Many women who are the breadwinners in their families face a choice: skip work, or face jail if anything happens to your child in someone else’s care

A few days after Christmas in 2016, Tressie Shaffer got up early and fed her then-six-month-old daughter a bottle. She burped and changed the baby, then quickly dressed for her shift at Wendy’s.

Just before leaving, Shaffer nudged her boyfriend, Jason Scott, awake. They had just celebrated the holiday together in a rent-subsidized three-bedroom apartment in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that Shaffer qualified for on minimum wage. Her Snap benefits kept just enough food in the house, but she could barely cover rent and utilities. Scott, who wasn’t working that day, would assume care of six children.

The older children, ranging from ages three to seven, were on break from school. It wasn’t the first time Scott, 29, had looked after the six-month-old, Zaylei, his daughter with Shaffer, as well as Shaffer’s other three children and his two sons from previous relationships.

Just a few hours into her shift, Shaffer received word of an emergency and rushed home, where she found paramedics out front working on her unresponsive six-month-old, who was having seizures and had stopped breathing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zaylei held by her sister ArieAnna at the Bethany rehabilitation center where Zaylei stayed for a year and a half. Photograph: Courtesy Still She Rises

At the hospital, a CT scan revealed Zaylei had bilateral subdural hematomas – bleeding on her brain – which medical professionals often attribute to shaken baby syndrome.

Scott would later admit during a police interrogation that he once playfully shook his daughter by her legs, while in Shaffer’s presence. He stopped after Shaffer worried about its impact on Zaylei’s Marfan Syndrome, a serious medical condition known to delay development and restrict body movement. During her own interrogation, Shaffer told detectives she noticed a bruise on her daughter’s cheek a day before the emergency hospitalization, but she was not alarmed.

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“I never, ever could imagine him ever hurting our daughter, or any of the children,” Shaffer, 31, recalled nearly two years later. “He was so good with them. I had a Super Nintendo from my childhood, so he’d be down on the floor playing with them. At one point, I came home and they were making Play-Doh.”

The state launched child welfare investigations into both parents, and criminal charges for both followed. But it was Shaffer who faced punishment first.

In November, a Tulsa jury found Shaffer guilty of permitting child abuse by injury, a felony offense. Jurors handed down an 18-month prison sentence, which Shaffer is currently serving, although the assistant district attorney who handled the case suggested Shaffer be put away for life. Scott is still awaiting trial.

What happened to Shaffer wouldn’t have happened if she wasn’t poor, according to the national public defender’s office, Still She Rises, which exclusively represents women and mothers and worked on her case.

Through their work, they’ve found that many single mothers who are the sole breadwinners in their families, like Shaffer, face a choice: Don’t go to work, or be willing to face swift imprisonment if anything happens while your children are in someone else’s care.

The latter appears to be happening increasingly in Oklahoma, where women are being incarcerated at more than twice the national rate and more often the perpetrators in child abuse cases.

Although it’s unclear if Oklahoma child abuse cases alone are accounting for an increase in mothers who are incarcerated, what is clear is that the state leads the nation when it comes to putting women in prison. About 149 out of every 100,000 women are incarcerated in Oklahoma, compared with 57 out of every 100,000 nationwide. And this rise is in tandem with an increased number of reported child abuse cases. Oklahoma’s department of human services, an agency that investigates child abuse and neglect, assessed 62,828 cases in 2017 and substantiated 15,289 of them, about 24%. That’s compared to 16.5% of cases substantiated nationwide, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services’ 2016 report on child maltreatment.

In Oklahoma, mothers were identified as perpetrators in substantiated cases more often than fathers.

In Tulsa county, where Shaffer and Scott live, substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect spiked 102% between 2012 and 2016, according to the state’s department of human services. Tulsa child welfare advocates interviewed in April 2018 by the local news outlet, TulsaPeople, suggested the spike corresponded to an increased frequency of reporting by citizens. However, police were the most frequent reporting source for substantiated allegations.

