WHEN THERESA “ROXANNE” CRUZ went to prison, her children lost not just a mother but also a grandmother. Roxanne’s mother, Theresa Azhocar—the “weekend grandma” Roxanne’s children had known and adored all their lives—had been affectionate to the point of indulgence. She had money for Disneyland and the energy to enjoy it. When her grandkids would visit for the weekend, she would take them into the garden of her home in Chula Vista, California, just south of San Diego, and teach them to plant flowers. Then she ’d line them up in a row; bathe them and wash their hair; give them her husband’s white T-shirts for nightgowns; and snuggle with them on the sofa to watch The Nutcracker until bedtime. “My God,” their grandfather used to tease, “we have all these channels and all we watch is the Disney Channel.” In January of , Roxanne was sentenced to twenty-five years to life for conspiracy to commit murder (the sentence was later revised on appeal to seven years to life). Three days later, her father, Theresa’s husband of twenty-seven years, died of a heart attack. In the course of a week, Theresa Azhocar became

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GRANDPARENTS a single parent to four young children, including an infant with medical problems.

The cohort Theresa had joined so abruptly was large and growing. In a trend that is fueled by both addiction and incarceration, . million children now live in grandparentheaded households. Half of all children with incarcerated mothers, and a sixth of the children of incarcerated fathers, are cared for by grandparents.

When Roxanne went to prison, Theresa was transformed from a doting weekend grandma to a harried caretaker who had no time for the Disney Channel, much less Disneyland. Theresa, then forty-eight, worked up to sixty hours a week as a naval electrician, then came home to mountains of laundry, grieving children, and unpaid bills from her daughter’s lawyer. If someone left the milk out, she might fly off the handle. By the time I visited, Roxanne’s three older children— Andrea, Antoinette, and Carlitos—had grown up. Adriana, the youngest, was the only one living with her grandmother. She was thirteen and at school much of the day, but the house was full of children all the same. Theresa now cared for a rotating crew of grandchildren and great-grandchildren while their parents worked. On a spring morning, three long-haired girls in flowered cotton dresses played on a swing set in the backyard under the supervision of Theresa’s seventy-seven-year-old mother, Felicitas. A yellow parakeet sang in a cage in the dining room; outside, two more cages held baby parakeets and a gray rabbit that Theresa was keeping for a vacationing daughter. The creak of the screen door was constant as children ran in and out from the yard to the kitchen and back again.

Theresa sat at the kitchen table as Antoinette’s son Alfonso—a three-year-old with sun-streaked brown hair and the brown saucer eyes of an anime character—snuggled blissfully into his great-grandmother’s arms and went to sleep. Theresa was beautiful at sixty-one, in a red-and-black print dress that reached to her ankles, with the same brown-gold hair as her grandson’s, cut into soft layers around her face. The inevitable chaos that comes with a house full of kids—a child dribbling a giant silver exercise ball through the living room; another climbing onto the kitchen counter to investigate a chicken salad—did not appear to faze her. When friends tell her she ’s crazy to be caring for yet another generation of children, she doesn’t reference duty or necessity. “You’d be surprised how much I get out of it,” she tells them instead. At lunchtime, one of the girls objected to the chicken salad and was given a bowl of homemade pasta salad instead. Another required a ham-and-cheese sandwich, apple juice, and chocolate milk, which Theresa mixed from an industrial-sized tin of Nestlé’s Quik. After lunch, the children ran outside to play. Theresa’s face, which animation had lifted in the presence of the children, fell a bit, settling into its true age as she began to talk about Roxanne. According to family accounts, Roxanne had left an abusive relationship but was being hounded and threatened by her ex at the time of her crime. She had been prescribed Xanax for panic attacks and, according to Theresa, became addicted; in the month before the crime, she took as many as three hundred pills. When her ex sued for custody of Carlitos, the son they had together, Roxanne’s panic intensified. On June , —the night before a scheduled custody hearing—Roxanne was outside in a parked car as acquaintances went to confront her ex-boyfriend. One of the men shot him in the legs. Theresa maintains that Roxanne had no idea the man intended to shoot her ex; that she had fallen asleep in the car and woke up to the sound of gunshots

Four days later, Roxanne had taken four-year-old Carlitos to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal when police surrounded their car. They arrested Roxanne and took Carlitos to the home of a paternal aunt. Carlitos was later placed in the custody of his father.

Initially, Roxanne was charged with assault. It was a year before she went to trial. By then, the man who did the shooting had been convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to thirty years to life. Roxanne’s own charge had been revised to conspiracy to commit murder.

Roxanne was out on bail during her trial and had moved in with her mother and her children. Theresa said that Roxanne, who became pregnant with Adriana while awaiting trial, stopped using drugs during that time and returned to her former self—baking cupcakes, taking the girls to play basketball, bringing them to church.

Theresa and Roxanne were home with baby Adriana when Roxanne’s jury came back with a verdict. As soon as they got the call, they raced to the courthouse. Theresa dropped Roxanne and the baby off and went to look for parking. When she got inside, she found the judge ’s secretary in the hallway holding Adriana. Theresa entered the courtroom in time to hear the world “guilty,” and see her daughter taken away. Theresa remembers screaming and crying in the car on the way home—the baby, in the back seat, slept through it—then trying to pull herself together in time for the older children’s arrival from school. She had just gotten home when they burst through the door, competing to see who could get inside first to give their mother the valentines they had made for her that day. Andrea, the oldest, was the first to notice that her grandmother’s eyes were red. “Where ’s my mom at?” she shouted. “She’s not here right now,” Theresa said, the fear in

Andrea’s face compelling her to blunt the truth. “She ’ll be back in a little bit.” The girls began to wail.

