Almost three quarters of the 2,422 women in New York state prisons are mothers. More than half of those women are from New York City or the surrounding suburbs. This story is the second in a three-part series looking at a recent trip by inmates' children to visit their moms on the inside. To read Part 1, click here. For Part 3, click here.

After the children moved from Albion's Visitors Hospitality Center to the less hospitably and more pragmatically named Front Gate Entry Building, the four sisters—Tamara, Serena, Dana and Sophie—were told to take off their shoes and belts, just a few feet from a gate of blue steel bars that opened to the secure part of the facility. Everything else, including Sophie's pacifier, had been left behind. "It felt like being put in jail," said 11-year-old Dana.

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Women In Prison

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Patrick Egan
Patrick Egan
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Once through their security screening, the girls passed into a fenced courtyard, then through a door that opened to a big room inside the main prison building. There was their mother.

Sharon paused at first. She wasn't wearing her glasses. Her daughters were taller than she remembered. But she couldn't run to greet them anyway. A waist-high wall marked her boundary. The kids could go in, but she couldn't go out.

This was the first time all four sisters would be in the same room with their mother in nearly two years. It was May 2008 when Sharon, then living in Queens and working as a counselor to the mentally disabled, drove her car while impaired by an anti-depressant and struck and killed a pedestrian. (Sharon asked not to be identified by her real name, or inmate number, because she said the family of the victim had made repeated threats against her and her daughters.)

She hadn't seen any of her girls in person since transferring from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, in Bedford Hills, N.Y., to Albion in August 2009. The family had taken advantage of video tele-visits. Seeing your mother on a computer screen is a small comfort, because, as 11-year-old Dana pointed out, "You just want to hug her."

Virtual hugs and kisses will remain a fact of life for incarcerated mothers and their families. Prisons are the lifeblood of many small-town economies. Despite the fact that the majority of incarcerated men and women come from New York City, the state ships many of them great distances to serve their sentences.

When women enter New York State's prisons, there's no consideration given to how far away her family lives. "It's just not possible," William Powers, the Albion's superintendent, said. He explained that there are too few facilities to accommodate special requests. If a woman's sentence requires a medium-security prison, she's going to Albion, whether she lives in Bay Ridge or Buffalo.

In Albion's visiting room, Tamara, Serena and Dana moved quickly, swamping their mother. Sophie toddled around the group hug, confused, looking for a way in, and Sharon, wiping away the tears, realizing the oversight, scooped the little one up. "She let you pick her up?" asked Tamara.

Tamara's question wasn't an isolated concern. Stacy Burnett sat by herself at one of the half-dozen tables scattered around the visiting room. Burnett (inmate 09G0379) arrived at Albion last April to serve five to 10 years for grand larceny, writing bad checks. She hadn't spoken to her son, Thomas, in almost a year. She knew that he called Kathy Dupont, Burnett's close friend and caregiver to Thomas, "Mommy." They live together in Highland, N.Y., 327 miles to Albion. Burnett was pretty sure this day would be a difficult one.