My Son Is In Prison. This Common 4-Word Reaction From People Is Gut-Wrenchingly Insensitive.

“We are no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.” ― Samuel Beckett

My personal misfortune occurred on Valentine’s Day five years ago, when 11 federal agents awakened me at 6 a.m. by pounding on my door. I was half-asleep, in ratty pajamas with morning-frenzy hair as I learned that my life-as-I-knew-it was officially over. There was no going back. They had come to arrest my 25-year-old son, Louie.

As a 66-year-old professional white woman, I had the extreme luxury of never having learned how to deal with cops, so I didn’t know that I could have refused to cooperate without a lawyer present. Instead, with minimal threats and heavy intimidation (and being quite outnumbered), I too easily gave up my son’s whereabouts, hundreds of miles from me. Within hours, I had secured a private attorney for him, and by day’s end, he was in custody.

Louie isn’t married, and I am a single mother, so there was no question that I alone would shoulder the burden of the financial, emotional and legal responsibilities for his care. I had no idea what lay ahead of me. This was his first run-in with law enforcement, so I was naive about the extent and costs of the tasks.

It turns out to be both time-consuming and expensive to have an incarcerated son. The first six months were a steep and twisting learning curve for me, and I am still mastering the skills to be a staunch advocate. I also still struggle to accept how little influence I can have within the legal and criminal justice system. But this is not the most difficult aspect — the hardest part is my broken heart.

Having a son in prison is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and it is a long experience, not a single-incident trauma. It goes on for years, with shifts, of course, along the way, but none of those shifts involve increased freedoms or happiness for Louie or me.

The incarceration has commandeered a good portion of my free time and cost me a high percentage of my life savings so far, and I’m not nearly done. Unless we win our last-gasp appeal, we will be in the government’s custody for another four and a half years. And then there’s parole and supervised release — no picnic either, as I have been repeatedly warned.

The initial shock wears off, but the chronic pain does not subside over time, although mine has healed to the point of only being a moderate emotional limp now, and it is rarely noticed by others. This invisibility is a relief for my work as a psychotherapist, as I don’t want my clients to be distracted from their self-focus to notice it or worry about me. Friends and family are a different matter.

This calamity has expanded my understanding of the impact of race, class and privilege on Americans, especially within the criminal justice system. My merely basic knowledge of the real causes and impact of mass incarceration was a luxury that only someone in my privileged experience could afford. Now that I know — and now that I live in this world of court procedures and prison regulations — my political perspective has shifted further left. This exposure to the criminal justice system has also alienated me from much of my family and most of my white friends. Their privileged ignorance expresses itself as insensitive questions, biased assumptions or, worse, never asking after Louie anymore, as though he is dead.

Simple curious questions from colleagues or strangers who have limited or no exposure to prison life can also step into dangerous emotional territory. I can’t blame them for not knowing this is a minefield, but it is. It starts off simply by them asking, “Do you have children?”

“Yes, I have one son,” I respond casually, but my body tenses up. I know what’s coming.

“How old is he?” they ask, and I realize with some relief I have made it through one more question without trouble.

“He’s 32 now,” I answer.

“Oh, and where is he now?”

Here it comes. I take a breath. “Actually, he’s in prison,” I announce matter of factly, and all the oxygen is sucked out of the room with their inevitable gasp and covering their mouth with both hands.

And then it is now my responsibility to assuage their discomfort. Or worse, they blurt out their spontaneous follow-up question, “What did he do?”

The curiosity is understandable — completely so. But leading with those four little words shows little understanding of the injustices built into the system, assuming, first off, that he is guilty. And even that is of very little importance now. Louie is in prison, and he lives among the other men, guilty or innocent, all within the harsh and arcane rules of the prison.

The “guilty” and the “innocent” are not separated for different treatment. All the families are grieving. I must catch myself before I answer and control my initial inclination to be harsh. At my best, I am mildly instructive, telling the person that his “crime” is not what matters most now. Better first questions show compassion, as in, “How is he doing?” or “How are you holding up?” or “Is his facility nearby so you can visit him regularly?” I am nearly never asked any of these, so the encounters leave me feeling self-conscious and exposed. And ashamed.

