Anita Rao
At this point in the history of this show, I think you all know that I'm a chronic overachiever. This was never more true than in my last year of college, when the desire to write a senior thesis culminated in hundreds of hours of interviews, research, meetings — and literally a 112-page document. While I wish I could go back in time and tell 2011 Anita to chill out a little bit, I would never take back this experience because it opened me up in the most unexpected and transformative ways. A big part of that were the stories I heard from the people I interviewed: all formerly incarcerated women who had participated in a creative writing and performance workshop while they were serving time in the Raleigh women's prison. The other big part: the person who mentored me. A woman who helped me understand just how important it is to approach narratives of incarceration with nuance and really listen to how prison shapes the whole of people's lives — far beyond the crime committed or time served.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao.
That woman who mentored me and served as my thesis advisor did it with such intention and grace, in part because of her own connection to the topic. When she was 15 years old, her father was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Ashley Lucas
It was an incredibly traumatic experience to know that the father, who absolutely adored me and who I adored, was going into a place where I could not follow his day-to-day life anymore. And it was, quite frankly, terrifying. And it stayed terrifying for the entire 20 years that he was inside.
Anita Rao
That's Ashley Lucas. I met Ashley at UNC-Chapel Hill where, at that time, she was a professor in the drama department. Today, she works at the University of Michigan, where she's a professor of theatre and drama and the director of Latina/Latino Studies. We're gonna get into her interest in drama a little bit later, but first, more about her childhood. Ashley's father was incarcerated in a Texas prison in 1994. And at that time, the rules were that for the first 30 days you're on the inside, you can't have any contact with your family. No visits, phone calls or even letters. So the first opportunity Ashley and her mom had to see him was on Christmas Eve.
Ashley Lucas
We immediately got on an airplane and went to see him, and the visits were only allowable on weekends. This was in the days before GPS, before people had ready access to figuring out how to get places on their phones. And we had a map that we had gotten from the rental car agency at the airport. And when we finally found the prison — which was in the middle of a cotton patch in South Texas and not easy to find — as soon as we pulled into the parking lot of the prison, they took away our map, because maps were considered contraband because they could help somebody with an escape. And we went into the prison, completely bewildered and overwhelmed and trying to figure out what was happening to our lives, but also how you enter and navigate the system — this institution. And all of that was incredibly intimidating.
And the visiting room was packed, it was full of children. All these other families and small kids, people with four or five children, babies in their arms, elderly people were spending Christmas in this prison. And when you first begin visits in Texas prisons, you also can't see somebody without a piece of glass between you, you're in a visiting booth in the way that you see in movies. And — and the way this one was set up, my mother and I had to share one headset on the phone that lets you communicate between the glass. And so we spent that Christmas Eve huddled in the little visiting booth trying to hold the phone receiver between the two of us so that we could actually hear what my father was saying. So there was my father, looking very pale and frightened and his head shaved — for the only time I ever saw him with a shaved head in my life — and we couldn't touch him.
Anita Rao
As your student, I remember how often you emphasized that when talking about incarcerated people to not focus on the crime or what that person did. I'm curious for you when you were a teenager, how you were processing that. How you were talking about what was going on with your father, with friends and people in your life.
Ashley Lucas
I was sort of struck down with terror when adults would ask me what my parents did for a living. I think that question is generally designed as a, kind of, "get to know you" thing that people ask children. When you don't have a good answer to that question, it's a frightening question. Because when you say the truth, "My father is in prison," some people really freak out. They stop talking to you, they don't want to have that conversation, they think you might be criminal also, or a lot of people would pretend that my father was dead. And the truth of the matter was that for his entire life and mine, my father was a very present, very loving, very much desired and missed part of my life. So I wanted to be able to say, "Yes, I have a father and I love him. And I would love for you to be able to know him too, because he's a beautiful person." And that was not a conversation that most people in my life, particularly adults, were ready to have. So I didn't start telling people that my father was in prison until I got into graduate school many years later, and had just hit a breaking point in terms of my own silence.
Anita Rao
In the many years before Ashley hit that breaking point, she talked about her father mostly with her mom, who created a super open environment for conversation in the home. In addition to visiting her dad as often as they could, she also wrote him daily letters.
