On a late-October morning two years ago, Robin Steinberg stood barefoot in her apartment, on the Upper West Side, preparing to uproot her life. Her suitcases were stacked by the door, her winter coats piled in the hallway. Steinberg, a fifty-nine-year-old native New Yorker, had decided to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to launch a legal startup. She laced up her sneakers and said goodbye to the bedrooms of her grown children, which she called “the shrines.” As she dragged her bags to her car, she told her doorman that she was going to cry. “I’m not good with change,” she said. He told her not to worry, and blew her a farewell kiss.

When Steinberg decided to move to Tulsa, she wasn’t sure whether it was in the Midwest, or the Southwest, or somewhere else altogether—“the buckle of the Bible Belt,” she called it to friends. After an initial scouting trip, she told me, “I saw a woman in yoga pants with a gun strapped to her leg—it’s an open-carry state!” Steinberg had spent most of her career working in the South Bronx. In 1997, along with seven others, including her husband, David Feige, she co-founded the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit that provides legal services to indigent clients. Rather than representing a client in an isolated case, the organization addresses the underlying reasons that the person ended up in the criminal-justice system. Lawyers might meet a client through a drug-possession case, then help him fight an eviction, get public benefits, or fill out his kids’ school-enrollment paperwork. “We’ll go anyplace a person needs us to go,” Steinberg, who served as the organization’s executive director, said. “Housing court, family court, immigration court.” This model became known as “holistic defense,” and, by 2016, the Bronx Defenders had expanded to a staff of three hundred, and was handling thirty thousand cases a year. The organization’s progress has mirrored changes in the nation as a whole. Beginning in the nineteen-seventies, as the war on drugs took off, incarceration rates in the U.S. grew explosively. Only in the past eight years have rates finally begun to fall for most demographic groups, with one alarming exception: women and girls.

America imprisons women in astonishing numbers. The population of women in state prisons has increased by more than eight hundred per cent in the past four decades. The number of women in local jails is fourteen times higher than it was in the nineteen-seventies; most of these women haven’t been convicted of a crime but are too poor to post bail while awaiting trial. The majority have been charged with low-level, nonviolent offenses, such as drug possession, shoplifting, and parole violations. The result is that more than a quarter of a million children in the U.S. have a mother in jail. One in nine black children has a parent who is, or has been, incarcerated.

Earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of people protested America’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border. Laura Bush denounced the practice as “cruel,” and Senator Jeff Flake called it “un-American.” In May, Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security Secretary, defended the separations by noting how often the same thing happens to families in the criminal-justice system. “In the United States, we call that law enforcement,” she said.

For the children of incarcerated parents, the toll can be profound. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has shown that these children have an increased risk of mental-health conditions, including anxiety and depression. In adulthood, they have higher rates of asthma, migraines, high cholesterol, and H.I.V./AIDS, and are more likely to use illicit or prescription drugs. The economic effects are equally devastating. Adolescent boys with an incarcerated mother are twenty-five per cent more likely to drop out of school, and have a higher chance of ending up incarcerated themselves. The former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in remarks at the White House in 2016, summed up the situation: “Put simply, we know that when we incarcerate a woman we often are truly incarcerating a family, in terms of the far-reaching effect on her children, her community, and her entire family network.”

Nowhere is this problem starker than in Oklahoma, which has the highest rate of women’s incarceration in the nation. Eighty-five per cent of these women are mothers. Oklahomans have begun to acknowledge the negative repercussions of the situation, and the need for criminal-justice reform has become a rare point of bipartisan agreement in the state. In 2016, the governor, Mary Fallin, a Republican, said, “We need to prevent the breakup of the family,” calling the incarceration rate a “generational curse.” The former Republican speaker of the Oklahoma House, Kris Steele, has said that “to continue to throw more money on a broken system is not conservative, and not responsible.” George Kaiser, a Tulsa oil-and-gas billionaire, has made incarceration a central issue in his philanthropy. Since 2006, the George Kaiser Family Foundation has been trying to end generational cycles of poverty in Tulsa. At first, the foundation focussed on early-childhood education, pouring more than a billion dollars into various projects. But it soon became clear that outcomes for children wouldn’t change unless the foundation also addressed the incarceration of their mothers. In 2015, the foundation’s program officer, Amy Santee, called Steinberg. “I realize this is going to sound crazy to you, and you’re probably going to say no,” Santee said. “But what if the Bronx Defenders came here, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to represent women with children?”

Steinberg promised to consider the idea. Within a few months, she’d recruited five Bronx Defenders staffers to relocate to Tulsa with her. She was calling the project Still She Rises. “I’m not an incrementalist,” Steinberg told me on the day of her move. “Startups are my favorite thing.”

After launching a nonprofit in Tulsa, the lawyers of Still She Rises listened to the stories of incarcerated mothers and developed a plan to help them.

On November 9, 2016, Steinberg convened the first full-day meeting of Still She Rises. It was the morning of the Presidential election, and there was a feeling of excitement among the staff. The group had leased an office in North Tulsa, where it planned to concentrate its work. The office—a former video-rental store in a strip mall, wedged between an abandoned payday loan shop and a cat-spaying clinic—was still undergoing renovations, so the meeting took place in a co-working space in the city’s arts district, near a café serving vegan sandwiches and cashew-cheese tacos. “It could be Brooklyn,” Steinberg marvelled. “It’s full of wool hats and beards!” The staffers sat around a glass table covered in candy-corn cookies. Someone had scrawled the group’s central question on a blue Post-it and stuck it to the wall: “Why does Oklahoma incarcerate so many women?”