Andrea was nine years old when her mother went to prison. Antoinette was eight, and Carlitos—who remained with his father— was five. Four-month-old Adriana had been born prematurely when Roxanne’s placenta ruptured during her trial, and she suffered from digestive and breathing difficulties that required constant monitoring.

In the midst of the maelstorm that had hit her family, Theresa’s own sorrow and anger remained largely submerged. She had no more time, or space, to grieve her husband than she did her daughter. Only last year—fourteen years after his death—did she finally put a headstone on his grave. Theresa was born in Mexico and raised in the United States. Her mother had always told her, “It’s God and the United States—believe that. This is the best country in the world.” She used to get a lump in her throat when she heard the Pledge of Allegiance. Now she winces when her grandchildren and greatgrandchildren recite it. When Los Angeles residents rioted in the wake of the Rodney King verdicts in , Theresa was appalled to find herself thrilled by the violence, as if the rage she could not afford to express had found a physical manifestation. “I wish they would come downtown and start with the courts,” she told a co-worker bitterly.

“I could say that I was grieving at that time,” Theresa said of the years after her daughter was sentenced. “I realize that now. I was inside myself. It was like my whole system was poisoned by the anger that I had in me.”

Once, she overheard a co-worker talking about an upcoming jury-duty assignment.

“You know how to say ‘guilty,’ don’t you?” joked another colleague.

“It was like they had lit a fire on me,” Theresa remembers. “I told him, ‘Yes, and when you say “guilty,” remember that next time it could be you or your kids.’”

Theresa went to bed many nights to the sound of her grandchildren crying in their beds. Long after they fell asleep, Theresa would lie awake, struggling with the guilt that was more powerful even than her anger.

“Sometimes I think that the family of a person who commits a crime is worse off than if the person had died,” Theresa said. “You wonder, ‘How can my kid have done this? How could I have stopped my kid from doing this?’” She would finally fall asleep, only to wake up an hour later with the same questions pressing in on her.

Sleeplessness is commonplace among grandparent caregivers, as is depression. Their worries are endless: that they will die and leave their grandchildren parentless; that they will not be able to manage, as they grow older and slower, to keep the children safe and fed; that they will lose this generation to the same forces, or failures, that overtook the last; that their children will never come back and retrieve the grandkids; that they will.

Whether or not she had slept, Theresa left the house at six each morning to get to work by seven. Antoinette and Andrea remember being rushed out the door some days with mis- matched shoes—two lefts on one girl, two rights on the other. In addition to childcare, food, and clothing for the kids, Theresa was paying two lawyers—one for her daughter’s appeal and one to represent Theresa in a custody battle with Carlitos’s father (the two were ultimately awarded joint custody, and Carlitos spent weekends at Theresa’s house). Because of the inflated cost of collect calls from prison, her phone bill averaged $ a month. She mortgaged her house to the limit; spent her retirement savings; and ran up more than $, in credit-card debt, which she was still working to pay down when I met her. The only support for which Theresa was eligible was $ a month as a child-only grant from Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Had the children been in foster care, given Adriana’s special needs, the payments would likely have totaled several thousand dollars a month. But Theresa—like many grandparents faced with the same choice—was not willing to place her grandchildren in the custody of the state, with all the attendant risks and intrusions, in return for a monthly stipend. In , only about , of the . million children then living with relatives received foster care payments. Many did not receive other services—such as food stamps or Medicaid— for which they were eligible if they were low-income. Nationwide, of those children being cared for by relatives in , only about a quarter received financial support in the form of either foster care or TANF payments.

Grandparents who do choose to have their grandchildren placed with them as foster children live in fear of losing them if social workers should deem the grandparent too old, ill, or otherwise unfit. The children they care for are hardly immune to this threat. Lorraine was raised from infancy by her grandmother while her mother was in and out of jail and prison.

When Lorraine was eleven years old, her grandmother had a stroke and became less able to supervise her. When Lorraine hit adolescence and began getting into trouble, she remembers a social worker telling her, “You are walking on eggshells. If you don’t do well in school, I’m going to pull you out of the house.” Márta, sixteen, was at home with her two-year-old brother and nine-year-old sister on a Friday afternoon while her grandmother was at work and her mother was in prison. A social worker dropped by and, finding Márta alone with the younger children, took them away to the shelter. It wasn’t “healthy,” the worker told Márta, for the children to be under the supervision of a teenager during the after-school hours. A childcare subsidy for the family was not available. Shelter care, at $, a month, was.

Nearly two-thirds of children being raised by single grandmothers live in poverty. The multiple expenses associated with maintaining contact with an incarcerated family member— phone charges, travel to visit and sometimes overnight lodging, overpriced vending-machine meals in the visiting room, money for commissary—comprise a significant drain on already-scant resources. These costs—above and beyond the cost of feeding, clothing, and housing prisoners’ children—have led the anthropologist Donald Braman to conclude that “incarceration acts like a hidden tax, one that is visited disproportionately on poor and minority families; and while its costs are most directly felt by the adults closest to the incarcerated family member, the full effect is eventually felt by the next generation as well.” Grandparents often take pride in having “rescued” their grandchildren from foster care, and emphasize that there was never any question of whether they would do so. “Our children are luckier than most,” I heard one California grandmother tell a group of others. “They’re not in a foster home. They get to know that we ’ve loved them since they were born.” All the same, the disparity between the support relative caregivers receive and that a stranger might is a source of bitterness as well as hardship. “I’ve seen grandmothers mortgage their houses to the gills in order to provide for the child,” said Susan Burton, a former prisoner who founded and runs a network of homes for reentering prisoners in Southern California. “I’ve seen them lose their homes. Go into bad credit to supply the needs of the child. Then you see the amount of money that would go into foster care for that same child. It says that the state is promoting the separation of families—that children’s needs are more apt to get met if they are taken from their family.”