Ashley Lucas
Every time the mail gets passed out in prison, they're calling people's names and handing out the letters. And I wanted my papa to have something every time. So I wrote him every day for the 20 years that he was locked up — except on Sundays because the mail doesn't go out on Sunday. Because that was what I wanted him to be able to sit with in prison if he couldn't sit with me.
Anita Rao
Ashley is just one of the more than five million people around the country who have spent part of their childhood navigating the challenges of having an incarcerated parent. But despite the size of this group, it's not well organized. For the first eight or nine years Ashley's father was in prison, she only met other kids of incarcerated parents in the prison visitors room. When her father got denied parole for the third time, Ashley was in graduate school, and her pent up frustration mixed with her scholarly mind concocted an idea.
Ashley Lucas
We have the most incarcerated population in world history — not just today, but always, even if you count slavery. We are locking up more people per capita in the United States right now than anybody ever has. And I couldn't make sense of that. And I also couldn't make sense of the fact that if we are locking up over two million people, surely somebody else I knew was having this experience. And if that was the case, why wasn't anybody talking about what had happened to them? Why didn't anyone know — want to know what had happened to me? There were a lot of people who wanted to know just how guilty was my father, and what was his crime and what had caused him to go into prison. But the much more enduring experience for our entire family was, what is it like to negotiate having a family while there's a big set of prison walls in the middle of it?
And I had been doing research on ethnographic theater — theater created by people who look at a living community and attempt to present that community in some scope of its diversity of experience on stage in a single play. I decided that I would try it for myself. That as a way to get through my pain, and frustration and anger, I wanted to talk to other people about the experience of having family in prison. So I just started telling everybody I had ever met that my father was in prison, and that I wanted to write this play. And I realized very quickly that all of the other people of color who I knew in graduate school already had an incarcerated loved one — somebody in their family. The first person I interviewed was a Chicano from Las Cruces, New Mexico, who was getting his PhD in English at the same university as I was, and he had many incarcerated family members. He was the only man in his family not to have gone to prison. And I realized, when I interviewed this friend of mine, that not only did we have so much in common in terms of — of what it feels like to love somebody inside the walls, to not know what their life looks like, to become temporarily incarcerated yourself when you go to visit them. But we also had some very different experiences. For me, the day that my father went into prison was this unique and earth-shattering event. And when I asked my friend about his memories of his brothers, or his father, his uncles going into prison, he didn't have a singular significant memory like that because it was so routine that people were going in and out of prison, that that didn't feel like a momentous day. And I realized that I had a lot to learn.
Anita Rao
Ashley traveled across Texas, California and New York to interview family members of incarcerated people. From those interviews, she wrote a one woman show called, "Doin' Time: Through the Visiting Glass." It's composed of 13 different monologues. Here's a taste.
Ashley Lucas (Doin' Time Clip)
When — when we first came in here, Annie was just a baby and, and they won't let you bring a baby bottle with milk into the visit. And when we came in, they searched us all over just like we were criminals ourselves. It's bad enough to have them do that to me, but to watch them do it to my kids? It was awful. And then there I was with Annie — first time he'd ever seen her. And he couldn't even hold her or nothing. All I could do was hold her up to the glass for him to look at. I didn't want that to be the first time that he saw his newborn daughter. Me and my boys cried all the way home.
Anita Rao
When Ashley first wrote the show, she assumed she'd perform it at grad school and then maybe once for her mom, but it took on a life of its own. From 2004 until the start of the pandemic, she performed it in communities across the country and the world. She's done it inside multiple prisons and for audiences filled with folks who have experienced the effects of incarceration from the outside.
Ashley Lucas
In performing the show, I always hold a discussion with the audience after the performance to let them talk about their own lives, to ask me any questions they have. And most of all, to give us a place where we can have the community that I was seeking. Because in watching the play, people felt much more liberated to talk about their own experiences without having to divulge things they didn't want to divulge. So they didn't have to say, "This is exactly what x y and z looked like in my family when it happened to us." But they could point at one of my characters and say, "When you were that person, when that character said that thing, that really resonated with my life experience." And they could talk about what it felt like without having to expose themselves to greater scrutiny in public.
