This week, we’re featuring two interviews concerning prison conditions in North Carolina.
First up, you’ll hear from Elizabeth Simpson of Emancipate NC, one of the signatories to a public letter to this state’s department of corrections calling for the release of hundreds of prisoners in North Carolina. This comes in response to over-crowding and understaffing of prisons following the emergency transfer of 2,000 prisoners from prisons in the western part of the state effected by Hurricane Helene. [00:01:15 – 00:18:50]
Then, Mona Evans of Benevolence Farm, a post-release residence and re-entry program in North Carolina for people coming out of the women’s prisons talks about their programs, re-entry and some of the realities faced inside womens prisons in this state. [00:20:04 – 01:04:40]
In this conversation I mentioned Victoria Law’s latest book, Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration (Haymarket Books). You can find our 2013 interview with her about her 2nd edition of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women at this link.
Other projects Mona mentioned include:
- Arise Collective re-entry program
- DownhomeNC engages in a number of progressive causes in this state, including the bail fund that Benevolence Farms is currently running. You can find our 2020 interview with them here.
. … . ..
Featured Track:
- Women on the Inside by Sistas In The Pit from The We That Sets Us Free: Building A World Without Prisons
. … . ..
Emancipate NC Transcription
Elizabeth Simpson: I’m Elizabeth Simpson. I use she/her pronouns. I’m an attorney and the strategic director of Emancipate NC, and I’m in Durham, North Carolina.
TFSR: Cool. Thanks a lot for taking the time to chat. I appreciate it.
Elizabeth Simpson: Thanks for having us on.
TFSR: Oh yeah.
Could you introduce Emancipate NC to the audience? How did it get started? How long has it been around? What advocacy or other work do you do?
Elizabeth Simpson: Sure. Emancipate NC is an organization that dedicates itself to helping the people in North Carolina free themselves from mass incarceration and other forms of structural racism. It was founded about five or six years ago, 2019-2020. Me and Dawn Blagrove, who’s the executive director, worked to transform an older entity called Carolina Justice Policy Center into what’s now known as Emancipate NC, trying to put forward more of a race-first narrative about what’s going on with the courts and the prisons and the police and the jails in North Carolina, which is a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in North Carolina. It’s an unbroken line of those systems oppressing people in North Carolina, particularly people of color, particularly Black people. It’s Emancipate NC does a variety of things. We do legal work, we do narrative shifting strategies, and we do advocacy and community education.
TFSR: Can you talk a little bit more about that unbroken chain? Listeners who maybe don’t have that perspective might say, “Well, what about white folks that are behind bars? What about indigenous folks that are behind bars?” But my impression is that the argument that you’re making does not exclude those other experiences. Could you explain that a little bit?
Elizabeth Simpson: Sure, I think that what we see in North Carolina is that the state was founded on racist ideals, founded with an explicitly racist power structure, founded in a time when slavery was the law of the land, and it was founded to benefit only a certain class of people, and that would be white men with money and property. At that time, it was Black people, people of African descent, who were enslaved in North Carolina. After emancipation, after Reconstruction, and after Jim Crow, there had been gaps towards writing those historic wrongs, but there’s also always been a continuation of a system that’s going to make sure there’s a permanent underclass in North Carolina for the benefit of ruling people. Black people have been the most particular subjects of that oppression, and of course, today, it also captures other people as well, but without understanding that historical race as legacy, we don’t think we can really understand the current system of mass incarceration. And why it is so pervasive, why it touches everyone’s lives so completely, why having the mark of being a felon, why being arrested, jailed, convicted is such a permanent mark on citizenship and what function it plays in our society in terms of perpetuating ruling power and keeping a permanent class of people who are destabilized and just subject to coercive control at any moment.
TFSR: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this coalition letter that Emancipate NC participated in.
Elizabeth Simpson: Sure. The coalition letter was actually nine human rights organizations signed on, including the ACLU-NC, Disability Rights North Carolina, Disability Law United, Forward Justice, the North Carolina Justice Center, North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law School, and Emancipate NC. All of these advocates are people who work on mass incarceration issues in North Carolina in some form or fashion. We all reunited in the belief that the situation in the state prisons right now is untenable.
TFSR: Could you go into what that what that situation is? I don’t know if this was specifically authored and put out after Helene hit the western part of the state. If you could talk a little bit about pre-existing conditions in some of the Eastern and Central North Carolina prisons, and what changes occurred because of the impact in the western part of the state.
Elizabeth Simpson: We have a prison system in North Carolina that already has too many people in the prisons. Whether or not you’re someone who wants to abolish prisons altogether, I think there should be a consensus that there are too many people who are locked up. In particular, more people are locked up than they have the resources to take care of them. That means they don’t have enough correctional officers to monitor and keep these facilities orderly. They don’t have enough medical staff to provide medical services to the human beings that they are incarcerating and that they’re responsible for taking care of. They don’t have enough mental health staff. They don’t have enough programming. And those are not things that we’re necessarily advocating that they add. What we’re advocating is that they release people to reduce the pressures on the system. It’s clear that people don’t want to work in prisons. They aren’t applying for jobs as correctional officers. They aren’t applying to be correctional doctors because these are inhumane systems that really harm anybody who participates in them. That’s why you see that people are not applying for these jobs. They do not want to do this work because it is inhumane work.