Antoinette is a mother herself now—single, working, tired— and is beginning to understand what her grandmother was up against. As a motherless child, she took everything personally. “When you see a lady yelling and screaming all day, and how tired she is, you think, ‘Well, she ’s tired of me!’ ” Antoinette said. “I felt like I made her life harder than it should’ve been.” When her mother went to prison, Antoinette felt that her whole life had been transformed overnight. She stopped going to school and was medicated for depression. Once, Antoinette threw a penny into a wishing well at a shopping mall. She and her grandmother looked at each other without speaking and both burst into tears. Sometimes Antoinette would wake up with her pillow soaked from crying in her sleep.

When Roxanne went to prison, the hallmarks of her children’s daily life went with her. Roxanne had always made a production out of holidays—assembling elaborate Easter baskets topped with inflated bunnies; recruiting a male relative to play Santa Claus at Christmas. Theresa dreaded the holidays—the demands of daily life were more than enough for her. The girls hated them, too—the bulky knit hats and sweaters their grandmother put under the tree were painfully out of style. “You know what? I’m not good enough,” Theresa would say when she saw the disappointment on their faces.

Sports fell by the wayside; there was no one to take the kids when their grandmother was at work. When a classmate invited Antoinette to the prom, she felt compelled to turn him down; there was “no energy” in her household for shopping and primping. When there was an event at school—an open house, or parent-teacher night—the girls would make up excuses not to go.

When other kids went to slumber parties, Andrea and Antoinette were not allowed to go. Theresa had good reason to be protective—she worked full-time and found it difficult to provide the supervision she felt the children needed, and she had already lost one daughter. But instead of making the girls feel safe, these restrictions heightened the social alienation that came with having a mother in prison.

For a while, the children felt their mother’s power and presence in their daily lives, even from a distance; they felt her, as Antoinette put it, “standing over what happens in the home.” When they complained to her about not being allowed to go places with their friends or encouraged to play sports, Roxanne would talk to her mother and things would get better. As the years passed, that power ebbed. “I’m tired,” Theresa would tell Roxanne when she lobbied for the children. “If you were here, you’d do it.”

Roxanne had always been Antoinette ’s confidante—a young mother who was like a best friend. After Roxanne went to prison, the simplest conversation turned into a minefield. “She would ask me questions—‘What did you do today? Did you play basketball?’—but once her questions were up, we were quiet on the phone,” Antoinette remembers. “How do you ask someone who’s sitting in a jail cell how they’re doing? I felt bad for her to know what I’m doing in life. I feel bad to tell her that I’m eating tamales for Christmas. When I’m sad, I don’t want her to know about that either, ’cause she cries every night. It’s been fourteen years and she ’s still crying.”

Talking to her grandmother—or her great-grandmother, who retired from her job and moved in to help care for the children— offered little solace. They seemed old-fashioned to Antoinette, out of touch with the crises and opportunities she faced as a young woman. Adapting to their ways entailed constant concessions. “After my mother left, there was no taking naps in the day,” she recalled. “When my great-grandmother made my bed, I wasn’t to touch it, until it was dark. That’s the way they lived back in the day. And here I am in the s and I can’t even take a nap when I come home from school.” Her friendships grew strained as well, as Antoinette struggled to keep her mother’s status secret.

“Tell your mom to drop us off at Rollerskate Land,” her friends would say.

“How do I turn around and tell them that I don’t have my mom anymore?” Antoinette would wonder.

Eventually, she told her best friend where her mother was, then a few others. It wasn’t long before the whole school knew. “Who did your mom kill?” classmates would ask her mockingly. “I felt that people thought of me like that,” Antoinette re- members—“that they thought of my grandma and my uncles and my whole family like we were jail people.”

Antoinette constantly felt—in a phrase she used repeatedly to describe her life growing up—“out of the circle.” The “circle” was the world where “everybody’s normal,” Antoinette explained. “Even to this day, I feel like I’m not. I’ve never lived a normal life. My life is different than yours, yours, yours, yours, yours. Everybody. I’m different.”

Most weekends, Theresa loaded the children into the car and drove the two and a half hours to the California Institute for Women. She’d wait to be let in for three or four hours in the baking sun, watching the children’s clothes and faces get progressively grimier as they played in the dirt. She was not allowed to bring a baby carrier for Adriana, or even a blanket.

Inside the visiting room, the baby, who had grown accustomed to her grandmother’s care, would cry when her mother tried to hold her. Roxanne would cry with her.

“I used to get out of there just wanting to wreck my car” from rage, Theresa remembers. But she had to drive carefully. Her car was full of children.

Eventually, Roxanne received clearance for extended visits in the Family Living Unit (FLU), an apartment on prison grounds where Theresa and the children could spend three or four days with her. Inside the FLU, Roxanne baked cookies with her children, combed their hair, tucked them into bed. If Easter was coming, they’d color eggs and hide them. If it was anywhere near someone’s birthday, Roxanne would bake a cake. Photographs taken during FLU visits show a tight cluster of children with their mother at the center. Roxanne is youthful and beaming, looking like a sister to her daughters. They all wear their long, dark hair the same way—swept up in the front and loose at the sides.

For Adriana, now thirteen, who had no memory of Roxanne outside of prison, the FLU visits offered the only chance she ’d get at the kind of intimate, hands-on mothering her sisters remembered. At home, Adriana, whose Halloween costumes were store-bought, would stare enviously at old photographs of her sisters standing beside their mother in black cat costumes Roxanne had sewn by hand. Inside the FLU, Roxanne would put an oversized white T-shirt on her youngest daughter and use makeup to paint whiskers on Adriana’s upturned face. For Andrea, the FLU visits offered a respite from social isolation. “I have a mom, too,” she could tell herself, as well as her friends. “She ’s there. She does things.”