Anita Rao
I got the chance to see Ashley perform the show toward the end of my senior year in college, and I still vividly remember the feeling in the room when the show was over. Everyone was talking to everyone, and the silence had certainly been broken. Ashley continued to pursue her passion for bridging incarceration and the arts as the Director of the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan. A year after she started that job in 2013, her father was released from prison.
Ashley Lucas
I had spent, literally, 20 years imagining what life would be like when he came home. And my mother and I had a very specific picture of what we thought it would look like in our lives, and the things we thought my father would want to do and see and experience and eat and all of that stuff. And his vision of what that would be like had been completely different. He'd been imagining in a different isolation, not part of our conversation about what he thought he wanted. And that's not to say we didn't want some of the same things, but when we started talking about the past, we realized that even our memories of the time we had together prior to those 20 years of incarceration were different, because we remember things by the way we retell those stories and experience them. So there were things that were very important to me that he didn't remember at all, and vice versa.
And there was a great desire in him for the world to be the way it had been before he went in. And the world changes a lot in 20 years, and that was very painful. To watch him realize what had changed, how much was unfamiliar, how little he felt in control, because I think a lot of people in prison — and I think this would be true for me, if I had been incarcerated — I would imagine that I would feel very powerful and very much in control of my life when I was not under the thumb of the prison authorities inside the facility anymore. And the truth is that the world out here is not a friendly place for formerly incarcerated people. We slam doors in their faces all the time. They feel out of touch with the culture, and the way conversations are had, how you socialize. Everything about daily life out here feels strange and intimidating when you've done a few decades in prison. Even when you've done just a year, it's very disorienting to come back out. So to watch him in that pain and confusion was very difficult. But then again, all the little stuff is miraculous when you come home from prison. So we've always been a very touchy-feely, loving family. And if I just passed by the chair that he was sitting in and patted on his shoulder, he would grab my hand with both hands and say, "That's my baby, that's my precious baby. I love you so much," and press his face into my hand. And it was, just, beautiful, and so sweet and so lovely. But it was also a very painful reminder of how long he went without loving touch of any kind, because in prison, it's always against the rules to touch each other, particularly in a way that signifies real compassion or caring. So yeah, I have no words for the level of gratitude that I feel for the fact that my father lived in freedom again, but it wasn't easy either.
Anita Rao
I'd love to hear about where you are in your process of working through your experience now that I know your father has passed away — he was alive for five years after being released. And I'm curious how you're thinking about your experience as a child of an incarcerated parent now that he's no longer here.
Ashley Lucas
It's very strange to tell you the truth. There's a big part of me, emotionally, that still feels like he's in prison. That I could get in a car and drive to the middle of nowhere West Texas and find him, because the greater period of my life was spent not being able to have contact with him on a regular basis anyway. So I find myself still wanting to write him letters, still feeling like if I could just get over there to see him, he would be there. Even though cognitively I know that that's not the truth. And it's not comforting to picture him in prison, but it is comforting to think that he's out there. And I still feel like I spent all those years saving conversations in my head for the next time I would see him. The things I would want to tell him about, or include him in my life, the things I would put in my letters. I, every day, was sort of collecting and saving all the things I would want to give him. That's a habit I can't break, and I'm kind of grateful for that.
Anita Rao
At the end of that conversation with Ashley, I had one of those moments where words don't really suffice. My interview self and my college self and my human self were all folding into one another. And all I really wanted to do was transport myself to Michigan and give Ashley a huge hug. But as the professional that I am, I kept on. One of the threads I see through so much of Ashley's work is the desire to create more opportunities for connection between incarcerated people and their families. And ask new questions about the systems that keep them separated. Someone else who shares these desires: Sylvia A. Harvey.
Sylvia A. Harvey
So I learned that it's critical for people to be able to see and trust me in a way that goes beyond just being a reporter and a journalist and a researcher, which are all relevant. It's like, this person actually lived this, right? So just really taking that and saying, "How do I look at what happened to me and see how it's impacting, you know, the two million families that are are dealing with mass incarceration?"
