Update

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Amber who loved horses. Growing up in Pennsylvania farm country, she cleaned out stalls at a neighbor’s barn earning a dollar per stall – dirty work, but good money for a ten-year-old. At 14, she led trail rides, traded horses, and dared to dream of being a veterinarian so she could spend her entire life caring for the animals she loved – horses, cows, sheep, anything on a farm.

That’s how, in Women’s History Month, the history of one woman begins.

“I can’t even be a receptionist in a veterinarian’s office now,” Amber said. “As a felon, you can’t be around the drugs they administer. They say the sky’s the limit, but that doesn’t apply to felons.”

Amber’s history includes several stints in state prisons, county jails, and most recently a secured short-term facility in Philadelphia where the Pennsylvania Prison Society facilitates a weekly peer-support group to help women like Amber prepare to return to their families and communities. She was first incarcerated in a state prison in 2011.

Over the 13 years that Amber has been in and out of prison, “I lost the rights to all three of my children. I witnessed absolute degradation,” she said.

Amber’s story is her own, but it’s not unique. 

The rate of women being incarcerated has skyrocketed – up 834 percent over nearly 40 years, from 1978 to 2015, according to an analysis of federal statistics by the Prison Policy Initiative. That’s double the rate of growth in the incarcerated male population. 

Women come to prison with different issues than their male counterparts, the research shows. Many have suffered abuse, trauma, and mental health problems, and they don’t escape those behind bars. They have different health needs, including coping with menstruation, pregnancy, menopause, and substance use disorders. 

Nearly two-thirds, like Amber, are mothers whose children are under 18. They are often the primary caregivers. But even if a cooperative family member takes over, maintaining relationships isn’t easy. Because there are fewer women in prison overall, there are fewer prisons and they tend to be farther away, making visits more difficult. 

“It’s heart wrenching when you are incarcerated,” Amber said. “You wonder, ‘Are they ever going to talk to me again? Am I ever going to see them again?’ No answers. Just more questions. It wears on you. 

“You wish you could have time to visit, but then you wonder, as a mom, am I traumatizing them?”

Like many others, Amber bounced in and out of different county and state prisons, mostly for violations of parole. 

In 2017, feeling pressure from county officials while incarcerated, she gave up custody of her three children. “That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she said.

Amber said she was promised open adoptions so she could stay in her children’s lives, but now those promises seem empty. These days, she’s talking carefully to her 18-year-old daughter, trying not to pressure her, even though a cup of coffee together would be heaven. They’ve yet to meet in person.

Her son, 14, is in some facility, somewhere; she doesn’t know where. 

Her youngest child was adopted by family members of the child’s father, but they have decided “they want me never to see her again,” Amber said bitterly. “You can put her in a lineup, and I wouldn’t recognize her. I’ve never heard her laugh. I’ve never heard her speak. Nothing. When I got locked up, she wasn’t even a year old. And now she doesn’t even know I exist.”

Amber began her incarceration in a county jail and then was transferred to the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, near Williamsport. “They were barely giving us toilet paper,” she said. “I had a GED class. They didn’t have pencils, papers.” 

She readily passed, and then helped others after the teacher left. “There was nobody else.”

So many women, Amber said, live for their children and partners. And when they lose both in prison, life seems purposeless, and the struggle to rehabilitate gets even harder. Even the slightest promise of contact with a child can provide motivation, but those hopes are often dashed.

It leaves too much free time, Amber said, so women tell themselves, “I’m just going to get high. I’ll just fall back into my old routines because that’s all I really know.’”  

“Time is stopping for women in there. How are they going to spend that time?” she said. “It would be great to have better programming.”

With better programming, the prison system “would be releasing into the world people who are ready to enter society,” Amber said. “But instead, they are creating ill will. [The women] are just sitting there, angry, bored, and wondering what to do.

“It almost seems like women are running the race backwards,” Amber said. “Why are they being reincarcerated? It just seems like they just aren’t getting any traction.”

As Amber cycled in and out of prison, at one point she ended up in Philadelphia’s Riverside Correctional Facility. Riverside, she said, was the “most rowdy, violent place I’ve ever been.”

Later, she returned to Muncy, where she found a turning point when she was placed in a therapeutic community. “Basically, it changed my life. It taught me how to live, how to get a routine and manage my time. It helped me be a better person in general.” 

That wasn’t the end though. In August, after being out on parole for a time,  she wound up back in state prison again, this time at State Correctional Institution at Cambridge Springs, a more welcome environment. From there she was transferred to Philadelphia, assigned to a program for people who violated parole operated by The Kintock Group Inc. under contract with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. 

At Kintock, women going on job interviews didn’t have the proper clothes until the Prison Society connected women to Dress for Success, who provided professional clothing. “I know two women who wore those clothes to interviews and got jobs.

“If it wasn’t for the Prison Society, who knows what prison would look like,” she said.

A lot of people don’t know what women experience in prison, Amber said, explaining why she agreed to share her history during Women’s History Month.

At age 37, many pages of Amber’s history have yet to be written. 

“I definitely have a lot of confidence in myself,” Amber said. “I feel like I have finally reached the time in my life where I have the support of other humans. I’m older now. I’m going to go back to school.

Out on parole since December, she finally landed a job as a server at a Schuylkill County diner. Her longtime boyfriend has moved from Louisiana to be near her. Her best friend from childhood remains a friend, and she’s living with her mother, hoping to move out on her own soon. She’s working to rebuild her relationship with her oldest daughter.

“Their lives went on, things happened, time happened, while I was sitting in jail,” she said.

With any luck, and the cooperation of “the best parole officer I’ve ever had,” Amber will soon regain her driver’s license and lose a monitoring device she is required to wear around her ankle. And if all goes well, by Women’s History Month next year, this part of Amber’s story will indeed be history, as she is finally released from supervision after nearly 15 years.

What Amber knows and wants others to know about her history is that she shares much of it with so many others – women in prison, women, like her, who have lost children, women, who, too often, are lost themselves and often get too little help finding their way.

“You don’t know,” she said, “unless you’ve been there.” 

- Jane M. Von Bergen

To protect privacy, the Pennsylvania Prison Society sometimes only publishes first names, even though complete identities are known by the Society.