That was already the status quo before Hurricane Helene hit the western part of the state. When it did hit, there were four prisons in particular that were really badly impacted by the flooding and rainwater. That’s Western Correctional for Women, Avery-Mitchell Correctional, and Mountain View Correctional. Those were all facilities that ultimately had to be evacuated, and all the people who lived there had to be transferred to some of the facilities further east because those facilities were no longer livable at all. Now, there was an interim period of days where people were still in those facilities, and they didn’t have running water, electricity, or access to clean food or toileting. That was a very dire condition for those days. Then, ultimately, people were transferred on busses, sometimes along arduous journeys while shackled. They were not permitted to bring all of their personal property. Things had to be left behind, photographs, and legal paperwork had to be left behind, and they were transferred to new facilities, oftentimes housed in gymnasiums, so they were not necessarily with a bed or a mattress. Definitely didn’t have access to proper hygiene, proper showers, toilets, phone facilities, or the ability to contact your loved ones. So, it was very difficult for those people who were transferred to the eastern prisons.
I’ll highlight the women. In North Carolina, there are three facilities for women only, and one of those is Western Correctional in Swannanoa. The number of people who used to be in three facilities is now in two facilities. That was a particularly bad circumstance in terms of crowding, in terms of access to life’s necessities. We did hear that at Anson Correctional, for instance, which is another women’s facility, people were given reduced rations once the new women were transferred in, and people were not able to contact their families because there weren’t enough telephones. There weren’t enough tablets. People were sleeping on the floor in the gymnasium. There were not enough showers or toilets, which were really inhumane conditions. That’s the genesis of advocates beginning to talk about advocating for the Secretary of Corrections to release people outright because that is an authority that he has to maintain control over the prison system.
TFSR: Is there a precedent for, in emergency situations such as this, the release of prisoners in North Carolina? You mentioned that the Secretary of Corrections, Todd Ishee, has the freedom to do that? Has he, or anyone else in that position, done that prior, and how did they justify that, and what changes did that actually create?
Elizabeth Simpson: Back in 2020, some of the same advocates who signed this letter, including myself, were part of a coalition lawsuit against the state prison system, and that was related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the nightmare that caused inside really every convict-care facility, whether it’s prisons, jails, nursing homes. Wherever there are a lot of people living together, COVID-19 is particularly dangerous because it can spread, and there really is no way to keep it from spreading. So, we filed that lawsuit back at the beginning of April 2020, a couple of weeks after the pandemic began, and ultimately settled that lawsuit for what is believed to be the largest decarceration in the country of prisons as a result of the pandemic. That was in February of 2021. We settled for a reduced population of 3500 people, although ultimately, nearly 4500 people were sent home early as a result of that settlement. There are a variety of mechanisms for sending people home, but the one that is solely within the Secretary’s discretion is called Extended Limited Confinement, and that’s a statutory provision that gives the Secretary the power to let people that he “trusts,” serve the rest of their sentence from home. They remain incarcerated. They remain under the control of the state, but the location of their confinement is extended to their home. Of course, they have to have to qualify for that. You have to have a home to go to. You have to be what is considered trustworthy. Back at that time, they selected people who didn’t have infractions, who were near release date anyway, who didn’t have a crime against a person. They particularly looked at pregnant people and people who are over 65 as people who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19.
The point of the settlement was twofold. One was to move people who were particularly vulnerable out of the congregate facility to safety, and the other was to reduce the density inside for those who remained. That was a very successful measure. There were studies afterward about whether there was any public safety impact of sending that many people home. At the same time, jails were reducing their populations, and police were using their discretion not to bring people that they arrested into jail but rather to give them citations or just to use their discretion to let them go. What was found with that, as well as this, is that everything was fine. There really is no need to have the number of people locked away in jails or prisons that we’re keeping right now. There’s no public safety justification or rationale for that. There’s some other rationale for that; whether it’s control or whether it’s money, or whatever your favorite analysis is, it’s not a public safety rationale to have that many people locked up.
In the context of a deadly pandemic, officials did consent to have people outside of those facilities. With that as an example, we asked Ishee to consider reviving that program and look at who’s in prison right now. Because between the discretion of police officers and the lack of charges that were filed, and then the slowdown of the courts, the slowdown of convictions, and then the releases, the prison population dropped to the lowest level since parole was abolished in North Carolina. It was abolished back in 1994. That was the era of tough-on-crime and really longer, more harsh sentences for crimes, less parole, less discretionary releases, and more firm sentences. The population has gone up and up since then. But we had the lowest population for a while after the pandemic, and it’s been going up since then. It’s really at a level that is too much for the prison system to handle. From an administrative point of view, they can’t hire correctional officers. They have vacancies of 30-40% in some facilities. They cannot provide good medical care to individuals. This is a population that is getting older, so a lot of those people who are sentenced as young people in the ‘90s or early 2000s are getting older, and they’ve spent those 20-30 years of their life in prison, so not getting good nutrition, not getting good medical care. They may be in their 50s or 60s now, but they are even older in terms of their profile for health needs. The state is discovering how expensive that is.
TFSR: An interesting element of this is that with the call for releasing more folks to home confinement, oftentimes these days that means reliance on private companies that are providing ankle monitors for a fee to the individual who’s stuck in the house and that shifts the cost of the person’s caretaking to the family on the outside, including the cost of that, because now they’re eating food out of the pantry. They’re living with other folks. Maybe they can do childcare or whatever, but they might be limited in their ability to go out and look for a job or do any employment at the same time. I guess it’s up to people if they’d rather not be in an overcrowded prison. That’s a general positive, and putting them back in their household, with their family, or what have you, seems a healthier alternative.
