When Mothers Do the Crime, Kids Do Hard Time

By SHAWN HUBLER

May 22, 2000 12 AM PT

Wilshire Boulevard, emptied, can seem as stark as a boneyard, but some landscapes are more complex than people realize. Maybe it was the light. It was 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday, and the sky over the concrete was this deep pink-and-blue, like a baby blanket. It suffused even the lowliest details: a crippled campesino delivering newspapers, a stray dog trotting, a bus hissing to a diesel-y stop, now curbside.

This was Mother’s Day--eight days ago, if like some at that curb, you are still counting. Mother’s Day--something else that can be complex. Outside a branch office of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Corrina Vargas stood with her grandma, playing a pocket Game Boy as the grown-ups discussed the mother she had not seen in eight years.

“She was, like, 3 the last time we went up,” the grandmother, a short, sweatshirted woman named Alice Sanchez, was saying. “It was far, ‘cause I drove. And hot. And the wait! They made us take our rings off, and shake out our hair to make sure we weren’t taking anything illegal in, and you can’t wear shoes that flip-flop. . . . My health isn’t good, and we couldn’t afford to go back.” This time, a friend drove her and Corrina from Montebello so they could catch this bus, chartered by the church and two nonprofit agencies. The grandmother gestured toward the lime-green Game Boy, which the child gripped like a talisman. “She’ll have to leave that, but, hey, it’s 4 1/2 hours from here to there.”

“There” was Chowchilla, home to the world’s largest concentration of incarcerated women. Corrina’s mother is one of more than 7,000 female inmates in side-by-side fortresses that rise from the Central Valley almond fields. The girl was a baby when a judge sentenced her mother to life in prison. She has never been told what the crime was, except that drugs were a factor. “We want her mother to tell her herself,” the grandma said.

So what did Corrina know about her mother? “I have a picture,” the dark-haired child said. “It’s from her first day of kindergarten. She has two ponytails and a little skirt. I can’t exactly remember her, but in the picture she’s really pretty. People say I look just like she did.”

There is probably no hardier perennial than the prison question, and no aspect of the burgeoning prison-industrial complex that is more painful than its growing impact on kids. Throwing “bad” people behind bars sounds simple, but only if you can forget, say, that 75% of incarcerated women have dependent children. Coming from the 200,000 American minors now whose moms are imprisoned, “out of sight, out of mind” suddenly sounds more complex.

“The parents do the crime, but the children do the time,” Florence Richer, a counselor on the bus was saying as a family pushed past her. Sixteen children of nine inmates had been rounded up by the church’s prison ministry for this trip. Some were like 7-year-old Frankie Miranda, with the face of a cherub and bleached tips on his black crew cut. Frankie thought he and his 5-year-old baby brother, Jose, were visiting a stranger. Asked if they were glad to be visiting their mom, they looked at their paternal grandma and asked, in Spanish, “What does she mean, Mommy?” They, too had a picture of the woman they were visiting--a street-corner dope dealer who’d been in and out of custody since the age of 14. Was she pretty? “No!” Frankie said.

And some were like Cynthia Annie Tejeda, 17, whose mother was serving nine years for assault, battery, kidnap and robbery: “We’re exactly alike. Same freckles. Same eyes. Same lips. Same face shape. It’s been four years since I saw her, but we’re, like, best friends.” Cynthia Annie lives in a halfway house. The nuns had to intercede for her visit because she’s on probation for drug use. It was said that when she got past the guards, she and her mother ran, sobbing, to each other, touching each other’s wet faces again and again.

It was said that little Frankie drew 14 pictures for the stranger in prison, but that she seemed “detached” in the visiting room. It was said that Corrina Vargas cried--but only for a minute--when her visit had to be through a glass partition because her mom was being disciplined.

“I hardly noticed it. Really,” the child reported later. “We talked about school, sports, what we like to do. I started to ask, you know, why she was there, but then she got a sad face. And so I just said, it’s OK. Never mind.”

As we spoke, she was writing her mom a letter, for the first time in a long time. “I’m gonna say, maybe if she could tell me. You know. What she did. Maybe the next time we talk.” She paused, and the silence would have been starker than a heart could bear without breaking, had love not suffused it, like a pink-and-blue dawn.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].