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Prison Nurseries feel strange at first, like those pictures where someone photoshops a friend’s face onto the wrong body or glues a picture of your aunt in her Christmas sweater onto a background of the Bahamas. Everything seems mismatched: babies and guards; cartoons and heavy metal doors. It’s a hard concept to swallow, babies in prison. But as more and more women are incarcerated, more and more babies are born behind bars and their are few options for these families. Nurseries, while still rare, have been one of the more successful options.
We follow two mothers, Casey and AJ, in Decatur Prison’s Nursery Program and Reunification Unit. Through their experience we learn about the costs and benefits of prison nurseries. But we also ask a question about prisons in general: What happens to the people who relied on someone who is then taken to prison? How do prisons help and hurt people to do the things the world ask of them?