And this is not a critique of y’all public letter or the concept of decarceration, but after someone has been pulled out of the active economy and been in the prison economy for decades, they often have these marks on the record that’ll make it hard for them to get employment, they’ll have complicated health problems that have been exacerbated by decades of being in prison, and all the stresses and dangers that are associated with that. This defers the cost of those things back onto the public and back onto already underresourced portions of the community from which most of the incarcerated folks come. That doesn’t have to be necessarily what this letter is trying to address, either of those things, but I wonder if that’s the thing that people who have been doing this advocacy work or people from the communities most impacted by mass incarceration or racialized incarceration have been talking through and trying to work through?
Elizabeth Simpson: Yeah, that’s definitely something important to bring up, and it is going to shift the cost onto families and communities, as opposed to the state. And that isn’t quite fair. But at the same time, when we talk to people, they want to go home. Their families want them home. Their communities want them home. I think that more robust help would clearly be welcome in the form of health services, such as food, job assistance, training, and all these things that would benefit our communities and make them stronger. Yet, that our communities want to take care of themselves also and would rather have their loved ones home and figure it out rather than have them locked up for the rest of their lives. It’s an unfair choice to present to people who are in really bad circumstances.
TFSR: Yeah, how can members of the audience amplify this call and engage with it and get involved with similar pushes for decarceration in North Carolina?
Elizabeth Simpson: You are always welcome to reach out to the decision-makers. They’re listed in the letter, and the people who have the power to decide these things are not elected officials. They’re appointed officials, they’re administrative officials. They aren’t necessarily always known to be public, but they exist, and they can be contacted. All of these organizations that are listed on the letter, plus many more small ones- I know there are many prison book organizations in North Carolina that do great work, as most communities I know of, there’s some organization that does some prison freedom work, and getting involved in learning about the stories of people who are incarcerated and supporting them and their families is always worthwhile and welcome.
TFSR: Thank you so much, Elizabeth for for having this conversation and making the time and for the work that you do.
Elizabeth Simpson: Thank you for having Emancipate NC.
. … . ..
Benevolence Farm Transcription
Mona Evans: My name is Mona Evans. I am the community advocacy director at Benevolence Farm. I use she and her pronouns. I am currently located in Burlington, North Carolina. I am originally from Detroit, Michigan. I always identify myself and describe myself as a mother of three.
TFSR: Cool, thanks for taking the time to chat and have this conversation. I appreciate it. Mona, I’m excited to hear about the programs at Benevolence Farm, but I was hoping to hear some of what incarceration at a women’s facility in North Carolina is first, just to set the stage. Folks have reached out and mentioned that a lot of the conversations that we feature on the show tend to be focused on men’s prisons and experiences in men’s facilities. I wonder if you could speak, as a formerly incarcerated person, a little bit about your experiences of incarceration, how long you were inside, and what security levels or facilities you were at.
Mona Evans: Yes, I actually had the pleasure, I bounced around a lot because I was actually incarcerated during the peak of COVID. I bounced around from all three of the top women’s maximum security prisons in North Carolina. I started off at Raleigh. I was originally sentenced to a four-and-a-half-year sentence in prison. I did about 16 months of that time in the County. I was incarcerated in Union County Jail, which is right outside of Charlotte, I believe. I’m still learning North Carolina a little bit.
But they shipped me first to NCCIW, and that’s pretty much the processing camp. That’s where everyone starts off. I was there for about seven weeks. I didn’t get the chance to really go into the compound because you go through this quarantine phase whenever you first come in, when you first get incarcerated, and it basically is just you have to take all these medical tests. They do a lot of mental health screenings, and then also they evaluate you as far as what they consider if you’re high risk or low risk. That determines what security level you will go to, and your crime level also determines your security level. I had what you considered a violent crime. I had a voluntary manslaughter crime, which is a murder charge. I was automatically, even though I didn’t have a criminal record before, but I was deemed a violent criminal. I was deemed as being high-risk. I was placed in maximum custody first. As I said, this time was a weird transition, with COVID at its peak, and North Carolina was in the process of moving the men from Waynesboro, which I believe was the name of the men’s prison. They were transitioning and moving the men from that prison so that they could have another medium custody prison for women in North Carolina, which is now considered a Neuse Correctional which is now called Anson Correctional in Wayne County, North Carolina.
They transferred us to Neuse, which was temporary. I stayed at Neuse for about a year. Neuse is originally a minimum custody camp. I wasn’t able to work there because, like I said, it was just a weird transition with COVID. There weren’t any programs available to us anyway because everything was shut down on the outside world. We were also following that in prison. After about six months there, they finally transferred us to Anson. Anson was a medium-security prison. They did have max also there. I spent about nine months in maximum security there. My experiences there were really rough because when I was at Neuse, there were gates, but it was more outdoor space, I would say, so I didn’t really feel I was in prison. When I got to Anson, it was the real thing. It was the concrete walls; it was the barbed wire. It was a real prison. When I got there, also because of COVID and then the transition with women into prison and not trying to figure out how to navigate that. Do they treat women the same way they treat men? They were still in this weird transition, so they were a lot stricter with us.
