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WHY A SECOND CHANCE MATTERS // FROM HOPELESSNESS TO EMPOWERMENT
There is very little hope in staring at a jail cell wall for months on end. Tiffany Richardson, a teacher and Board member of Woman2Woman Empowerment, compares jail experience to hitting a brick wall. People are stuck, staring at the same blank walls, but that act does not bring change. She says it does not give them the hope they need to change their lives. “The girls keep going back and going back, and I’ve been there and I know,” Deb Abrams, previous participant and now a Board Member of Woman2Woman Empowerment, said. Woman2Woman Empowerment is a non-profit program dedicated to the administering weekly real world readiness tactics and an available bible study group for women incarcerated in the Tuscaloosa county jail. “Everyone deserves a second chance,” Roxanne Harris, the founder and Executive Director of Woman2Woman Empowerment, said. “Some people didn’t have that example of a model in society so we try to give them one.” Harris first began ministering a Bible study for women where it was founded in Cumberland, Maryland, in 1998, when a friend suggested a solution to the need she saw for a bible study in the county jail. She soon found herself opening it up to the community with more components. When Harris’ husband retired in March 2012, they decided to move to Tuscaloosa to continue the jail ministry. Harris’ husband previously worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, but he was more comfortable with the idea of county jails better, she said. “I was kind of terrified about going into jail at first,” Harris said. Woman2Woman is made up of 20 women, some court mandated and
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some voluntary participants. Jail ministry is something Harris considers more important than her uneasiness of jail itself. Abrams says the program is living proof that guided her to change her life, her relationship with God and her drug habits. She took part in the class while incarcerated from November 2012 to June 2013. In addition, Harris gave her food, clothing and hygiene products. She did this for all the other women, and after some of them graduated and left jail, they have shown interest in volunteering for the program to help other women in jail. “We want to be personal about the individual,” Harris said. That is where the name Woman2Woman comes in, which Harris says is why they did not choose to call it Women2Women. The goal of the program is to impact the way each individual woman sees herself and how she can give back to society. ”We want them to think that even though they went to jail, that’s not their final state, and they can be more than what a paper says about them,” Harris said. Woman2Woman includes two phases. The first is an in-jail Bible study offered in the Tuscaloosa County jail on Monday from 9-10 a.m. These women voluntarily join Harris in learning a Christian life perspective by studying the women in the Bible they learn life skills and how to apply these lessons to their personal life. “They taught me never to give up,” Abrams said. “The first forty-five days after release is the hardest.” The second phase is the Alternative To Incarceration, which is a 14-week program. Some of the women are court mandated to attend. While the Bible study guides women spiritually, this
phase is intended to aid women in the aftercare when they are released from jail. The ultimate goal is to ensure their eventual success and to decrease the amount of women that end up back in jail. “We try to give them some direction and information that they might not have received through incarnation,” Harris said. Different partners with Woman2Woman collaborate to teach the participants different life skills during sessions. A Wells Fargo employee came and discussed financial literacy and how to clean up a credit account and score. Other parts of the program include self esteem and anger management. A woman who published a book about anger came in to teach one of the sessions. Woman2Woman also focuses some of the sessions on enabling job success. They discuss on employment interviews and how to properly address jail time to potential employers. A small business owner even came to show the pros and cons of opening a self owned business. “If you come in with an open mind it will help you do things different from the past,” Harris said. Participants pay a $50 fee for the full 14 weeks and receive progress reports along the way. At the end of the program, a graduation is celebrated. Harris said Woman2Woman aims to make the participants productive citizens ready to take on the world. “I would have probably volunteered to go on my own, anyways,” Megan Hicks, a recent court mandated participant this December in the Alternative to Incarceration Program, said. Woman2woman Empowerment encourages both monetary and hygiene product donations. An individual hygiene pack is made for the graduated women that include enough products that last them for a whole month after they get out of jail. Woman2Woman shows women how to survive after jail and not make the same mistakes again. This spring an empowerment program for men in incarceration will be offered. Harris says several men requested to know why Tuscaloosa did not have a program for them, so their interest sparked her husband in helping create a similar program.
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“The program and the Board has been my backbone through the whole thing,” Abrams said. Some of the people that went through the program is now on board or involved in volunteering for Woman2Woman. Harris says the people who have been in jail have the best understanding of the women participating and can give personal testimonies and advice. Abrams admits finding a job after jail time was one of the most difficult lessons. She says that after applying what she learned in Woman2Woman, she now has a job she loves dearly and anxiously awaits being able to volunteer for the program when the court allows, which is a year from the end of her court sentence. Meanwhile, Harris appointed Abrams on the Board of the program. “I want to try to help as many women as I can that have been in my situation,” Abrams said. Richardson says the program is all about setting seeds, seeds to help women help themselves. That is why Richardson embraces Woman2Woman and the opportunity to aid these women, many of them mothers looking for help, with tools and essentials to help cope with their problems. “We hope to get more students from the court because there are many more people that will benefit from the program,” Harris said. Harris plans for the Woman2Woman Empowerment classes to continue to grow and for the alternative to incarceration to be offered in more jails in the surrounding Tuscaloosa area. She is beyond pleased with the effect it has had on the recent women of the program “I’m not proud of the things I did before, but I’m proud of where I’m at now,” Abrams said.
Roxanne Harris