I did not know what to do. We did not know what to do. My husbands' and my solution to coping with incarceration was to become involved, so we got rid of our pain by learning to help others. It was eight years ago that I started the support group with two women, one of whom is here, Carol Groth. We have continued since then and I have a horrible feeling that until I die, I am going to be meeting every Monday night with a group of women.

Let me tell you a little bit. We gave you a brochure. Our coming to this conference caused us to name ourselves and put together a brochure, we had just been the support group. The women came up with our name, which is SISTERS, which stands for Surviving Incarcerations So Together Everyone Remains Sane. That really is what we try to do. No one has ended up in the psychiatric hospital yet, we have remained sane. So, you are the first to have them. We hope you will enjoy them. It has caused us to think a little more about who we are, where we are going, and the fact that we are going to continue.

First of all, we will go through what we do and how we started. We will give you plenty of time to ask questions, and hopefully we can answer them. Now we are SISTERS. Eight and a half years ago I started this group in my home, which wasn't a good idea because one or two is okay, but when you have three or four women and about ten kids, it doesn't work to well in your own home and the women do not get any respite. I went to prison fellowship and they took over as the sponsor. They found a location for the meetings which happens to be an inner-city church, of which Carol is a member and they have provided us for the last six and a half years with space, free of charge. We have had use of their facilities, gymnasium, kitchen and whatever we need, they provide for us and this has been a wonder relationship. To try and get people, the prison fellowship sent out a mass mailing. Out of the mass mailing of three to four hundred, we got two more people to come. Then we discovered with the women come children and they don't necessarily come with one child, so we had to have another volunteer to help with the children, and that happened to be Carolyn. We have used study materials on marriage, relationships, videos, guest speakers, Bible studies and excursions. We do anything that seems interesting and that is topical, anything that will help. Maybe change their way of doing things or their way of thinking. We don't allow the meeting to deteriorate into a pity party, because that is what will happen. I will tell you, we bear some pitiful things. Instead, we try to look at the positive and the negative situations. We try to find something that is positive. We laugh a lot. We have fun activities. We have picnics, cooking session, we go to dramas and concerts. We draw up craft projects. We have had a women from our Michigan State University extension course come and do meal planning and that is free. Find all the freebies out there that you can. We have had an accountant come and talk about budgeting, an attorney talk about making just a simple will, naming guardians for your children if your husband or their father is incarcerated. Hopefully, we can help women grow beyond their expectations. I think that is what she was talking about this morning. Many women, I don't why this is, have very low expectations of what their life can be. We try to help them grow beyond that. We find humor. Laughter is a great medicine. We use biblical applications to tackle their situations, because that is where we are based. They know we are a Christian organization. We let them know this. We don't ask them what their faith is or where they are. That is not important. They need to know that they will be prayed for. We pray for situations. We don't ask if they are saved or any of those kinds of things, but we let them know where we come from. We use Christian biblical principles to help solve problems.

Carolyn Tate

I am very glad to share with you. I became involved when the director of prison fellowship called asking if he could use our church as a meeting place for our group. So I became the instigator and the girl Friday to put the package together. In having this responsibility, I thought someone from our own congregation should be host, so I took on this obligation since it was my idea. I was also hoping that there would be members of our own congregation who could benefit from our services. Now, we have had two more members of our church, one came for a short while and left. The other one went to the last conference with ___________. She has peeked back in on us and both are doing well on their own at this particular time.

My husband and I have both been involved in prison ministry. We are going weekly for a Bible class and I felt committed that we could render a service to our community through this means. As I met with the women, I realized that there was some situations in their lives that maybe I would be able to help a little greater than just being a member of the group itself. As we worked together, I found that there were some common factors working in these women's lives, most of them who were bread winners for their own families. They included, allowing scheduled time for their own family activities, keeping up with regular household tasks, and coping with homework assignments of students. Some subjects of which they were unfamiliar or were not familiar with the techniques being used in the classroom and needing to develop and maintain a code of discipline. Many of them chose the easy way out, which I’m saying lacking discipline because they wanted to keep a friendly atmosphere within their own family. This is difficult if you have to argue with the child to get the homework done. I had been in the classroom for twenty-nine years and retired, so I said this is my spot. I can offer tutoring services for these women. So, I though of several other ideas and they were incorporated into our group. The program included the following aspects: We had a teenage girl who volunteered her time to come in and each parent who brought children were asked to serve by donating one dollar per child for the support for the baby-sitter. She took care of the infants and those who were in pre-school. I proceeded to work with the school age children and needed extra help and assistance. Through this, they often learned a new method or technique of solving a problem where they could gain independent skills, so that became helpful. The observations that I had in talking with the children and assisting in their homework, I shared with the parents and I let them know they were really catching on, they are wanting to do more and more things by themselves. This became an added area where success was given to the whole family, because the mother didn't have to argue to get the work done. The child used me as a beating post if necessary. It at least allowed them to go home with some peace and contentment. All of the factors that aid in transforming the former area that was once a defeat and frustration turned into insights of amazement and hope. The parents have been encouraged by the successes of their children. Many even having different reports of _________________ time because their child was finally raising in their self-esteem and able to do things more independently. I really have enjoyed my work with the group and I like Barbara. I will stick as long as she is with the program.