I think the most difficult thing for me being a woman in prison, I would say, would be just having a menstrual cycle. Just that dignity of having to ask a male officer for pads and tampons was very dehumanizing. Also, I spent quite a bit of time in solitary confinement, where you’re not able to shower on a regular [basis]. You’re showering maybe once or twice a week. If they’re short of staff, you’re not showering at all. Just being a woman in those circumstances and not being able to keep up with my hygiene was very depressing for me. So, once I ended up going to medium custody, things did get a little better. I ended up getting a job in the kitchen, where I worked as a baker for a while, and that helped a lot. That helped me get out of the dorm a lot. I read a lot of books, and as far as experiences were, I have a lot of male cousins who are in prison, so I hear a lot of stories about a lot of violence with male officers. There were maybe some fights, but women’s prisons are a lot different than the males. There are really not a lot of threats as far as violence towards staff and inmates. I did see a few fights. I was also in a few of them, but it’s nowhere near as violent as the men’s prison.
TFSR: Cool. Thank you. There’s a lot in there.
When you were talking about being in there at the height of COVID, at least at Neuse or Anson or whichever facility, how was the administration dealing with the disease, with people getting sick? Were people being isolated in the yard, or was there a longer quarantine when people were getting transferred from one facility to another? Were people giving PPE or allowed to make their own masks out of shirts? What did that look like?
Mona Evans: I spoke on this before. Honestly, it was all over the place. We were the last ones to even think about quarantine in the prison systems. Of course, I was calling home, and I was talking to my family, and they were telling me about how everything was shut down. You can’t go here, you can’t go there. There was really no movement. They were wearing masks everywhere they went. They still did not issue us any masks at the time. I got sick, a lot of us got sick, and we were going to medical; they were still not testing us for COVID at the time. There was really no quarantine phasing going on in the beginning, even though, on the outside, they were still quarantined; people were using masks. I remember a lot of us got rolled up in prison because they didn’t issue us any masks at the time. So, we were cutting up our shirts, old scarves, or towels that we were using to make masks, and they were charging us with property damage. It was a really scary time because we had limited resources as far as the outside world, besides staying in contact with our family, and not really knowing what exactly was going on, and just based on what the facility was telling us. They were showing really no concern at the moment. We really didn’t understand the severity of COVID when I was incarcerated.
TFSR: That’s about the experience that I’ve heard from other people, too. There’s a really good book that I haven’t gotten all the way through, but Victoria Law just put out a new book called Corridors of Contagion that collects the experiences of people in women’s facilities in different parts of the US during and after the COVID pandemic started. That shares a lot of similar stories of people being not informed about what was there, being punished for attempting to care for themselves or diminish the possibility of spreading the disease. Not being given the ability to clean spaces, which is a really frightening time, especially if someone’s in there with a compromised immune system. If you’re elderly or if you have some condition, it is extra dangerous.
Mona Evans: And then just the fact that once the CDC came in and pretty much forced them, the CDC had all these rules also, so they enforced it in the prisons. We were given masks. Our movement was very limited. We weren’t going outside at this time, I think, for about six months; we didn’t go outside when the CDC started handing down the rules as far as COVID.
The biggest thing for me is that prior to prison, I was diagnosed with a condition, thyroid condition called Graves disease. This required me to go out. I had to get blood drawn every so many weeks. Then, I also had to see an oncologist, which I was seeing at UNC in Chapel Hill. But once COVID came, that shut down, so I couldn’t go outside the facility I was in for any outside appointments or anything. My health suffered drastically because of that.
TFSR: You were in for long enough that the policies would have changed and the beginning steps of the pandemic would have passed and stuff would have “normalized” back towards what they were before, before the pandemic started. Right? Were you able to resume treatments and medical visitation to UNC and other outside doctors after that?
Mona Evans: Yes. Three months before I got released, everything was going back to normal. They were letting us back outside. I was sent out once again for my doctor’s appointment, and everything was starting to resume back to normal. Classes started to open back up. Also, for educational purposes, other jobs were opened back up. They were also opening up the facility because they had to separate us in each dorm. I worked in the kitchen, and all the kitchen workers lived together, which I thought was not a smart idea because when one of us tested positive for COVID, the whole dorm would be locked down. So there were all the kitchen workers. That was really interesting. Also, because the people you live with are the people you work with, we were relieved when those restrictions were lifted. Because in prison, you already have limited access to the outside, just gaining those small privileges back was a relief for everyone.
TFSR: You mentioned some differences from people’s experiences or understanding of what goes on in men’s prisons, including maybe a lower level of violence endemic throughout it, also, menstrual and hygiene being handled by male guards being an embarrassing thing and not really having the capacity to cleanse yourself without going through this step. In one of the writings that you put on the Benevolence Farm website, you also mentioned the ability to change your clothes, launder your clothing, and launder your sheets, and everything is diminished. And some of that probably would have been when you were in solitary confinement, too.
Are there any other differences that you want to note that the audience should be aware of between what their perception might be of what prison is based on men’s prisons versus women’s prisons?
Mona Evans: I just think that a lot of times, men have a lot more program opportunities than the women’s prisons do. Lots of different educational programs. I spoke a little bit about how the Anson Correctional used to be Waynesboro Correctional, which was a men’s prison. When it was Waynesboro, they had all of these classes like welding, all these skills that people could use when they actually get out of prison and that they could use in the community as far as finding a job. When it became the women’s prison, they took away all those classes, which I really didn’t understand because there are some women who would enjoy doing welding, and if these are skills that individuals could actually utilize when they come home from prison, it should be equally distributed, whether it’s a men’s prison or a women’s prison. The biggest thing for me is the difference in educational programming.
