Mothers' Day In Stir

Albion Correctional Facility

Almost three quarters of the 2,422 women in New York state prisons are mothers.

So City Limits reminds us.

Women in New York State are imprisoned primarily at Bedford Hills and Albion.

Maybe we can pause for a second this weekend and think about some of these families in which the mother is behind bars and the children would like to visit. This is particularly hard if the children are in, say, Brooklyn, and the mom is in Albion, some 400 miles away, a distance Google says you can drive in under 7 hours. One way.

Mothers' Day had its origins in the U.S. in the mid-19th century as a day to bring together the opposite sides of the civil war. It doesn't seem to have focused on re-connecting families separated by prison walls. Maybe this would be a time to begin envisioning precisely that.