In a cyclical way, these kinds of hurtful interactions feed the shame that I am already prone to feeling about my son’s incarceration. I am sure that in most everyone’s eyes, it is at least partly a result of my inadequate mothering.

As a psychotherapist, I am highly aware of our culture’s tendency to blame parents, especially mothers, for both the personality and behavior of their offspring. I am party to this type of attribution of blame myself. Did I spoil Louie? Did I miss some warning signs of imminent trouble? Surely, I must have, according to others, and sometimes me. In this time, and especially in the first two years, I have plumbed the depths of my memory to relive every decision I made, every friend Louie ever had, every event that could have been seen (in retrospect) as a step along the path to his arrest. Shame is that excruciating feeling that who we are has led to our troubles — that we are not good people and we are, therefore, less worthy of love.

Maternal shame and guilt are baked into the role of mothering. Even those mothers with nearly perfect children have succumbed to self-doubt. How could we not? The demands of mothers are both far-reaching and contradictory. We are expected to be devoted first and foremost to our children over our own self-interest, function as a role model for womanhood, both vehemently pursue a career and be willing to drop it when the family needs us. We all must live with the discrepancy between our actual self and the idealized image of a perfect mother. These feelings are both exposed and exacerbated when one’s son is arrested. It is one thing to think these self-incriminating thoughts in the dark privacy of my own bed before sleep, but it is the potential public exposure that really crushes my self-esteem.

I am in contact with many mothers of incarcerated sons through three Facebook groups, and I currently volunteer to lead support groups for mothers. Shame breeds secrecy, so it is not surprising that most of the mothers of incarcerated sons in the support groups I lead do not tell the truth about their sons’ whereabouts. When people innocently and casually ask how and where their sons are now, the women are likely to respond, “He’s in Florida,” or “He’s with the government,” or “He’s in the army.” Maybe they are better at self-preservation than I am. They may limit intimacy by their half-truths, but they are not derailed by their internal dialogues about their guilt and shame.

In the first few years, I derived most of my understanding and comfort from communities that have experienced mass incarceration. They have learned the hard way, through multi-generational experiences, how to show up for families of inmates. The Facebook groups for mothers of incarcerated sons are populated by a racially and economically diverse group of women, some of whom have several children in federal or state custody. These mothers understand the complex sea of feelings we swim in and the enraging lack of control and information we are offered.

One day, Louie said something on the phone that was, in my mind, unnecessarily mean and unfair to me. I was standing in Trader Joe’s by the produce section when I abruptly announced, “”I’m hanging up!” and I did! I was immediately racked with guilt for ending a precious phone call with an incarcerated person. Louie and I are not two equals having an interpersonal conflict. The phone is his lifeline, and I am his safety net. I couldn’t call him back, as only he can initiate phone calls, and he can only make one call every 30 minutes. So, I stewed. When I got home, I posted about it in one of the Facebook groups. Those mothers immediately understood both the anger and the guilt and gave me permission for both feelings in the best possible way. They told me about the times they did the same and assured me that anger is both fair and a normal part of this process, even from a mother who may be all my son has.

Approximately one in four American women have a loved one in prison. Given that there are over 2 million people living in U.S. prisons and jails, 93% of whom are male, there could be close to 1 million mothers struggling with a son in prison today. However, the burden is not equally distributed among the population. In the most recent studies, Black people are incarcerated at five times the rate of white people, and 2.4 times the rate of Latino Americans. According to The Sentencing Project, in 12 states more than half of the inmates are Black. The impact on these mothers of their sons’ incarceration cannot be separated from all the other social and economic forces at play, be it poverty, racism, housing and food insecurity, and access to meaningful work. That is true, of course, for us moms. Our experience of parenting a child in prison is determined partly by our social positions and personal histories.

We mothers are so involved in our children’s daily struggles and needs that we feel like we are “doing the time” with our sons. This involvement takes a huge toll on us, both financially and emotionally, and it does not diminish with time. In fact, the longer our sons are “in,” the more our physical health is in jeopardy. The women in one of my support groups reported high blood pressure, weight gain, diabetes, lost eyesight and increased alcohol use, all originating after their sons’ arrests. One mother told us that she changed so much, she had to change her name — the old one didn’t fit anymore.

