Mama, They Got Me Too: My Family Has Survived Incarceration Over Generations

At 15, I took a trip from Florida to Texas to visit a prison. This wasn’t my first dance with the system — I’d seen my uncle in the feds before — but this one cut deeper. This time, I was going to visit my mother.

They locked my mother away for assault and battery of a “peace officer,” a charge that still makes me let out that sharp, hollow laugh, the kind that rises just to keep the tears from falling. Because the truth is, she never assaulted anyone. And in all my years growing up Black in America, I had yet to meet an officer who brought anything resembling peace.

Seven years before that, I’d watched a police officer brutally beat my mother in a doctor’s office in Pantego, Texas. Her crime? Being a Black woman who dared to ask for her medical records. She was walking out of the office when the officer grabbed her like she was nothing, body-slamming her to the ground with a violence that made the walls seem to shake. Then came the blows — one after another, the cold metal of his handcuffs used as a weapon against her skull. I stood there frozen, my childhood shattering as her blood stained the floor. That was the day the system branded us both, marking us as disposable in their vision of American justice.

I was just a girl then, my soul still soft, my heart still believing in a world that might be fair. My hands were too small to hold together the pieces of our shattered family, but I tried anyway. That moment planted something in me that grew roots deeper than fear — a bone-deep knowledge about those uniforms and their hollow promise to protect and serve. Because where I come from, protection was never meant for us. All we ever got was the weight of their authority, the bite of their cuffs, and the chill of their gaze as they looked through us like we were already ghosts in their system.

As my aunt drove down the winding road, the prison loomed ahead like a fortress for the forgotten, each mile marking the distance between freedom and captivity. When we arrived, the guards were stiff and unkind, their faces sunken, just as bleak as the place they guarded. They made us wait in a room that felt more like a cage for visitors than a haven for us to share our love. Every sound was sharp and loud, every smell acrid, as if the building itself was a beast that thrived on human despair. My two young siblings huddled close, their small faces painted with both innocence and confusion. I stared at the clock, its hands mocking me with their slow, deliberate movement, as I tried to prepare myself to see my mother.

When she walked into that room, my breath caught in my chest. She was 8 months pregnant with my youngest brother, her face weary but defiant, her spirit dimmed but not extinguished. Her eyes searched for us, for her babies, and when they landed on me, I saw the unspoken words between us: I’m sorry. Stay strong.

I drew her a picture that day, scribbling “keep your head up” in bold, hopeful letters — words she’d told me a thousand times when life felt too heavy.

Not long after that visit, my brother Elijah was born into captivity. He came into this world shackled to a reality he didn’t choose. His first cries echoed in a place that didn’t know how to cradle life, only how to cage it. I wondered what it did to her, to my mother, to hold her baby for just a moment before the system took him away. To love fiercely but be powerless to protect. A bond broken, severed by the system. We were some of the lucky ones, at least; many women don’t have family members willing to take the newborn babies in.

Years passed, but that moment — seeing my mother’s belly protruding under the prison-issued white uniform bearing her “inmate” number, her face pale, hair frazzled and dry — stayed with me. I thought about her every day, about the resilience she had to muster in a world determined to break her. I carried that picture in my heart, even as I grew older, and tried to carve out a life free from the shadow of the system.

Freedom is fragile when you’re born into a world where justice wears a mask and mercy is a stranger. Over a decade later, when I was wrongfully incarcerated, I found myself on the other side of freedom. The first time I was able to call my mother from captivity, tears slid down my face and onto the jail phone. I choked out the words I never thought I’d say: “Mama, they got me too.”

Her voice trembled on the other end, soft but steady. “Keep your head up, baby,” she said, repeating the words that had carried us through so many storms. And then she told me something that made me weep in silence after the call ended: She had kept that picture I drew her all those years ago. Fifteen years later, she sent it back to me, her way of saying, I never stopped fighting for you. Now, don’t stop fighting for yourself.

Prison is more than a desolate place; it’s a sentence passed down through generations, a curse disguised as justice. My mother’s story was the prologue to my own, and I saw her reflection in every woman I met behind bars. Women like Brenda, who couldn’t read English and thought she’d signed a plea deal for 7 years but got 17. Women like Ty, sentenced to 45 years for her boyfriend’s crimes, growing up in captivity yet still fighting for freedom. Women like Ms. Morgan, 75 years old, her memory fading but her will to write her story as sharp as ever.

We were mothers ripped from our children, daughters robbed of our dignity. The system didn’t care about our humanity. It only cared about our compliance. And yet, even in the belly of the beast, we refused to be broken. We sang, we prayed, we dreamed of freedom. We found ways to hold onto the pieces of ourselves that the system couldn’t touch: our minds, our hearts, our beings.

When I sat in that holding cell, my mind racing and my soul aching, I thought about the cycle I was caught in. I thought about my mother, her hands trembling as she held that picture I drew for her, and how those same hands had written to me from behind bars: “You are stronger than you know, baby.”

Her strength became mine. Her fight became my fight. Her voice that was silenced was now mine, only this time they couldn’t shut me up.

The system has a way of reaching through generations, pulling us into its grasp like a shadow that never ceases. It targets women with precision, especially Black women, branding us as criminals when all we’re trying to do is survive.

But it’s not only the harm that’s intergenerational; the struggle to break the cycle also stretches across generations. And it isn’t just a personal fight; it’s a collective one. It’s a fight against a system designed to oppress, to silence, to dehumanize. It’s a fight for a world where mothers don’t have to give birth in chains, where daughters don’t have to visit their mothers behind bars, where families aren’t torn apart by policies masquerading as justice.

Today, I carry my mother’s strength like a flame that refuses to die. It burns in my bones alongside the stories of every woman I met behind those walls—women who taught me that resilience isn’t just about surviving, but about keeping your soul alive when the system wants to bury it.

This story isn’t just mine to tell. It belongs to my mother, who gave birth in chains but never let them shackle her spirit. It belongs to Brenda, who signed away years of her life in a language she couldn’t read. To Ty, watching her youth slip away through prison bars for someone else’s crimes. To Ms. Morgan, fighting to document her truth while she can. It belongs to every woman whose name will never make headlines but whose strength holds up the sky.

It’s for the children pressing their hands against cold visiting room glass, trying to remember their mothers’ touch. For the babies born into fluorescent lights and guard towers instead of gentle darkness and loving arms. For every family trying to stay whole when the system is designed to break them apart.

But most of all, it’s for the future we refuse to stop fighting for. Where justice isn’t just a word they use to make oppression sound noble.

Because our stories aren’t just stories — they’re proof of what they tried to kill and couldn’t. They’re testament to every woman who kept her head up when they wanted her on her knees. They’re the battle cry of generations who refused to be silenced.