After one visit, prisoner Angela Reese's child from Miami sat by a tree, his legs crossed, as though refusing to leave. In a few cases, women report that they face even harsher sentences from relatives than from the courts. In other cases, children have given up on their mothers, essentially treating them as dead. To compensate for isolation and depression, some mothers turn to medication and overeating. For many mothers, the location of their prisons adds to the estrangement from their children.
Some mothers maintain ties to their children by telephone.
She can talk to us and tell us the right way. . . . We need her really bad. Then she was transferred to Florida and hasn't seen them since. Avila's mother, Maria Mares, has been raising the children by herself and can't afford or manage the long drive. At age 50, suffering health problems, she's often exhausted from lifting heavy bags of potatoes in her minimum-wage job at a processing plant and from cooking tamales and tortillas at home to sell for extra money.