Theresa remembers all four kids piling into Roxanne’s double bed during these visits, vying to be near her, competing for the chance to speak with her alone. The older girls would barrage their mother with questions about boys, sex, puberty—things they wouldn’t dream of discussing with their old-fashioned grandmother. The trips were costly and timeconsuming for Theresa, who had to miss work and bring in all the food and supplies, but they left her with a sense of relief all the same, a feeling that she and her daughter were partners in raising the children, and that Roxanne was carrying some of the weight.

Five years after Roxanne went to prison, the Department of Corrections imposed a new regulation: prisoners serving life sentences would no longer be eligible for FLU visits. “That was when I began to have real trouble with the older girls,” Theresa remembers. Antoinette and Andrea were just entering the fraught territory of adolescence when they were told they could no longer spend more than a few hours with their mother. “You’re too old,” they would scold their grandmother, dismissing her efforts to help them navigate this passage. “You don’t understand.” Theresa could not argue with them. She ’d always been good with small children, but teenagers—especially those as angry and alienated as her grandchildren were becoming— were a different matter.

It is not uncommon for grandparent placements to fall apart during the teenage years, as grandparents’ health begins to falter and their charges’ behavior grows more challenging. The Azhocar family held together, but it was not easy. “To be honest, I started not caring anymore,” said Antoinette, who was twelve years old when the FLU visits ended. She quickly became, to use her phrase, “very bad.” Now, when her grandmother told her she could not go somewhere, she went anyway, slamming the door as she left. Antoinette was sitting on her grandmother’s sofa as we spoke, and she began to cry. Her children, Alex and Alfonso, who had been playing nearby, came close and hovered, patting her gently, Alex bearing drawings and treasures from school. Andrea’s son Ruben brought his aunt a paper towel to blot her tears.

“When my mother was sentenced, I felt that I was sentenced,” Antoinette continued. “She was sentenced to prison— to be away from her kids and her family. I was sentenced, as a child, to be without my mother.”

Over time, this feeling of being punished calcified into a sense of destiny. “I felt that I was one of those children that was put on this earth to live without a mother, and that’s the way my life was meant to be,” she said. “You know when someone be- comes a movie star, it’s like they were meant to be a movie star? I felt like I was meant to grow up without parents.” Now, at twenty-three, Antoinette feels frozen. Even if her mother were to walk in the door tomorrow, Antoinette believes, she would not be able to escape her motherless destiny; to get her childhood back. But she does not feel ready to let go of it, either.

“I feel like I’ve grown old, but my mind is left back in second grade,” she said. “Like when she comes home, I want to start all new again. I want to be a child again when she comes home.” In the meantime, Antoinette is a mother. It is a role that consumes her, into which she invests not only her will to protect her children from what she experienced, but also her wish to be parented herself. “Sometimes I look at my kids and I say, ‘You know what? I wanna make up with my kids all the time my mother and I didn’t have.’ I don’t want them ever to feel neglected, or lonely, or scared,” she said.

But the insecurity Antoinette felt growing up has seeped into her adulthood. Her dreams are suffused with anxiety about her ability to protect both herself and her children. In some of the dreams, she “does something bad” and her boys are taken from her. In others, she herself is endangered, and must save herself against great odds for the sake of the children: her car goes over a cliff and she jumps out midair, clinging to the bushes as the car plummets; she is lost at sea and must swim and swim to reach the shore.

In each of these dreams, she thinks only of her children, even as her own life is at stake. Sometimes she wonders why her mother could not be that single-minded. “I don’t want to say it, but she took my childhood away,” Antoinette said. “I feel that she could have done things to prevent herself from leaving us. Stayed away from that man, you know? When I was little, I always said, ‘Wasn’t I important? Wasn’t I more to her than anything?’ I think of my kids now— they’re more to me than anything. I would jump off a bridge in a second right now, for them to live a beautiful life. Why didn’t she do that for me?”

On April , , Theresa got a call from her daughter’s appellate attorney. Roxanne’s conviction had been overturned after a federal judge found multiple problems with the original trial. The state of California appealed this decision, but the judge agreed to release Roxanne on bail pending the appeal. Two months after Theresa got the call, Roxanne left CIW and came home to her family.

Theresa had bought tickets for Disneyland and Sea World, but no one wanted to leave the house. The children kept their mother up until two in the morning, talking and talking. Theresa remembers looking at her grandchildren’s faces and seeing the years fall away, as if the children had reverted to the age they were when their mother went to prison. Roxanne finally got the kids to bed, then crept into her mother’s room to go to sleep herself. Theresa remembers waking up over and over again in the night to look at her daughter, straining to make out her features in the dark. Roxanne had been home less than a week when her lawyer called again. The state had successfully appealed the ruling that had released her on bail.

“You mean I’m going to have to turn myself in?” Roxanne asked. The children, who were within earshot, began to scream. Eighteen days after she walked out the prison gates, Roxanne walked back in. A circuit court later reinstated her original conviction and left her to complete her indefinite sentence.

After Roxanne went back to prison, Theresa remembers, “It was like somebody died in our house.” Meals were eaten in silence. For Adriana, Roxanne’s respite from prison had represented not a return to the familiar but something entirely new. For eighteen days, Adriana had been granted a taste of daily life in the presence of a mother; had gone to school with ribbons in her hair. When Roxanne went back to prison, the bows came out, and Adriana reverted to the life she had always known. “What was mom like?” Adriana grew up asking her older sisters. “What did she do with you guys?” She has an album in which she keeps letters and a few photographs. There is a baby picture of her, in her mother’s arms at an FLU visit. Her most recent photograph of her mother is on a  California ID card, for which Roxanne applied during her eighteen days of freedom. The ID came in the mail after she returned to prison, and Adriana made off with it. In the picture, Roxanne is young, pretty, and solemn. When Adriana showed me the ID, it had just expired.