TFSR: It’s hard to tell one way or the other, but do you think that was just general sexism or a lack of funding being given to women’s facilities, or because as it transferred, it also matched the time frame of prisons in general defunding educational and training programs as it has for decades?
Mona Evans: I think it’s a mixture of both, all in one. As a nation, as America in general, we always looked at our prison systems as a male-gender-based thing. Even when people are shedding light on things that are going on in the prison systems, you never really hear people talking about women who have been in prison or the women’s prisons because it’s always been a male thing. People don’t really think about making sure that women have funding in this area, in prison, or there are certain issues that are different, as far as when we’re housing men, that we need to understand. It’s more of a cultural thing, but I do agree with you. I do think it could be consistent as far as lack of funding. There could be a lot of elements to it, but I think, generally, it mostly boils down to a cultural thing.
TFSR: I think for the last at least decade, maybe a decade and a half, the largest proportions of incarcerated populations that I’m aware of have been people entering women’s prisons, and in particular, Black women being the largest part of the general population, largest identity group being funneled into prisons in the US. This seems to require that shift, and if there are going to be people in those facilities, there need to be programs available, as you said.
Mona Evans: Yes, I agree. When “the war on drugs” started, a lot more women were getting incarcerated. Even to this day, there’s a very high number of women who are entering the incarceration system. If we take a step back as individuals ourselves and try to figure out why this is happening, a lot of these women are returning to prison. What are the reasons why people are returning to prison? I think just highlighting those issues is huge.
TFSR: That leads me to some of the later questions. Could we talk for a minute about Benevolence Farm and what that project is, how it started, and what it was developed to address?
Mona Evans: Yes, so our founder, her name was Tanya Genesis, she was a social worker. She worked in social work for a long time, and pretty much she started seeing a very high level of women entering the incarceration system. She started talking to women who were incarcerated, asking them about what they needed when they exited prison, and one of the top things that came up was housing and employment. She wanted to create a program that would provide that and wraparound services that they would need. She wanted a program that was completely designated and designed for women in general and their needs. That’s pretty much how Benevolence Farm started.
I originally heard about Benevolence Farm when I was incarcerated, and realizing that I was also coming up close to my release date and that I needed a program that would help me get on my feet. I knew one of the things that I needed, with me originally being from Detroit, Michigan. When I originally wanted to go back home to. But because I was being placed on nine-month post-release, I was denied to go outside the state. I would have had to remain here in North Carolina. I didn’t have any family members here in North Carolina, so I knew I needed to find a program that provided housing. But then also I kept thinking about, “Okay, what if I do find a program that provides housing? What about employment?” I had a clue in the beginning when I was incarcerated about how difficult it was going to be for me to find employment, especially with me now having a felony record, so I was already thinking about these things when I was getting close up on my release date. So, I got in touch with Benevolence Farm. Once I realized that they do offer housing employment, I applied right away.
TFSR: It seems to offer a ton of different features for the folks that are going through it. Is Benevolence Farm self-funded? Does it take money from grants? Does it get government money? How does it work?
Mona Evans: Benevolence Farm is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we offer housing, employment, and wraparound services. We also have a social enterprise, which is a part of the residence employment at the farm, where we make body care products and candles. We have 13 acres. We grow lots of herbs and flowers that we infuse into oils that we put into our products. The proceeds that we get from our body care sales and our candle sales go to support the women’s employment wages there. How do we get funding? We pretty much get by with donations and our social enterprise. We do some government funding every now and then, but predominantly, it is donations from the community.
TFSR: Just out of curiosity, it seems from the website’s description and from people that I have talked to and the way you’ve described it that it seems like a very special program. How does it compare to transitional housing for other people that either a) don’t get accepted into it (I imagine there are not enough spaces for all the people that are trying to transition out of women’s prisons.)
Mona Evans: I really love this question because the farm has a very special place in my heart. They gave me a chance, and that was when I actually came home after prison. I can speak firsthand on how the program works. For instance, just to be able to have that housing and employment right after incarceration is a huge deal. What sets us aside from other programs is that when I was incarcerated, I was applying to a lot of different other programs on top of Benevolence Farm because I was always thinking, “What if I didn’t get into this program?” I still wanted to make sure I had my options open. The issue I was running into with the other programs was that most of the programs provided maybe 90 days that you could stay there, as far as housing, but they didn’t offer employment. That’s what set us aside.At Benevolence Farm, residents have the autonomy to stay there for up to two years.
Also, what I really like about the program is that we’re always adding new programs for individuals in the community, and it’s not a structural environment. Most programs have rules. Benevolence Farm is more based on an individual case-by-case basis. When residents come into our program, we specifically sit down with them, figure out what their needs are, and we meet them where we are, which is very important versus having a program where there are all these rules. Because sometimes a program doesn’t fit for everyone. Having a program that is designed just for an individual in general is awesome for me.
TFSR: And you said that you describe yourself as a mother of three; on the website, you were listed as the family reunification advocate. Can you talk about this bonding family program that you created and the alternative that it presents to other transitional housing? I was really surprised to read that the housing at times includes families of folks released from prison, not just folks getting out themselves, and in the society that we live in, so much care work, intergenerational care work, falls on people who are coming through women’s prisons. This seems to be a really important part of protecting the social fabric, as well as reducing recidivism and all these other really important things.