Barbara DeJong

One of the things of being a prison fellowship instructor, I get access to all of the prison fellowship information and programs. One of the things that my husband I do is we are certified instructors for the prison fellowship's marriage seminars. We go inside the prison and work with the husbands and the wives. The wives in some prisons, the administration is confident enough with their chaplain to allow this kind of programming. We will go in perhaps for three hours on a Friday night, go back in on a Saturday morning until noon, come out and have lunch (the women), unfortunately the guys can't come out, go back in the afternoon and maybe finish up again that evening or the following Sunday morning. It is a time when the husbands and wives have time that is not in the visiting room. It is a place where they begin to work on some skills they have never dealt with, one of which is communication. One is dealing with the feelings and emotions they have, so I'm taking these statistics from the marriage seminar.

Marriages that last: Marriages that last outside without a prison experience is about fifty percent. Fifty percent make it fifty percent don't. Marriages that last while serving time were only fifteen percent of marriages survive. Out of that fifteen percent only three percent survive one year after release from prison. Those are horrendous statistics. As we heard this morning, family support can make a difference in rehabilitation. If we do not get the family working together on the same wave length with the same kind of goals, they are not going to make it. Only three percent, three out of a hundred make it. I don't like those kind of statistics. Our son's marriage did not make it. So, what do we do about it. I think one of the things that is needed, is that we need to have support groups of one kind or another, because when someone is incarcerated, whether male or female, the family outside becomes isolated. When our son went to prison, my husband and I dealt with things differently. Because our son was incarcerated on the other side of the state, it wasn't in our newspaper therefore, no one needed to know. If someone asked about Joe we could just say "he's fine". Unfortunately, that is not how I deal with things. I blab. I tell everybody. While my husband is telling no one and saying "shuuu", I am out asking people to pray for us, telling them what has happened and trying to find out ways in which we could become involved. We discovered, and are still discovering, especially the women who are on the outside who have incarcerated husbands or the fathers of their children, they become isolated. They feel all alone.

People don't understand and they don't know what to say. If someone dies, you know what to say to the widow. There are certain things that you can say. If someone gets divorced, you can say he was stinker anyway, or you can say I'm sorry, but when someone's husband is incarcerated, people don't know what to say. Do you say oh that's nice? Really what they need to do is come up a put their arm around them and say I'm sorry, Is there anything I can do to help you? Would it help if I took you to the grocery store? Could I watch your kids for you if you want to go visit him? People don't say that. Instead, suddenly these women become totally isolated and there friends are no longer there and of course, the next thing that happens is they have financial difficulties and then they discover when they go to visit, they're treated as if they are the criminal also, so they discover they are doing the same time as their loved one. Families hide out. We have had women who say that on their job, as far as their employer knows, that their husband is in the service or he is a long distant truck driver and that is why he is not around. They are afraid if they tell their employer that their spouse is incarcerated that they will not have a job. It is a place to meet others that are in the same situation. It is a safe place. They have common grounds. It is a place where they can vent their frustrations. A place where the other women understand their frustrations. It is a place where they can brainstorm problems and solutions. They can build up their self-worth. They can learn to problem-solve and make changes in their lives. Some of them have no clue that they have even solved some of these problems.

Hopefully, through talking with the other women and dealing with some problem solving skills they can learn to solve problems. They need a safe place where people can be trusted. Whatever is said in the support group does not go outside of that room. Whatever you say, we never ask, Why is your husband in prison? We never ask those questions. If you choose to volunteer it, that is you choice. That is not our business to know. It is our business to try to help, encourage, and help keeping people to just survive.