Ashley Pharis's Blog
A lesson from Cook County Jail / 07.18.08, 03:26 PM
Every month the counseling agency I volunteer for goes to the Cook County Jail to facilitate workshops for female inmates who are nearing their “out-date”. These workshops based on the “Within My Reach” curriculum provide insight, tools and a space to dialog about what healthy relationships look like, the importance of them in our lives, and how to obtain and maintain them. For one week a month, about 25-40 women inmates gather together for two hours to be a part of this training.
I was given the opportunity to help facilitate a couple sessions, and of course, all my pre-conceived notions of what going into a roomful of inmates would be like were completely shattered. The women came from all different backgrounds and were insightful, genuine, caring individuals who welcomed us with open arms and shared their hearts with us and one another.
At the end of the workshop, each participant is asked to fill out a booklet, which includes background information like age, race, level of education, personal income, etc. The booklet is a series of questions with fill-in-the bubble responses. Part of my job as a volunteer this year has been to take the data from the participants’ booklets and input it into the online data system. However mundane this task may seem, I can tell you that it has been one of the most eye-opening tasks of my year.
Through this process, I have seen the statistics that stack up against many of the women that we serve in these workshops. The numbers don’t lie. But the more I see the patterns, I wish the numbers WOULD lie. I wish I could erase the circle that over half of these women bubbled in stating that the highest level of education they’ve received is the 8th grade. I am tempted more and more each time to ignore the question asking about race, believing that maybe if I deny the truth in the numbers that show over 75% of these women are African American, JUST MAYBE the negative stereo-type will concede and the chance that these women will come back into the prison system will as well. And I hope to God that the over 75% of participants who mark in that their current income is under $5,000 a year (many with multiple children in their home) are accounting for their income IN JAIL and not out of jail.
But it goes to show that there are interconnected factors, the pattern of the lower-educated women being African American, the pattern of single mothers with many children making little to no money, the high levels of drug-use coinciding with confessions of guilt about their drug habit. All these factors are correlated in a great big giant mess.
I cannot even begin to elaborate the level of guilt I have felt this year in realizing what great advantages I have had in my life because of being a white female from a middle-class nuclear family. It has been paralyzing in many ways, disheartening and really earth-shattering in my understanding of the many circumstances and choices that these women have to deal with. It has been very humbling experience to say the least. I’m hoping to find some reconciliation at some point, but I’m grateful for the journey I have begun.
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