Once, when Adriana was five or six years old, Theresa saw her wishing on a star and asked her what she had wished for. “For my mommy to kiss me at night before I go to bed,” Adriana answered.

“Adriana, I kiss you all the time,” Theresa said.

“But you’re only a grandma,” the little girl said. “You’re not a mommy.”

When she was small, Adriana would wander around the prison grounds during the FLU visits staring at the fence or the sky. “I’m thinking of a way to get you out of here,” she would tell her mother. Sometimes, she fantasized about stealing a cor- rectional officer’s gun and shooting her way out, but she settled instead for cajoling her mother’s keepers: “Can my mommy come home now?”

Lately, Adriana told me, she and her mother were “not getting along,” and so she had stopped visiting. The visiting room, she added, “stinks like bad breath.” Theresa told me later that Adriana had come to feel, and to resent, that her mother was closer to her older children, because she had lived with them. “She loves you just the same,” Theresa tells her granddaughter. “But she raised them. She didn’t raise me,” Adriana answers. Roxanne’s children have struggled with the question of whether their mother’s indefinite absence has been more or less painful than her death might have been. As it is, the wound caused by Roxanne’s absence is reopened every two weeks in the visiting room; every time the phone rings and a disembodied voice says, “This is a call from an inmate at a correctional facility . . .”; every time the parole board meets and tells Roxanne to try again the next time.

In , the California legislature passed Assembly Bill , also known as the Theresa Cruz Act, which instructed the Board of Prison Terms to consider a history of domestic violence in making parole decisions. In May , Roxanne was turned down for parole, as she would be at each subsequent hearing.

Theresa has boxes upon boxes of paper attesting to her daughter’s rehabilitation behind prison walls—dozens of certificates of appreciation, achievement, accomplishment, and completion. Roxanne has been trained in Data Processing, Cobol, Advanced Cobol, Unix, Lotus --, Equipment Uti- lization, and Survival Skills. She ’s got a Life Plan for Recovery; has Broken the Barriers; been a Special Blessing; and bestowed upon others the Ability to Dream. She ’s acquired her High School Equivalency Degree and her General Educational Development certificate; attained a Certificate of Completion in Responsibility of Self-Determination; and made it through the Twelve Steps over and over.

A prison chaplain for whom she worked as a clerk declared Roxanne “cooperative and willing to take direction. . . . She has been concerned as long as I have known her with a continuing bonding with her children.”

A drug-treatment instructor asserted that she had “transformed her life into one that is of service, caring, and hard work. I am certain she will continue in recovery and continue to help other women after she is released back into the community. She is a leader of women and can be a great asset to the recovering community in our society.”

A parole officer who worked with Roxanne at an in-custody drug-treatment program asserted that “it is my professional opinion that Theresa Roxanne Cruz is a well-respected lady today, who has taken responsibility for her actions and who has great insight regarding her past criminal behavior. . . . She will be an asset to our community. My family could feel safe with her as a neighbor. . . . My opinion is that taxpayer money is being wasted by denying this inmate parole.”

“Ms. Cruz will be a valuable, productive, responsible and respectful asset to the Community upon her release.”

“The positive impact she has had on the CIW Community will benefit society as inmates are released back into their communities.” Her “commitment to continue to affect change in other women after her release will be a valuable asset to our society upon her release.”

When I visited the Azhocar household in the spring of , Roxanne had another parole hearing coming up, but her family wasn’t talking much about it. Roxanne had been turned down for parole seven times already. Hope in the Azhocar household had become a controlled substance—as potent in its dangers as in its healing powers.

Roxanne’s children have stopped asking when she will come home. Now it is her grandchildren who ask questions: “Why does Grandma Roxanne have to stay here?” “How come we have to drive so far?” “Why is this her home?”

At sixty-one, Theresa has nineteen grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. “My daughter’s incarceration has affected five generations,” she said. “My mother, me—it completely turned my life around—my daughter, her children, and their children, who now, which is sad, go to prison to visit their grandma. There has to be a better way, and not just for the person who’s incarcerated.”

Each of Theresa’s adult children and grandchildren has a key to her house, and weekday mornings find a stream of parents bustling through on their way to work. By the time Antoinette arrived at :, Theresa’s great-nephew Jordan and granddaughter Emily were already in residence. At eight, Andrea and her son Ruben stopped by for raisin bran and oatmeal, respectively, on the way to Ruben’s school, which was down the street. Felicitas came into the kitchen in a floral housedress and leopard-print slippers to make a cup of coffee. Ten minutes later, Andrea grabbed Ruben and Jordan, whom she would also drop off at school, and was out the door.

At :, Theresa made herself a piece of toast. The doorbell rang. Four-year-old Bunny—another granddaughter—had arrived to play with Emily. “You want some breakfast?” Theresa asked Bunny. Emily began to fuss for her gymnastics outfit, which she had left at home. Alfonso started shouting. Theresa’s toast got cold.

The Disney Channel reigns once again in the Azhocar household, and sometimes Theresa even finds time to sit down for a few minutes and watch. Alfonso might drape a blanket over her legs, take her hand and kiss it. Sometimes Theresa looks at her younger grandchildren and great-grandchildren and wonders at the expression she sees on their faces—an unfettered happiness that was absent from the house during the years when she was raising Roxanne’s children.

Theresa is more indulgent with the current crop of grandchildren and great-grandchildren than she was with the ones she raised single-handedly. “Look how she takes them to Mc- Donald’s all the time. She takes them to Sea World,” Antoinette said with a touch of petulance. “I don’t understand why she didn’t do it with us.”

