Inmates joyful to be reunited with children

Kerry Perez couldn’t stop crying as she embraced her children. “They grow up so fast,” she said, kissing her daughter and running her fingers through her long hair.

After she was incarcerated nearly three years ago for selling drugs, Perez missed out on her children’s lives. She wasn’t around when her daughter, Tomarro Stackhouse, attended her first dance or came in second at the regional inline speed-skating championship. She couldn’t be there for her son, Jonny Stackhouse, as he struggled through school.

“Those are times I can never get back,” said Perez, an inmate at Pine Lodge Corrections Center in Medical Lake. These days, as she recovers from drug addiction and serves her time behind bars, her children remain her only hope.

On Saturday, Perez and dozens of other women at the minimum security prison were briefly reunited with their families – children, parents and siblings who traveled from all over the state and beyond. The families were able to make it to Pine Lodge because of The Little Bus That Could, a program operated by Rebuilding Families Inc., a Gig Harbor-based nonprofit committed to helping women offenders with their transition back into the community and their families.

Volunteers traveled to Seattle, Olympia, Yakima and a dozen other locations to pick up about 48 people – children ranging in age from 1 to 18 as well as other family members. After spending the night at a church in North Bend, Wash., they awoke at 4 a.m., boarded two chartered buses and headed for the prison in Medical Lake.

The Little Bus That Could makes its way to Pine Lodge three times a year, according to Judy Riggan, one of the volunteers and a board member of Rebuilding Families. After visiting with the women at Pine Lodge, the children and other family members head to Opportunity Presbyterian Church in Spokane Valley, where they play games, share a meal and spend the night before the return journey the next follo-wing day.

For the majority of these children, these trips to Medical Lake are the only way they’re able to visit their mothers. And because phone calls have been so expensive until last month – a 20-minute call used to cost about $22 – the women have had no regular communication with their children.

“This program has been my salvation,” said Perez, whose children traveled from their home in Bremerton. “Without it, I would never see these guys.”

Perez, 42, and the other mothers spent several hours Saturday doing crafts, reading books and sharing a meal with their loved ones in a large room filled with Christmas trees, bright lights, hanging ornaments and other holiday décor created and prepared by the roughly 300 inmates at Pine Lodge.

“I was really excited to see my family,” said Toekeyba Christian, who was delighted to see her only child, 9-year-old La Deja Diggs, as well as her parents, Carolyn Esters, of Seattle, and Michael Christian, who traveled from Los Angeles.

All of them held back tears as they embraced and sat together at a table to drink cider and talk about the changes of the past year.

Toekeyba Christian, who is serving a three-year sentence for robbery, said she has learned a lot from her experience behind bars. When she gets out, she said, her goal is to move back to Kent, Wash., attend culinary school and take care of her little girl.

“I’m going to live my life like I should have,” said the 29-year-old. “Next time I’m going to do the right things.”

Staff members at the corrections center try to reinforce the women’s connections with their children, said Pine Lodge Superintendent Walker Morton. Establishing these relationships is one way to discourage the inmates from returning to a life of crime, he said.

“Imagine your child’s face,” he tells them every Wednesday during a session focusing on family connections. “Picture the bars and your children on the other side. You cannot get back the time you are away from them. These children are the victims of your crimes.”

The family visits have boosted the women’s morale and have made them more determined to better themselves, said Perez, who is scheduled to enter a work release facility in Port Orchard on Christmas Day.

“There’s nothing in the drug life that will ever take me from these guys again,” she said as she continued to hug her children. “I will never come back.”

Her 14-year-old daughter, Tomarro, smiled at her and said, “Mom, we won’t let you go back to that life.”