Mona Evans: When I came to the program, my children were with family, and my goal after incarceration, of course, was to reunite with my kids as soon as possible. I knew I could not do that without housing and employment and just a support system in general. I always share with individuals that being separated from my children was very hard when I was in prison, but reunifying was even harder. The reason why I said that is because when you’re coming home from prison, you have all these obstacles and challenges already in your face. You’re now a felon, you have this stigma on you, and then on top of you having this stigma, you’re having a hard time finding housing. You’re having a hard time finding employment. When I was in the program, I was offered housing and employment. Once I realized that I wanted to get my kids back, and at this time, my son was in a situation where I needed to get him back immediately, I started looking for jobs in the community. Prior to incarceration, I had my CNA license. I used to work in nursing homes. I was in nursing school. I started applying for jobs that I was overqualified for, and those were at Walmart and Food Lion. I got denied every single one. I went through a depression phase because I just kept thinking “How am I going to get my kids back when I couldn’t even find a job to provide for myself. I can’t even take care of myself, so how is it even possible to get my kids back at this point?”
What that got me thinking about was what would I need in order to get my kids back? At the time, we were going through a transition at Benevolence Farm related to staff, and our executive director approached me originally to be our enterprise assistant, which was basically I’ll be shadowing our enterprise manager in the workshop, as far as helping residents make body care products and candles. That was my original position in the beginning. I got hired. I started working there, and as I was working, I had to think about housing. That was my next step. I knew in order for me to get my kids back, I had to be able to provide safe and secure housing for them. I ran through a lot of my savings by applying the various programs through rental properties, whether it was a private landlord or property management company. I got denied a lot and also went through a lot of my savings with application fees that weren’t refundable. I eventually ended up getting into an apartment that was still skeptical about letting me rent because of my prior conviction for a violent crime on top of that. So they charged me a double security deposit to move in. It was a two-bedroom apartment. Prior to incarceration, I never paid a double security deposit to move into a place, let alone almost $3,600 to move into an apartment. That was very difficult for me, but being in the situation that I was in, I did it.
Pretty much, when I got my kids back, I got my son back first. In the beginning, I called it the honeymoon phase; we were excited to see each other, we hung out, we went out to eat, and we did all these things. After about two or three months, the signs of our separation really started showing. When I left, my son was six years old. When I came back, he was 11 or 12. It was this weird transition as far as me stepping back into parenthood full time, trying to figure out how to discipline, and then the biggest thing for me was the mom’s guilt. I blamed myself for being away from my parents for four years for my kids and trying to figure out how to discipline them. I didn’t want to be too hard on them because I was away from all of them for all this time. I found myself trying to make up for lost time. Also, I was having a really hard time with the parenting aspect. I started trying to insert myself as far as the PTA groups at my kid’s school, and once they realized I had a criminal record, I stopped getting phone calls and invites to the dinners or to the mom meetings.
One day, I was in this job development program. To graduate, we had to create a project that was dedicated to four institutions. It could have been government, community, or anything that, and pretty much it had to be beneficial for other individuals. Because I was already working in a space where I was working with formerly incarcerated individuals, I was formerly incarcerated myself, I took this opportunity to take advantage of what I needed also, and I needed a support system. Originally, I started Bonding Families as a support group for formerly incarcerated women or families that were impacted by incarceration; where we would meet in person or over Zoom, and we would go over various issues and try to figure out how to support ourselves. That’s pretty much how it started. Then I got to thinking about how hard it was for me to find housing and employment. If I hadn’t been at Benevolence Farm and didn’t have that support system to guide me on that, where would I have been?
To answer your question, there are a lot of women who are coming home from prison that don’t go to re-entry programs. They are either homeless or trying to navigate this re-entry process on their own. I wanted to be a support system for them to navigate their process, whether it helped them find housing or employment, whether that looked just giving them access to their basic needs or connecting them to resources as far as how to get an ID, how to fill out full steps. I understood because I went through the situation, how imperative those things are. I wanted to design a program for them.
TFSR: All the examples that you’ve given about how difficult systematically it is for people who are transitioning out of prison to be able to get on their feet if they don’t have existing supports. Like getting charged extra, not having saved money for the last few years because if you got a wage on the inside, it was very low, and not being able to necessarily pay a double deposit in an apartment. But also, my understanding is, if you’ve got a felony, you can’t apply for food stamps, you can’t apply for public housing, you can’t apply for all these other federally available and probably state available programs that other people are able to, which is at such a time it’s so important for someone to be able to have those supports.
Does North Carolina have “the box” on employment and housing applications? Or has North Carolina banned the box where they ask if you’ve been previously convicted of a felony? What is the nature of it?
Mona Evans: They do have a box here where you don’t have to disclose, but employers and landlords still do background checks. That’s where I was running into issues because a lot of the applications I was filling out didn’t have that on the actual application, but they will still run a background check and a credit check when you apply for these different entities. Then I think also a huge barrier is when you have someone coming home from prison. My main thing was, especially with housing, they were asking for three times the rent or rental history. If you have someone who’s been incarcerated for 15 years, the only rental history they’re going to have is the Department of Corrections. I wouldn’t have any rental history for anyone to pretty much vouch as far as what type of tenant I am. So those were huge barriers for us.
I just kept thinking about the dynamic as far as women that go to prison; 80% of them are mothers, and prior to incarceration, most of them were the predominant caregivers in the home of those children. A lot of women, when they come home from prison, that’s the first thing they want to do is get their kids back. And just not knowing their rights as far as when they do get sentenced, do they sign their rights over? That was also a very huge deal to me. Then, the biggest thing is just being able to choose where they want to live and the communities in which they want to live. That’s why, through the Bonding Families Program, we funded our Housing First program, in which we help individuals find housing, and then we also pay their secure deposits for them to get into housing.