At first, I leaned heavily on alcohol for solace. My nightly usage was then compounded by the isolation of the pandemic. By year three, I was experiencing occasional blackouts and falls, further adding to my shame. I finally had to stop drinking altogether.

Concurrent with this reevaluation of self, I had to renegotiate my sense of who I understood my son to be. Like all mothers, I had a clear picture of who I thought Louie was. I would have described him as an intense, smart introvert with original opinions. He strived for recognition as an artist. I was, and still am, quite proud of his intelligence and gifts.

After Louie’s arrest, I have had to expand that image to include being someone capable of the crimes he was charged with. From reading the court-ordered evaluations, I have learned far more about painful things he’s gone through, and my pain is exacerbated by realizing that he never would have chosen to share them with me himself. I learned that there is a broken part of him. I love him not one whit less — parental love is as close as one will ever get to unconditional. But I also feel upset for him and sometimes angry at him for some of the choices he has made, even those that clearly resulted from traumatic events I now know that he experienced. I’m angry at how this has damaged my life too, and I did not break any laws. It is a complex stew of feelings.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is credited with saying, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” More than intelligence, I think the ability to hold simultaneous and conflicting feelings is the best measure of mental health. Much of my work with the mothers in my support groups is to help them hold onto all the contradictory feelings they have about their sons.

Most people’s natural tendency is to choose only one perspective, e.g., “He’s a great person, except for that one day.” As our sons’ primary advocates, it can be hard to own our negative feelings alongside love and concern. For example, some anger is understandable and often justified. If it can’t be experienced, it may be projected outward onto family, friends, and/or the legal system that brought their sons to prison. The system is infuriating, yes, but so are our sons sometimes.

I turned to professional literature on the topic, hoping to find some studies and trends that would help me understand my own experience and those of other mothers. It was a somewhat futile undertaking. There’s plenty written about spouses/partners of incarcerated men, and Google can produce multiple resources for children of incarcerated parents, but mothers of incarcerated sons are barely mentioned, leaving us unseen and unacknowledged. This denial translates to a near-total lack of support services for us. I believe this erasure is a reflection of the social imperative for boys to “outgrow” their mothers, and that, after a certain age, a close mother/son relationship is looked at with suspicion and disapproval.

I’m fortunate to be able to visit Louie most Fridays. It enables me to spend time with him and hug him twice. The procedures that visitors go through before being admitted to the visiting room are as arbitrary, capricious and dehumanizing as those for incarcerated individuals, offering us a tiny peephole into our sons’ over-controlled lives. I love Louie, but I hate visiting.

Most of the visitors appear to be mothers, although I also see grandmothers, wives, fathers and children. I am chastised regularly for speaking to these other women — in fact, it is not permitted. The only allowable activity besides talking to one’s own inmate is purchasing food from the vending machines and heating the cellophane-wrapped burgers and empanadas in the microwave for them.

Unappealing as that food appears to me, I understand that it is far better than that provided at meal time, so the men live for these snacks. In some distorted way, this reminds me of feeding my son when he was little — a mother’s traditional job.

I quietly mumble greetings and share complaints with the other mothers while waiting in the microwave line or perusing the vending options. Most of these women are so grateful to speak to another mom who “gets it” ... until a guard comes over and separates us. Keeping us from “organizing” allows the system to continue unabated.

Mothers of incarcerated sons are isolated by our internalized shame and lack of opportunities for community support. Our own shame silences us, and then the prison systems reinforce the separation from other mothers. We need recognition for the huge, thankless job we do to keep our sons alive and sane. We desperately need support services to address our grief and health-damaging stress. The first step is to break the silence, as the more that mothers can safely talk about what we’re going through, the more “normal” this experience will be viewed in the general culture. With about 1 million mothers of incarcerated sons in this country, we need and deserve better care.

In the meantime, I limp along with a chronic tug on my broken heart and a deeper understanding of how our criminal “justice” system punishes entire families without even a pretense of offering rehabilitation to incarcerated people or support services to those who love them. I am not at all who I was before the calamity of five years ago. I am an angry citizen, a lonelier friend and a better mother.

Note: Some names and details have been changed to protect the individuals in this essay.

Claire Greenberg is a pseudonym for the author, a psychotherapist and mother of an incarcerated son.

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