“I think it really comes down to, if you’re a mother living in poverty and anything happens to your kid, it’s your fault that you weren’t wealthier and don’t have more resources,” Ruth Hamilton, the attorney who represented Shaffer during her criminal trial, told me.

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Hamilton also serves as legal director of the Tulsa branch of Still She Rises. (The group’s founder and prominent social justice advocate, Robin Steinberg, relocated to Tulsa from New York because the rate of incarceration for mothers there is so high.) According to Hamilton, the problem isn’t the existence of laws meant to protect children from abuse. It’s the way the laws are misapplied when options for caregivers are clearly limited by circumstance and by the condition of poverty.

“You’re just putting mothers in an impossible situation, without taking into account their intentions, how much they want to protect their children, how much they’re even able to protect their children,” Hamilton said. “I just don’t think it makes any sense.”

Once mothers like Shaffer are released, they face uncertainty that they will pick up their lives and reunite with their children, advocates have said. Their convictions destabilize their families, disqualify them from some public assistance programs, including subsidized housing, and probably limit their job prospects since they will always apply as convicted felons.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tressie, her sister, and her daughter Zaylei, at the Bethany rehab center, also in early 2018. Photograph: Courtesy Still She Rises

Following her now-two-year-old daughter’s hospitalization on 28 December 2016, it took more than a year of hospital treatment and rehabilitation until she was well enough to move home. She has impaired vision, and can’t walk or talk. She has difficulty digesting food orally. An in-home nurse provides around-the-clock care, a service Shaffer set up through Medicaid after doctors installed a feeding tube and prescribed medicines that have to be administered multiple times a day.

“I couldn’t foresee into the future what was going to happen to my daughter,” Shaffer said, choking back tears during an interview at David L Moss Justice Center, the county jail where she was booked after trial. Shaffer sat at a round table in a windowless room, her left arm handcuffed to a white concrete wall.

Her face displayed a range of emotions, from disbelief to crippling fear. How is her incarceration in the best interest of her children, she wondered aloud.

A close friend and the in-home nurse offered to be guardians to her children until her release. But Shaffer worried that the state’s child welfare agency could suddenly decide her children are better off in the foster care, a reasonable concern.

She also expressed anger toward Andrea Brown, the now-former assistant district attorney for Tulsa county who tried her case.

“She said that I knew Jason wasn’t a good man, that he had violent tendencies, that I should have known, and that I should have never left my children with him,” Shaffer said, recalling statements Brown made at trial. “She wanted me to go to prison for life. I shouldn’t have to be in here. I should be home taking care of my babies.”

Brown disagreed.

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“The case of Tressie Shaffer was extensively litigated and ultimately 12 citizens of this community unanimously agreed that she was guilty of the crime,” the former assistant district attorney said in an emailed statement. “Unfortunately, the victim will endure a lifetime of difficulties and denied opportunities based upon the choices made by Ms Shaffer. Nothing will ever alleviate that amount of pain and suffering.”

In the affidavit for Shaffer’s arrest, Aubrie Thompson, a detective in the Tulsa police child crisis unit, suggested Shaffer’s history of dating men who abuse children was reason to hold her criminally liable for what happened to her daughter. Michael Lemery, a previous boyfriend, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for felony abuse that occurred in 2012 against Shaffer’s then-one-year-old son. Doctors found the boy had bilateral subdural hematomas and retinal hemorrhaging, which are injuries consistent with being shaken. According to Shaffer’s attorneys, doctors believed the boy’s injuries happened under Lemery’s care.

On multiple occasions, Shaffer left the boy and her eldest daughter with Lemery while she worked night shifts at Walmart. Shaffer said she never suspected Lemery would harm her children. She testified against Lemery, the police found no evidence she was complicit in her son’s abuse, and the state did not prosecute her.

The affidavit also cited a nearly decade-old child abuse accusation against Scott. According to a 2008 incident report out of the sheriff’s office in Nowata county, Scott admitted “whipping” a former girlfriend’s infant son and also playfully biting the child, leaving bruises and bite marks. According to Thompson, Nowata county sheriff’s office agreed to defer formally charging Scott, a deal typically brokered between authorities and a defendant, if he or she agrees to stay out of trouble.