TFSR: Yeah, that’s amazing. There are so many barriers that you’re helping people get past just by doing those things.
Does Benevolence Farm, in some ways, through that program, then act as, maybe not literally, but a co-signer to the lease of individuals that are applying for housing, who might get those double fees or the extra fees? Or does that having Benevolence Farms on there can that help decrease the amount because there’s some official nonprofit that’s standing alongside the person that’s applying for housing?
Mona Evans: Yes, so the Benevolence Farm actually had a grant for a while that was just sitting there, and we didn’t really have a real initiative to use the funding for at that time. When I first started Bonding Families, the first mother that I had was actually a very personal client of mine because of the fact that we were actually incarcerated together. I knew her personally while we were incarcerated. She was a mother figure to me also when I was incarcerated, and once she came home after doing a 16-year sentence, her record shouldn’t even been on her, showing up on background checks, but she was still being denied housing. She was also caring for an elderly grandparent of hers on top of her kids, and she was being denied housing. When she finally found housing, there was that barrier of double the security deposit. She had reached out and was talking to me about it one day, and I went to our executive director and was just beating my frustrations on. I didn’t understand why people were charging double security deposit and XYZ, and she informed me, “We have this funding set aside. And we really don’t have the initiative to use it. Let’s try and see how it works.” Once that happened, it spread like wildfire. We had numerous people reaching out. Originally, our Housing First fund was a Benevolence Farm program Bonding Families. Even though I am the founder, I am still operating under Benevolence Farm. They’re a sponsor for Bonding Families.
TFSR: I also noticed on the website that y’all collaborate with Down Home NC; there is a bail fund called We Are Down Home. For listeners who remember back in 2020, I spoke with some folks from Down Home NC about organizing in what they called no-chance elements. Can you talk about what role cash bail plays in conviction rates and family destabilization? How does that play out across how power is distributed along class race and gender experiences?
Mona Evans: The bail fund originally started at Down Home, but at Benevolence Farm, we are running the bail fund right now. The bail fund was put in place because we were noticing a lot of individuals from underprivileged communities were sitting in jail on very low-level crimes, and because they had a bond the family wasn’t able to pay for, they were just sitting there. This caused more harm than good because a lot of individuals were losing their jobs and their homes over a $200-300 bond. That was what the bail fund was put in place for. We pay up to $2,000 for individuals to get home. It’s mostly very low-level crimes and misdemeanors, but for someone who doesn’t have the resources, $200-300 is not something that they can steer to get out of jail.
TFSR: Yeah. If you’re working one or two jobs or more, and you have a family… Can you talk a little bit about what it means to not have to sit in that jail as you’re approaching a trial or whatever, or your case following through, and what that means for a) your legal defense possibilities and b) not losing a beat with those social fabric care relationships that we have? Like if you’re parenting, co-parenting, or doing elder care. Being able to defend yourself as a single person is way easier if you’re not inside, for instance.
Mona Evans: For instance, pretty much like you were saying, a lot of these individuals are predominantly caretakers of children. For Mother’s Day, we bonded out five mothers just so that they could be home with their children. But just the dynamic of being in jail, in which jail and prison are two different entities- I just wanted to flag that jail is pretty much where individuals are sitting on either pretrial or they are accused of a crime they have not been convicted yet. So, in a lot of these cases, they were bailing individuals out. They are very low-level misdemeanors. So for something like a parking ticket, to be sitting in jail and to lose all of your essential needs, as far as your job, and your kids could possibly be uprooted from their homes, you are losing a home or a car or whatever that looks like… It’s crazy for me. It is not ideal. It does not help the individual. Even if you’re you are fighting your case, it’s very hard to fight a case when you’re behind bars. Phone calls in jail are very expensive. When you’re trying to fight your criminal case, you’re pretty much doing a bare minimum because of just the strain and burden of trying to communicate with your lawyer or your legal team or even having to communicate back and forth with your family, whoever you have in charge. Having one of these could cause a very big strain on individuals and their families.
TFSR: Thanks for making the point about prison versus jail and the differences there.
When I was reading through the Benevolence Farm website, I came across your writing about your two stints in solitary confinement, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those experiences. In some prisons, solitary is a go-to for punishment and also for the isolation of an individual, supposedly for their own safety. Sometimes, it also correlates to people who are having a mental health crisis being isolated from other people, which can, I would imagine, exacerbate the crisis that someone’s going through, and this is in lieu of getting any treatment or counseling to relate to that. Could you talk a little bit anecdotally or personally about your experience in solitary confinement?
Mona Evans: For me, solitary confinement was really rough. For individuals that an individual who’s never been incarcerated before, just going into the prison system and all this structure and rules was already hard for me. When you go to solitary confinement, it’s even worse. Solitary confinement is pretty much what you summed up. Individuals go in, it’s a form of punishment. It could be for your own protective safety, or it could also be for mental health issues. I went a lot for punishment reasons. The longest I did was 46 days in total in solitary confinement. The hardest thing for me would have been the hygiene part. You’re in a cell that’s about the size of a box. It’s really small. You can’t barely stretch your arms out. You do not come out of that cell. You’re locked down for 24 hours. Where I was, they did allow us to go outside, but the outside was not typically what the yard would look like if I wasn’t in solitary confinement. For instance, in solitary confinement outside, they actually have you go out significantly early, like 4-5 am. You’re also in a dog kennel, if you’ve seen what an actual dog kennel looks like. You’re locked up in a cage outside when you are transported to showers, you’re handcuffed, you’re put in the shower, you’re locked in the shower, and you have about three to four minutes to shower and do what you need to do, and you’re immediately placed back in that cell for 24 hours.