Part of the reason is surely pragmatic: Theresa was working more than full-time when Antoinette was small; now she has retired. But caring for this latest generation has also given Theresa the opportunity to revert to the role of grandmother rather than surrogate mother. The children who fill Theresa’s house and yard these days are not likely to shout at her, “You’re not my mother!” They know their mothers will be coming for them at the end of the day. In October of , six months after my visit, Theresa went into the hospital for what she thought would be a gallbladder Grandparents  operation. After the surgery, doctors told her she had Stage IV liver cancer. Five days later, Roxanne went before the parole board for the eighth time. Her parole was denied. Theresa was in and out of the hospital in the weeks following her surgery, suffering from jaundice and dehydration as the cancer advanced. The children were scattered to an assortment of other relatives’ homes. Everyone was missing work. The Azhocar house, Antoinette told me, had grown oddly quiet; most of the lights were kept off. Adriana wrote an open letter on behalf of her grandmother: She is a rose, she is a flower that blooms, she is the one that has the voice to make many people’s flowers bloom. She is everyone’s best friend, a mother and my grandmother. . . . After her husband’s death, her life was committed to raising her grandchildren, Andrea, Antoinette, Carlitos and Adriana. . . . All her giving was volunteered and out of her heart. . . . Please, we need all the help we can get. HELP SAVE HER LIFE! Neither Antoinette nor Andrea could bring themselves to break the news to Roxanne, so Andrea’s husband did it. As soon as he said the word “cancer,” the phone line went dead. After that, Roxanne called several times a day, worried about Theresa. Antoinette ’s phone bill reached $. She could not afford to pay it, but neither could she bring herself to tell her grief-stricken mother not to call. “I feel helpless,” Antoinette said. “I don’t know who to talk to, or what to do.”  All Alone in the World Near midnight on December , —six weeks after she was diagnosed—Theresa died at home, where she had returned to receive hospice care. When she first learned of her illness, she had begun the process of adopting Adriana—she had held off over the years out of respect for Roxanne—so that Adriana would be eligible for survivor benefits under social security, but Theresa died before the paperwork could be processed. She had also hoped to make a final visit to the prison, to say good-bye to her daughter, but she became too ill to be transported before she could complete the arrangements. Roxanne—who had not been able to attend her father’s funeral fourteen years earlier—requested a family emergency leave to pay her last respects to her mother, but was denied. As a lifer, she was considered a flight risk. When Andrea and Antoinette were girls, Andrea used to drive Antoinette crazy with her worries. “An, what are we gonna do if Grandma dies?” Andrea would ask her younger sister. “Who are we gonna live with?” “Stop saying that!” Antoinette would order. “She’s not gonna die.” Now it is the twice-orphaned Adriana to whom she must offer some kind of reassurance. The same week that Theresa died, her mother, Felicitas, had a heart attack and went into the hospital. Andrea and Antoinette have been caring for Adriana, taking turns picking her up from school and driving her to sports practice. “I know this is going to affect Adriana a lot, her whole entire life, but we ’re just trying to keep her spirits up,” Antoinette said. “We don’t want her to fall down.” “I don’t want her to not want to go to school, be depressed— how I was when my mom left,” Antoinette said. “My grandmother is her mom—that’s all she knows.” Grandparents  • • • IN LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS, Dee Ann Newell has turned the master bedroom of the house where she grew up into a grandmother’s parlor, with a shiny, waxed wood floor; floral-print sofa and stately stuffed chairs; an oak armoire and a gleaming upright piano. The walls are a faint, dusky pink with cream trim, and the street outside is shady and hushed. The space bespeaks rest, and the women who visit it are tired. Some grew up in sharecropping families and spent their own childhood years working in the fields. Many now work more than one job. All are caring for their grandchildren and worrying about their incarcerated children. They meet in this room each Thursday to talk about parts of their lives that many feel compelled to keep secret at work and at church. Their grandchildren meet simultaneously in Newell’s old bedroom, which has become a children’s center. The house is the headquarters of Arkansas Voices for the Children Left Behind, a coalition that Newell founded in , then incorporated in  as a direct service and advocacy organization focusing on the families of prisoners. Arkansas Voices runs a mentoring program; hosts support groups; and staffs a “warm line,” which anyone with a relative in prison can call for advice or referrals. The organization is also developing a statewide grandmother’s lobby to advocate on behalf of incarcerated parents and their children. Newell is the chairman of the board. She also runs the Family Matters Program at the Centers for Youth and Families, the largest children’s mental health center in the state. A federally funded demonstration project, Family Matters offers case management to twenty-seven families affected by parental incarceration. The Family Matters clientele reflects the group that is,  All Alone in the World nationwide, taking on the lion’s share of responsibility for the children left parentless by incarceration: elderly African American women, poor and in ill health. The average household income of Family Matters clients is $, a year. Through Family Matters, grandparents and children attend support groups and receive counseling. Family advocates meet with caregivers and children two or three times a week, in their homes and at school. They help grandparents establish guardianship, obtain public benefits, enroll their grandchildren in school, and prepare for their children’s return. They also meet monthly with incarcerated parents and arrange special visits. Family Matters organizes its services around what grandparents say they most need. Food comes up frequently, as does gas to get to prison. Some grandmothers want to know how to get medical care for a child when the only document they have establishing guardianship is a note from that child’s mother, written on her way out the door. Some want information on how to file for bankruptcy. Some seek help finding new homes for their grandchildren as their own health fails. Newell is “near sixty,” with chin-length red hair and watery blue eyes. She brings to her work a personal connection: When she was nine years old, her father, who had manic depressive disorder, was taken screaming from the house in a straitjacket in the middle of the night. Newell remembers the psychiatric hospital where he spent the following year as “like a castle with turrets, and bars on the windows.” For several months after her father was taken, Newell refused to go to school. “I don’t use this as any sort of therapeutic thing for myself,” she said of her current work, “but I do know that some of my experiences make these kids extraordinarily special for me.” Grandparents  Sometimes, when she spoke about “these kids,” or “my grandmothers,” her voice quavered and it seemed as if she were having a hard time catching her breath. When she revealed a particularly egregious aspect of the way the grandmothers were mistreated or maligned, her voice dropped to a stage whisper. She had occasion to take this tone frequently. Paula Pumphrey, the director of Arkansas Voices, ran the state ’s parole and probation department when Bill Clinton was governor. The intimacy with which she and Newell spoke of their clients, and the level of detail, evoked gossip, except that it was infused with the opposite of malice. Get these two started on the subject of The State v. Grandma, however, and they get each other into a lather fairly quickly. It’s not hard to see why. A grandmother calls the child welfare department seeking kinship foster-care payments on behalf of her grandchildren. She is told that she will first have to place the children in the custody of strangers while the department does an investigation to determine whether she and her home meet state standards. This information tends to register as what Newell called a “veiled threat, if not a direct threat: we ’re gonna take your kids and you won’t have any assurance that you’ll get them back.” Few grandparents pursue this avenue of support any further. Out of the approximately three thousand Arkansas families receiving foster care payments, only about two hundred are kinship families. A woman is caring for her incarcerated sister’s children. She seeks TANF payments on the children’s behalf—which in Arkansas amount to $ a month for the first child and $ for each subsequent child—and is told she is not eligible. Newell schools the woman in the eligibility requirements and coaches her to return to the welfare office. On her third visit, a worker  All Alone in the World concedes that she is in fact eligible, but warns her that if she seeks benefits, her sister will be required to pay the state back upon her release. A grandmother is caring for her incarcerated daughter’s four children. The father of one of the children has been paying the state $ a week in child support, which the state has been keeping in the mother’s absence. The mother has been in prison for ten years, and the pot has grown to $,, none of which the child has seen. Pumphrey and the grandmother pay multiple visits to the child support office. After months of wrangling, it is determined that the grandmother is entitled to the money on behalf of the child. However, the state first reimburses itself for TANF she has received over the years on behalf of all four children, leaving something under $,. Finally, the grandmother receives what money is left—at which point her TANF payments are cut off because the $, pushes her assets over the eligibility limit. This is a family whose children have been known to call Pumphrey themselves to tell her they are hungry. Why would institutions that ostensibly exist to help and protect children go so far out of their way to make things harder for these already-overburdened old women, not to mention the children who rely on them? Newell has given this question thought, and has spent enough time at conferences and convenings at the Capitol that she ’s been able to pick up on the prevailing attitude toward grandparent caregivers, which might best be summarized thus: they’ve already screwed up one generation. Why should we help them screw up the next? This is the kind of talk that makes Newell’s voice fall to a hiss. Arkansas is home to nearly thirty-seven thousand grandparent- headed households. Newell estimates that a parent is incarcerated in about one-third of these families. “We are standing on the backs of these grandmothers,” said Newell. Were they to withdraw their unpaid services, she pointed out, it would “break the bank of the state."

