper, to make better than anything she had known.

THE NUMBER OF WOMEN IN PRISON GREW 646% FROM 1980 TO 2010, 15 TIMES THE RATE OF MEN.

Chaplin met her daughter's father when she was 16. They stayed together until he learned she was pregnant. She had two sons by two different fathers not long before going to jail.

Quickly her dream of a good life for them shattered as the familial pattern visited itself on her children. Chaplin said that an assault on one of them by an adult she knew sent her into a tailspin of anger and despair.

None of this is unique to her. Over 57 percent of women in state prisons reported being physically abused, and 39 percent sexually abused, before admission, according to a 2009 U.S. Department of Justice report.

Still, something — a survival instinct, perhaps — kept Chaplin from the drug and alcohol addictions that others succumb to. It wasn't her, but a friend who got smashed and fell asleep at the wheel after a party, leaving her with a leg full of metal from the crash.

Through it all, she worked at the local Burger King like her mother. Holding a job, staying drug-free — those strengths became the hand-holds Insco and Johnson built on as they worked with the inmate to pull herself up the slippery slope to a better life.

REAL PRICE OF INCARCERATION

Virginia has one of the nation's lowest crime rates and highest rates of incarceration, according to a Pew Center study. Its "truth in sentencing" laws passed in the 1990s fattened the system while failing to reduce crime or recidivism, Justice Policy Institute statistics show.

Taxpayers aren't the only ones who support this punishment-heavy, expensive system, which in all its parts consumes nearly 8 percent of the state budget.

Inmates pay, too.

The first price Chaplin paid was the loss of her children. Middle River inmates see their children only once a week for 15 minutes through glass.

Chaplin's daughter, age 6, went to live with her father, who agreed she can take the girl to live with her again when she's on her feet.

Both her sons went to live with their fathers, too.

80% OF INCARERATED WOMEN REPORTED INCOMES OF LESS THAN $2,000 A YEAR BEFORE THEIR ARREST — BARNARD CENTER FOR RESEARCH ON WOMEN REPORT.

"It's part of getting locked up. You lose a lot," Chaplin said.

Since her release, she's been under pressure, "big time," to prove she can be a parent before one of her boys moves with his dad to Maryland. "I want my children," she said.

To get them, she must overcome formidable financial and social hurdles faced by almost all women transitioning from jail to the outside.

When it came time for her release, Chaplin couldn't leave without a place to go. With no job or savings for an apartment, she designated Valley Mission homeless shelter as her address.

A cousin in Staunton took her in. The verbal fights start in the morning and don't stop, she said.

After four months of rejections by employers, she got an $8 an hour job at Augusta Lumber. There she chops wood in an unheated building as it comes down the line, puttying the holes and raising the planks onto the shelves.

Having no car or public transportation — she can't get a license until she pays her jail debts — she worries she'll lose the job, not knowing from day to day how she'll get to work.

Another Wings participant, Mary Bailey, is still looking for work since her release from Rockingham Regional Jail. Bailey went in owing $1,947 in restitution, and came out 293 days later owing $7,085, she said. In order to get an itemized bill explaining the charges, she must petition the judge.

Chaplin's $9,000 debt includes not only restitution, but also Middle River's charges for everything from the cell to health care.

At $3 per day, Chaplins's room and board came to about $2,000.

And when a Middle River inmate does work release, $15 per day of their earnings also go to the jail. Chaplin found women's opportunities were limited to hotel housekeeping jobs that pay less than opportunities for men. Briefly, she earned $7.25 per hour at the local Sleep Inn.

Hypothetically, for a female inmate working at that rate 30 hours a week for a year, it means the jail gets almost $3,000 out of her potential $10,500 earnings.

Inmates by law are entitled to health care. As the costs of providing it have swelled, Middle River and facilities around the country have outsourced it to private companies that charge co-pays and out-of-pocket costs. Augusta County budgets for the coverage, and Middle River contracts with Anthem to provide it.

"You and I pay for healthcare, so why not them?" Capt. Eric Young of MRRJ said.

Chaplin, who developed gallstones while incarcerated, was charged $15 per visit to see a nurse and $25 to see a doctor.

For comparison purposes, when Illinois' Department of Corrections raised inmates' co-pays from $2 to $5, the outcry made headlines.

Chaplin also had to pay $100 for transport to Augusta Health for a diagnosis and $700 for an ultrasound. She needed a gallbladder operation, but couldn't afford to pay the $6,000 deductible that was required up front. She continues to need an operation today.

The co-pays and out-of-pocket costs are likely a burden to many inmates besides her, given the fact that on the outside, their poverty qualifies them for Medicaid or free charity care.

Inmates are also captive consumers for prison commissaries that can charge more than market rates.

The jail even saved money by switching Chaplin's medications to a lower-cost formulary that includes older medications like thorazine that most doctors stopped prescribing years ago.

Collectively, the costs added to reasons that Chaplin would start her life outside at an even greater handicap than when she went in.

ONE GOOD THING

Chaplin's tough-girl shell calcified as she endured her jail time. When she wasn't in work release, which was most of the time, she said she spent 18 hours a day in lock-up.

"They'd call out, 'chow time, feeding,' like you're an animal," she recalled. "They slide your tray through a slot with fake meat things that looked like brake pads. You get three to five minutes to gulp it down, and your toilet is right there in your cell so you're eating in your bathroom."

The experiences made her seethe.

One day MRRJ Program Director John Lilly put up a notice on the bulletin board about a new program for women.

"We never had a woman's program, except a parenting class," Chaplin said. "I signed up right away." Getting out of lockup was a big part of her motivation, she admits.

At the first meeting, the women introduced themselves and told their stories. After each meeting they went away with homework.

They had to look in the mirror and write about what they saw. They wrote letters to parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters and read them out loud; talked about their charges and what they did to them. Make it detailed, or do it over, was the rule.

"We have to get them to talk about their childhood," Insco explained, "the things that happened between the ages of 13 and 18, when the downward spiral begins with self-medicating and acting out."

Later they would also learn to budget, balance a checkbook, develop a resume and work through relationships with their children, family and partners.

The talking she did in Wings and the relationships she built with the other women got through to Chaplin.

"When I saw they were willing to invest their time in us and show concern — and they weren't getting paid to help us — it said to me, 'Someone does believe in you.' It gave me hope," she said.

She stays in constant touch with the others by Facebook and text, and talks to or texts Insco sometimes four times a day. Experts say these relationships help women inmates succeed. Staying in a transitional home after release gives them a safe, supportive environment where they can repay debts and build capital and confidence.

"Kelly is a scrapper, I love her dearly," Insco said recently in her Staunton living room, which doubles as a meeting place for Wings graduates until they can afford a home. "When police see her rap sheet, they pile on her, but she's one of our stars."

Each Wings participant has a step-by-step plan that would be impossible to achieve without that level of support. For Chaplin, it's getting into Blue Ridge Community College followed by an adult degree program at Mary Baldwin, for which she can get loans.

Chaplin is determined to make it.

"I know why I went to jail now," she said. "Without jail, I wouldn't be changed like I am. I will be one of their success stories."

In a state with one of the nation's lowest investments in post-incarceration support, Wings has to raise a little under $250,000 a year to operate the transitional home.

Once its occupants are employed, their contribution — about $250 a month for a room and two or three meals a day — will make it self-sustaining.

They've already picked out the name: Joyce Cuetta Howard Residential Re-entry Center, for Johnson's mother, a psychiatric nurse at Western State Hospital.