Raising A Baby Behind Bars

The nursery program at the washington corrections center for women allows inmates like karen garcia to keep their babies with them—as they learn to be better parents

- Caitlin Keating

It’s 7:30 on a rainy weekday morning, and Karen Garcia is chasing her rambunctious 2-year-old daughter Aryanna down the hallway and into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Minutes later the toddler’s picking out her own outfit for the day and clambering into her stroller for the short ride to daycare. “For a moment everything seems normal,” says Garcia, 40. “And then I’m reminded where I am because there are barbed-wire fences everywhere.”

Since November 2015 Garcia’s “normal” has been raising her daughter behind those tall fences at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor, Wash.—one of only 11 states in the U.S. that offer a prison nursery to its inmates with young children. Under the program, which was founded in 1999, women in the minimum-security facility with sentences up to 30 months can apply to keep their children with them until they’re released. Inmates accepted into the program, called the Residential Parenting Program at WCCW, also receive drug treatment and therapy and are taught everything from how to prepare healthy meals and change diapers to bath-time safety. The goal is to send them back to society with the skills to be a good parent. “This program has saved my life,” says Garcia, who was seven months pregnant with Aryanna when she was arrested in October 2015 and was later found guilty of selling methamphetamine and a firearm. “It’s made me into a mother I never could have been if I were out on the streets.” Says Sonja Alley, the correctional-unit supervisor for the program: “Karen’s done tremendous work on herself and addressing the issues that brought her here. A lot of these women have lost everything, so the struggle is really creating an entirely new sober life when they get out.”