“You want to say, ‘Well, would you like to come meet the women I know who have done everything they know how to do but have six children in a basement?’ ” Newell said. “What is it we’re gonna tell them they need to be doing that they’re not doing? They’re trying to survive. They’re trying to keep those kids safe. They can’t.”

In her  account of kinship networks in a poor black community, the anthropologist Carol B. Stack outlined the complex informal rules governing intergenerational rights over, and responsibilities to, children. “This system of rights and duties should not be confused with the official, written statutory law of the state. . . .” she cautioned. “Community members clearly operate within two different systems: the folk system and the legal system of the courts and welfare offices.” What is wounding when the legal system fails to recognize the folk system is not just the denial of much-needed support but the message that grandparent- headed families are somehow illegitimate.

The questions that drive “eligibility”—whose child is this, anyway?—bear little relationship to the reality of grandparents’ lives: they are caring for their grandchildren while their children are gone. When grandparents describe the struggles they face trying to enroll their grandchildren in school, get medical care for them, or seek government assistance—the shame and fear they face in their dealings with public institutions— one is reminded of the experience of undocumented immigrants.

The grandmothers will tell you that Newell and her colleagues were not only the first to offer help; they were and re- main the only ones who didn’t make them feel ashamed for needing it. Marilyn, an Arkansas grandmother, wept as she described applying for TANF on behalf of her granddaughter after her daughter was arrested. A worker told her she was not eligible; her daughter would have to come down and sign the forms. When she explained that her daughter was in prison, she said, “It was like they weren’t interested [in helping]. Like it’s bad. That’s how you feel.”

Newell and Pumphrey have been ruthless in their efforts to communicate a different message. They rallied a crowd of grandmothers and had them pull their grandkids in red wagons to the steps of the Capitol, and managed in  to get legislation passed guaranteeing funding for services to children of prisoners and their families. Now they are working on a campaign to establish a guardianship subsidy for relatives, so they can receive support without subjecting their grandchildren to the vicissitudes of the foster care system.

The two women are ruthless, also, in the bare-knuckled advocacy they practice on behalf of individual grandmothers. Arkansas, Newell observed, is a good-ol’-boy state, and she is something of a good ol’ boy herself. She grew up in Little Rock in a prominent family; her husband was Clinton’s legal counsel when he was governor. During my time in Little Rock, we did not enter a restaurant without someone influential rising from his seat and greeting her by name. Pumphrey, also, is well connected. Newell recalled standing with her on the steps of the Capitol and watching one legislator after another stop to pay their respects.

Pumphrey, Newell, and their staff work every connection they can to help grandmothers navigate state and local bureaucracies that seem bent on putting them through the twelve trials of Hercules before they are deemed worthy of a few dollars or a Medicaid card; to stop them from being evicted, losing their food stamps, or getting turned away at the emergency room. Their success rate is high, and Newell speaks with rightful pride of their ability to wrangle child care vouchers or a payment plan on a delinquent electric bill. Listening to them describe a day’s work, however, one gets the sense that they are struggling to contain a brush fire that is constantly replenished at a source they cannot access.