Although Shaffer has known Scott since high school, Shaffer said she’d never heard of the Nowata county accusation before they began dating.

I met Scott at his attorney’s Tulsa law office, where he denied ever intentionally harming his daughter.

“I have a nine-year-old and a six-year-old – and that thought has never come through my mind, no matter how frustrated I’ve been, to hurt one of my children,” he said.

His recollection of the day his daughter was hospitalized is similar to Shaffer’s. He got up after Shaffer left for work and started preparing breakfast for the five older children. Some time that morning, Scott noticed his six-month-old was in distress and called 911.

“My baby has quit breathing,” Scott told an emergency dispatcher in an audio recording provided by his attorney.

The dispatcher asked for an address, but Scott hadn’t committed it to memory because he wasn’t living with Shaffer full time. He located a piece of mail and relayed the information. Soon, Scott’s initial tone of alertness gave way to panicked panting.

“She wakes up crying and I’m fixing to change her butt, and she’s poopy, and she’s just laying there and her eyeballs are in the back of her head,” he gasped. “I tried to do CPR and it won’t work.”

In the recording, Scott can also be heard ordering the other children to their room. Scott didn’t want them to see their sister in distress, he said.

“The police made me feel like I was a bad parent, that I wasn’t doing my job,” Scott told me. “And I know I did my job. I saved my little girl.”

His attorneys said they intend to mount a medical defense, linking many of the baby’s medical conditions to Marfan Syndrome, an inherited disease known to cause heart and respiratory problems. Medical records should have cleared the girl’s parents of wrongdoing nearly two years ago, Scott’s attorney Clark Brewster said in an interview.

“This is a profound example of a criminal justice system, in this case, gone awry – just completely off the rails,” Brewster said. “They just leapt upon the concept that she [the six-month-old] had to have been abused. The accusation, blindly made, and then the gauntlet of having them arrested, is so incredibly unfair, in a case like this.”

If there’s an acquittal in Scott’s trial, that should leave the state no choice but to grant Shaffer clemency and reunite her with her children, Brewster said.

Scott is scheduled to face trial on a charge of felony child abuse by injury in June. He has pleaded not guilty.

Shaffer, a Tulsa native, is the oldest of six children. She spent much of her childhood with her grandparents and later lived with adoptive parents. Shaffer also has Marfan Syndrome and so did her late mother.

“As a child, I actually didn’t really dream of being like a doctor or anything like that – I wanted to be a mother for four kids,” she said. “I love kids a lot. I take on other people’s kids, sometimes.”

Just days after her conviction, Shaffer took every opportunity to interact with her four children. She called them through the jail video visitation system. She phoned them one evening, while the children stayed with Shaffer’s close friend.

The children had just finished their homework, and munched on carrots and cherry tomatoes with ranch dressing, while dinner was prepared.

“I love you,” Shaffer said to her eldest daughter.

“I love you, too,” her daughter replied.

“Promise?” Shaffer pressed.

“Promise,” the girl replied.

“I think you guys are going to the science museum on Saturday,” Shaffer said to her seven-year-old son.

“Well, the teacher said it was only for children and their parents,” the boy said.

Shaffer paused, as to not dwell on the fact that she could not attend her son’s field trip.

“I miss you,” Shaffer interjected.

“I miss you, too,” he replied.

“I want them to remember that we stayed strong and we made it through it,” Shaffer said in my jail interview with her, a few weeks before she was transferred to a minimum-security women’s prison in Oklahoma City, about an hour and a half west of Tulsa. Shaffer has about 14 months left in her sentence.

The prison does not have a video visitation system but her children can visit for two hours on Sundays. According to Hamilton, the two-year-old’s medical condition is too fragile to visit a prison during flu season.

Shaffer told me at the jail, “Hug your babies and hold them close, because you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

Aaron Morrison is a freelance reporter based in New York City. His work has appeared on Mic, the Bergen Record, the Miami Herald and the Associated Press