As many will celebrate Mother’s Day on May 13, activists have stressed the fact that celebrations must be inclusive and acknowledge incarcerated caretakers, mothers, and guardians. The Sentencing Project cited that in 2016, there were 213,722 women incarcerated in the United States. A fact sheet prepared by the Sentencing Project the year prior reported that more than 60% of women in state prisons have a child under the age of 18.

For much of her 20-year sentence, Monica Cosby was one of those women, incarcerated at the time that her three daughters were 1, 4, and 7 years old.

“While I was in [Cook County Jail in Illinois], I saw my kids every week,” Monica tells Teen Vogue. “When I was transferred to [an Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) state prison] in 1998, I never got to see my kids again, except one time in 2013. I saw my oldest, and by then she was already a mom she had two kids.... By the time I got out, she had two more.”

Like many other states, state prisons in Illinois are located in rural areas, placing women in facilities hours away from their families. For Monica, this meant keeping in contact with her growing daughters through letters and phone calls. She was released from the state prison around the end of 2015 and, with the welfare of other women in mind, began organizing with Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration (MUAVI) in her hometown.

Monica grew up in what she described as “the tradition before we were calling it social justice.” She carried those beliefs and ideals with her into her time in IDOC, talking with other incarcerated women about abolition, and then participating in MUAVI’s yearly Incarcerated Mother’s Day Vigil and Toiletry Drive and helping with Reunification Rides, a program that brings children to visit their mothers and caretakers who are incarcerated in Illinois.

“One of the key things that keeps people from returning to prison is stabilization of people with their families and children,” Monica says. “We know this but institutions and governments don't invest in the things we know work.”

Despite Monica’s distrust of government-implemented solutions to problems regarding incarceration, she believes working within the system to some extent is necessary to reinstall dignity along the way. Over the last two years, Monica found herself working with Deanne Benos, former assistant director for the IDOC, by consulting on state legislation HB3904, which would establish a permanent Women’s Correctional Services Division within the IDOC, a dedicated division to create accountability and intentionality for the conditions of women’s prisons and treatment of those incarcerated in these facilities.

“We’ve been fighting very different battles, the hardest are on the women fighting them behind bars,” Deanne tells Teen Vogue. “But for those of those us promoting decarceration of women or reducing harm, it’s really exciting to see the traction that’s coming back on multiple levels.”

Deanne believes the lack of gender analysis around mass incarceration is a contributor to the problem. Paraphrasing conversations she had with mostly male correctional officers within facilities, she says: “The officers would say, ‘Women and men are the same, they’re both convicts, they both have to serve their time.’ That was the culture, it still is the culture today but it’s changing, we’re on a promising track. But what you run into is largely a culture that is very gender-neutral.”

After leaving IDOC, Deanne founded the Women’s Justice Institute, an organization that became the vehicle for her to assess women’s prisons in Illinois and author HB3904, which was enacted in January 2018. Monica sees this legislation as one “with teeth,” and Deanne agrees.