On a summer afternoon, a leisurely caravan of older sedans made its way out of Little Rock, heading through maple and pine woods, dogwood and pecan, to Ferncliff, Arkansas. The cars were full of grandmothers, many of them with younger children in tow, on the way to the final evening of a weeklong summer camp sponsored by Family Matters. The site—Camp Ferncliff—is owned and operated by the Presbyterian Church; Newell went to camp there as a child. The camp offers the children a chance to spend time in the company of others who share their secret, and so be relieved of it. For grandparents, it provides an entire week of respite.

In the back seat of Pumphrey’s Lincoln Town Car, Jerry sat with his NBA baseball cap on his lap. He was thin as a stalk in jeans, a woven leather belt, and a striped short-sleeved shirt. His hair was gray and his basset-hound eyes were set in a web of fine lines. Jerry works as a school custodian and collects cans for gas money. Three years ago, he got a call from his daughter’s boyfriend asking him to come pick up his then-nine-year-old granddaughter, Taylor, whose mother had just been arrested for “bothering people ’s stuff.”

Jerry drove right over. Taylor was waiting, her clothes balled up in a plastic bag. He and his second wife have been caring for her ever since.

In his back pocket, Jerry carried a letter from his daughter, who was about to be released. “I’m praying that my daughter comes in and does well with Taylor,” he said. “Taylor’s come a long way since she ’s been with us. . . . She’s stable, and I don’t want her to lose any of that.”

Jerry spoke of his granddaughter with a tenderness infused with anxiety. “She wants to be grown; next minute she ’s back combing those baby dolls’ hair.” Lately he ’s found himself lecturing her a little more than usual. He ’s worried that her school attendance will slip once her mother comes home; that she ’ll stop going to church.

As we pulled into camp, Taylor spotted her grandfather and leapt off a picnic table to chase after the slowing car. “You like my necklace?” she asked eagerly. “I made it out of glass.” Jerry kissed her on the forehead. She was a beautiful, lanky girl—close to her grandfather in height—with smooth, dark skin and hair that showed the wages of a week at the lake. “I guess I can do that tomorrow,” Jerry said under his breath when he caught sight of his granddaughter’s unkempt hair— “get an appointment to get her wig twisted for Sunday.” Children were clustered around picnic tables beside a murky green lake. Many had damp hair. On the porch of the main building, several of the younger children stood together, singing, “Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda, here I am in Camp Granada.” A group of mallards tentatively picked their way among the tables.

Down by the lake, three men began drumming. Slowly, the children drifted into the circle and joined in before-dinner song. Taylor had left a space beside her and waved her grandfather over.

After a meal of barbecued beef and pork sandwiches, a dreadlocked young man in a purple and green dashiki paced around the fire pit, telling folk tales and leading songs in English and Swahili. At least one couple had formed during the week; they sat shoulder to shoulder at the story circle, holding hands when they thought no one was looking. Brenda—who was there to see her eight-year-old grandson Patrick—sat on a log and called out answers to the storyteller’s questions as enthusiastically as the children. (“What do American children call the yam?” “Sweet potato!”).

Brenda has cared for Patrick since his father, Brenda’s son, went to prison eight years ago. At first, Brenda took in both Patrick and his then-fifteen-year-old mother. Then the young woman moved out, taking Patrick’s welfare benefits with her but leaving him behind, Brenda said. Brenda hasn’t made an issue of it for fear of losing Patrick.

Patrick is doing well; he ’s an honor student and “grandmom baby” who has won trophies for being “most coachable.” But Brenda is excruciatingly aware of his vulnerability. When Patrick’s father—also named Patrick—was six years old, Brenda spent seven months in prison. Her husband had just died, and her twelve-year-old daughter was dying also, from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Brenda took an unpaid leave from her job to care for her daughter and ran out of money. Close to losing her house, she tried selling drugs.

After Brenda returned from prison, she said, Patrick Sr. remained resentful and got involved with a gang. He has since written a song about his time without his mother, called “Continuing Tears.”

When Brenda was an infant, her mother left her with a paternal relative and never came back for her. When her husband and daughter died, she had little family support; when she went to prison, her children had none. She found an extended family later, she said—for herself and for her grandson—in the Family Matters group, where she became a peer leader. When Brenda’s legs went bad—her doctor has told her she needs both knees replaced—and she had to stop working and lost her home, another Family Matters grandmother took her and Patrick in for six months while Brenda waited for her disability application to be approved.

“We ’re kind of like a family,” Brenda said. “We give each other a chance to vent; to talk to an adult, when you may not have seen one since the last week! You can talk about stuff and nobody is going to look down on you, because they are going through the same thing. If you have a child that acts up at school, you can talk with your sisters about it, and get feedback from somebody who is living it with you. That helps a lot, because they understand.”

After the story circle, I asked Brenda how she thought the children understood the focus of the camp. She called her grandson over and asked him, “Do you know why you’re here?”

“Because my dad’s in jail,” he said, then ran off to rejoin his friends.

The story circle dissolved into dancing; then the crowd drifted away. The children would spend one more night here. Some would go directly to the men’s prison to visit their fathers the next day; others would go home with their grandparents. As we pulled out, one of the grandmothers began reading a storybook to her two sleepy younger grandchildren in the back seat. An ambulance drove by, sirens blaring. “It’s gonna get you!” one boy told the other.

“These grandparents make enormous sacrifices,” Newell said, “but when you pin them down, they say, ‘This is the way I wanted to do it, and I will take what comes in order to keep my family together.’ What more could we ask, in terms of family values, than that?”

This excerpt is taken from All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated by Nell Bernstein. Published with the permission of The New Press. www.thenewpress.com