Anita Rao
Sylvia, who goes by SAH, is a journalist, public speaker and author of "The Shadow System: Mass Incarceration and the American Family." The questions she explores in that book stemmed from her own experience. Within a span of about a year, her mom died of an asthma attack, and her father was sentenced to 16 years to life in prison. This all happened before she was 6 years old.
Sylvia A. Harvey
My dad told me that when the doctor told me that my mother passed, I literally — as a 5-year-old or 4-year-old at the time — slapped the doctor. I'm like, what? So you're already thinking about, like, this can't be right, this doesn't make sense. Like, I can't comprehend this. So that was the biggest thing, I think, as a young person, right? Just not understanding what was happening, and then going into the actual facility to see my father and being told that I had to remove the braids that I had just gotten done specially for him, right. That was something that was particularly designed to show my father how pretty I was. And you go into this prison and they say, "Well, you can't wear that hairstyle inside here." But you're a kid, so you don't understand that. And I had to remove my braids, and I'm just — the whole time — questioning, "Why am I required to do this?"
Anita Rao
The rationale for asking her to remove her braids? Something she soon learned — to check to make sure she wasn't trying to smuggle in any drugs into the prison. Sylvia's father started serving his sentence in the mid 80s. And at that time, it was actually easier for her and her siblings to spend time with her father than it is for many kids with incarcerated parents today. That's because in addition to these one-off visits, they also got to have some long weekends together. That's thanks to the extended family visitation program. Most of those kind of programs have now been wiped away and exist in just four states in the country.
Sylvia A. Harvey
So Mississippi was — they launched these family visits in 1974, right. And it was this idea that there's no way for families to exist and build when they have a loved one incarcerated without these visits, right. But then, there was this idea that we can't allow this because, particularly in Mississippi, you know, on top of what they said were issues with budget, there was no funding for the program, which was not an expensive program. The other issue was this assault on Black sexuality, right? It was this idea that all of these men are having their wives come and visit over this weekend, which is a family-building program and process. But children were being born, they were able to expand their families, which was a huge type of access. It was an honor to be able to say, "Hey, I love my husband. I've been with him 40 years, and we've been able to continue our family." And that's not something that people think should be taking place, right? So it was like, no, no, no, you guys are having these children, and now these children are going to go on, you know, state assistance. The family is going to need help from the state, so let's end this. We don't want to have to take care of more children, and we don't think children should be born into single family homes, right? So they're essentially making the decision for these families.
Anita Rao
For you, as a kid who did get the experience to spend a full weekend with your father and your brothers about four times a year, what were you able to do in those visits? And how did those shape your — your relationship with him during his incarceration?
Sylvia A. Harvey
He is literally my best friend, right. Like, I can say that I know how to love fully and honestly and with my entire being because of my father, right. So despite the incarceration, right, and I think those visits, obviously allowed me to, you know, sit in his presence. It allowed me to make breakfast with him. We have this huge tradition of making breakfast. So he's — I don't know — whether he's making the pancakes, and my brother's whisking eggs, we're all sort of partaking in this experience that we wouldn't have if we didn't have these visits, right. And there was no one sitting in the room watching us, making sure that we weren't touching. I remember, you know, my eldest brother passed, and I was visiting my father, and I could just see his eyes welling up at, you know, the feeling of losing your eldest child. And the visiting restrictions saying I can't touch him at that moment, because they are fearful that I could be passing him drugs. And I just put my hand on his anyway, even if that meant being kicked out. So there were so many limitations in regular visiting that when you actually got those family visits, and you were in that little apartment, and you could watch TV, and you could laugh and joke, and you know, sit under the sun, it was — it was like you were home. It was like, just for a few days, he wasn't in prison. So they were crucial.
Anita Rao
That level of intimacy that you were able to feel with him is obviously something that shaped your — your perception of him, as someone who is, you know, your father and serves all these roles in your life, aside from just you know, someone who is in prison away from you. And for kids, there can be this cognitive dissonance that they experience of having a strong relationship with a parent or an incarcerated parent, but then maybe going to school, for example, and not knowing how to talk about this experience with other people in their life. So talk to me a bit about that and some of the stories that you've uncovered about this experience for kids who are trying to navigate being a kid of an incarcerated parent, but also being out in the world and living their own life.
