[Fred R. Conrad photo]
In an unglamorous pocket of Long Island City, Queens, between two of the nation’s largest public housing projects, dozens of women could tell comparable stories about Sister Tesa.
Twenty-seven years ago, answering an open call from an older nun, she started a home for children whose mothers were in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Last year she was honored by the White House.
Now, on a drizzly May afternoon, she walked the battered streets of her expanding domain: three apartment buildings, three thrift stores, a day care center, an after-school program, a job-training program, a group home for women with children, a food pantry, a mentoring program. Three more communal homes, including one where she lives, dot nearby neighborhoods.
In each of the buildings, nearly every woman, whether resident or staff member, is an ex-convict. They are former murderers, drug dealers, embezzlers, smugglers, burglars and addicts. And for many, it was Sister Tesa who turned their lives around, often after they failed on the first or second try.
“There are uplifting stories and tragic stories,” Sister Tesa, 67, said the other day. “They can all be motivating.”
Nationally, just over 100,000 women serve time in state or federal prison in a given year — six times as many women as in 1980 — and most have children under 18, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Nearly 150,000 children have a mother in prison. In New York, 2,420 women are currently in state prisons.
But in the debates about how to reform the penal system, nearly all of the focus has been on men, who make up more than 90 percent of all prisoners.
www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/nyregion/the-sister-of-second-chances.html
Comments (0)