incarceration

Author Ebony Roberts gives voice to the unspoken struggle many women face when a loved one comes home. We often talk about the impacts of mass incarceration, particularly on society, but rarely as it relates to how the epidemic is affecting individual families and personal relationships. We don’t talk about how it’s mostly women in families who carry the weight of their loved ones being locked away. It is usually women who have to maintain the home alone, find a way to visit the incarcerated loved one, explain to their children why that particular loved one is gone, and at the same time go without—in the case of being a wife—physical intimacy. And I don’t just mean sex. But what happens when that loved one returns home? Is the relationship that was cultivated in prison hea...

The documentary ‘Milwaukee 53206’ depicts the toll of the prison epidemic on families and entire communities. When documentary producers first approached Beverly Walker about featuring her family in a film, the Milwaukee mother and grandmother knew what that meant: cameras trailing them, her cherished privacy breached. But her husband, Baron Walker, by then having served nearly two decades of a 60-year sentence, saw an opportunity. “I thought it could be quite helpful, though at the moment I didn’t know to what extent,” says Baron, who had been sentenced in 1996 for being party to a pair of bank robberies. “In prison you have no voice…. This movie, I realized, could be that voice…” Baron Walker couldn’t have known then that it would eventually lead to his release. Milwaukee 532...

Tag: incarceration

After Incarceration: The Truth About a Loved One’s Return from Prison