Sylvia A. Harvey
Yeah, I mean, it's a huge challenge, right? When I was in Miami, there was a young, young girl, and she knew that her father was in prison. And when I talked to her about where he was, she said, "He's in school." And it was a lie, essentially, that, you know, both parents — the father and the mother — decided to tell her. And even as she got older, I think she was maybe 8 at the time, she understood that her father was not in school. But she didn't want to accept the fact that he was in prison. And she said to me, she said, "Well, he is in school in here, right?" So there's this idea that you know what's happening, but you don't want to acknowledge what's happening because there's so much stigma around the idea of having a parent that's incarcerated. Even though whatever they did, you should not be held responsible for. And I think a lot of people don't acknowledge that, and young people have to deal with, you know, what it means to have a parent incarcerated, and how they're going to be perceived by the outside. Even if that's in school, even — you know, it goes beyond just students and classmates that may pick on a kid or not understand, but also you have the same issues with teachers that aren't aware of their own bias, right, and not being able to tell all teachers what's happening with a particular student, because we don't know if their bias is going to come into play when they work with that young person. They don't have that support system that is — is crucial.
Anita Rao
SAH's research looks at the intersection of the education system, prison system and child welfare system to point out some of the gaps in support for children of incarcerated parents. One of those big ones she's reported on: the Adoption and Safe Families Act. It's a 1997 federal law that requires local child welfare agencies to request the termination of parental rights when a child has lived in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months. For incarcerated parents navigating long sentencing times — or even challenges during the reentry from a short jail stay — these timelines can lead them to lose their children entirely. Reporting these stories and also revisiting her own childhood hasn't necessarily been easy. But one thing that's made the process a little sweeter — SAH has been able to share some of her work with her dad. He was released from prison in 2012 and even got to be an unofficial adviser for her book, talking through both the big themes and their own family's story.
Sylvia A. Harvey
You know, it's funny, I laugh about this because I was speaking to my father yesterday, and he said that I've completely blacked out huge chunks of my — my life, and our sort of experience together during his incarceration. There are things I just don't remember. And he'll say, "You don't remember when you were 16, and you wrote me an angry letter saying that you didn't have a car like other kids had, you didn't have all of these things. You were so furious with me." And I was like, "Really?" Because, I'm like, how do I not remember all the bad stuff? Right, and you just, like, you had a tough, tough life. I think one of the big things that he got me to think about when I was writing about the young girl in my book, I was like, "I'm having such a hard time writing this chapter about her." And it was a chapter where I was talking about her not understanding that her father had life without the possibility of parole. Like he's, according to current law, never coming home. And this little girl didn't understand that. And she thought at some point, they were going to be able to have ice cream. At some point, she was going to teach him all these new dance moves, and he's never coming home. And I was like, "Why am I having a hard time with this chapter?" And he said, "Because you can see yourself in that little girl." And I'm like, "Huh? Like, yeah." So there's all this stuff that can be laying dormant that you just don't know is there until someone comes and says, "Hey, because that's who you were. Because that's what you experienced. Because those are the same questions you asked me." I always said, you know, "When are you coming home?" He would always say, "As soon as I can baby, as soon as I can." So yeah, I think he got me to see myself when I needed to in certain chapters, and he encouraged me to just keep doing the work.
Anita Rao
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC, a listener-supported station. If you want some resources on supporting incarcerated children, or just want to learn more about this topic, check the show notes. SAH had some great suggestions that we've linked in there for you. We also put in a link to watch Ashley's full, one-woman show.
This episode is produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Audrey Smith also produces for our show, Madison Speyer is our intern and Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer. Quilla wrote our theme music.
We would love for you to take one minute and support our podcast — post about this episode or one that you've loved on your Instagram account and tag us. Or if you're not big on social media, text this episode to a friend you think would like it. Thank you so much for your support.
Until next time, I'm Anita Rao, taking on the taboo with you.