Tara Carroll gave birth to her daughter in 2022 while serving a 22-year sentence in Missouri's Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic & Correctional Center. The baby was sent home with her husband while she returned to her prison cell. Back in an environment where she felt she always had to be strong, she wrestled with postpartum depression. Now, nearly three years later, Carroll is helping to care for other pregnant incarcerated women through a prison nursery program — the 10th of its kind in the U.S. — unveiled last week in Vandalia by the Missouri Department of Corrections, Missouri Independent reports. “This program is going to give women the building blocks to live a better life,” said Carroll, who is among five caregivers among the prison population. “And then that is going to overflow into their children, and then their children’s children.” The inside of the nursery, which is on prison grounds but separate from the main prison community, is starkly different from the rest of the facility. The floors are soft, made for tiny feet learning to walk, and colorful artwork on the walls is meant for little eyes.
These thoughtful touches gained the admiration of Maggie Burke, a former warden at the Illinois Department of Corrections who worked in that state’s prison nursery and who helped advocate for the nursery in Missouri.
Burke, now with the Keyway Center for Diversion and Reentry in St. Louis, hopes to see the Missouri program expand. Right now, only women with fewer than 18 months left on their prison sentence are eligible. Illinois’ program began with similar restrictions, but later expanded to serve women with longer sentences who were eligible to live with their young children in transitional housing. Liza Weiss, founding director of Missouri Appleseed is credited for bringing the program to life. Weiss started advocating for the prison nursery in late summer 2021. A bill to establish the program passed the next spring. The legislation had rare and overwhelming bipartisan support, receiving only one vote in opposition among the 163 representatives and 34 senators. “Everyone was excited to help Missouri families and keep moms and babies together,” Weiss said, adding that nursery programs elsewhere have produced research pointing to less depression and anxiety in children born to incarcerated mothers who were able to remain with their mother.
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