Also, when you’re in solitary confinement, you don’t have access to a lot of your belongings that you would have on you in a regular unit. So that looks like you can’t have a lot of your pictures, books back there, or certain hygiene products. You’re limited to what you buy in the canteen, so you’re totally dependent on the three meals a day that the prison feeds you. Dinner time at Anson correctional was distributed at five o’clock. That’s the time that we ate, and half of the time, the food wasn’t edible. I didn’t eat a lot of food, so I was really hungry. But I would say that the worst thing for me was just experiencing being on my cycle in solitary confinement. You have one day that you wash a week, you’re very limited on what you bring to solitary confinement, and so you have limited clothing on you; you have one sheet, one pillow, and one bedding. When you’re a woman, and you’re experiencing your monthly cycle, sometimes you have a heavy flow, and sometimes you have a light flow. Plus, just not being able to shower on a daily was very difficult for me. I just had to ask someone every time you did a round: “Hey, I need a pad.” Because they were also distributing our hygiene products through the officers, and they would give you maybe two or three a day. Every woman knows that your cycle depends on your mood… Every woman has different experiences in their cycle. You have heavy bleeders. You have some that have very light periods. You can’t just give someone two pads and just determine that that should get them through the day. I found myself messing up my clothes a lot and just having to sit with that because I didn’t have any access to another pair of underwear until it was time for me to wash again. If I had messed up my bedding or my sheets, I could have washed them in the sink, and then it would have taken days to dry out.
And just the limited contact, you don’t have access to the phone anymore. You don’t have access to the people that are in the prisons. You can’t talk to other inmates. You’re isolated to the highest degree. A lot of times when people go to solitary confinement, for me, the first couple of days, I slept a lot, and I read as much as I could. But after about 10 days, reality starts setting in. I started getting bored. Your body starts cramping up because you’re just laying there, pretty much not doing anything. You’re not really moving around. Then, there was also just that communication barrier: I was not able to communicate with my family or talk to my kids on a regular basis. You’re only able to write. That was very difficult for me because you have to wait till they pick up the mail. They gotta take the mail down to the mail room. Sometimes, they didn’t get there on time, and I would go two to three weeks without any mail from my family. So, I think the isolation process and the whole dehumanizing as far as hygiene was horrible for me. I actually was diagnosed with anxiety and PTSD once I got to prison, and being locked up in solitary confinement made that even worse. Just for the fact, I was very isolated. I wanted human contact. I wanted to talk to another individual. I was craving that attention. For someone with a mental health issue, isolation is not a good thing, especially that type of isolation.
TFSR: And there are international laws against extended use of isolation as a form of torture, and it’s recognized internationally as cruel and unusual, but it’s pretty par for the course in the US system.
Were there any counseling, mental health, addiction, or other resources available to you when you were inside of prison?
Mona Evans: There were, it was just limited. I was incarcerated during the peak of COVID, so a lot of programs that they did offer when I first came to prison weren’t offered because of the transition with COVID. Once things did get back to where they were, pretty much the mental health support was mental health meds. I have never been that type of individual. I had a dad who was addicted to crack cocaine and then heroin, so I have always been afraid to experiment with [drugs], whether it’s prescription drugs or any drugs in general just because of that. I was very skeptical as far as the mental health medications that they put me on. I went through various mental health meds when I first got to prison, and a lot of times, I didn’t like the way they made me feel I was having a lot of different side effects.
As far as mental health counseling, whenever you’re on mental health meds, it is mandatory that you do one session a month with your prison psychiatrist or your mental health doctor. They just go over the mental health meds that you’re on and the side effects. I would like to see more mental health and support revolving around traumas and trauma-based issues. Unfortunately, I did not get to experience that. I’m not even sure they have it now since I came home, but that was something I would want to see. As far as actual drug treatment, I was at the peak of COVID. A lot of those programs weren’t active. They did have Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous programs.
TFSR: Are there any things I didn’t ask about that you feel burning to talk about right now in terms of your experience, or in terms of the programs that you’re working with?
Mona Evans: I think we covered pretty much everything. I’m still actively doing a lot of advocacy work for women’s rights in prison, restoring women’s rights in prison, as far as their dignity when it comes to hygiene, but also, I’m still advocating for fair housing and employment for formerly incarcerated individuals. Also, just creating support systems for women coming home from prison, as far as supporting them through their entry journey.
TFSR: There’s the website for Benevolence Farms. Do you have a web presence that you want to point people to separate from that? Any social media or any other resources that you want to shout out, maybe for people that are supporting, people coming out or who are coming out themselves?
Mona Evans: Yeah. There are a lot of organizations that I really enjoy, like Arise Collective, which is also another re-entry program. They’re located in Durham. They offer housing and a housing re-entry program for women. Down Home NC is a really good organizing program for individuals if they want to get into advocacy work or learn about politics; that’s a really dope organization. Also, Forward Justice, it is doing some amazing things. They’re working to make sure that people like myself have the right to vote. I just recently went and voted, which is really huge. I think that’s about it right now.
TFSR: Miss Mona, thank you so much for having this chat. I really appreciate it, and the work you’re doing is amazing.
Mona Evans: Thank you.