Recently, I had the immense privilege of interviewing Amy Ard, the executive director of an organization called Motherhood Beyond Bars. 

Amy Ard shed some valuable insight on the work that Motherhood Beyond Bars is doing in Atlanta, Georgia. Their main goal is to provide support to infants and their mothers while the mothers are experiencing incarceration. 

I am so excited to share what I’ve learned! 

I started by asking Amy how she got into this line of work. She founded the non profit, but it was based on work that started before the non profit began. There was a childbirth class inside the prison where all incarcerated pregnant women are held in Georgia, started by a woman named Bethany Kotler. A woman in that class named the class Motherhood Beyond Bars. 

At the time, Amy had been working as a doula for 10 years, and was working with a private client. What she saw was devastating. She saw an incarcerated woman come in to give birth, with an armed guard at the door and handcuffs on the gurney. She began researching and realized that Georgia is one of the states where it was legal to shackle women. Amy began exploring the legislative angle and how to remove the shackles off of women. 

After talking with Bethany (who was on her way to Boston to begin her PhD), Amy asked if she could turn this into a full organization to continue supporting mothers. Amy said that if she could use the name, she would continue the amazing work that Bethany had started. So, in 2018, Bethany became one of the founding board members of the organization, and Amy became the executive director. 

For about a year, all of their work happened inside the Georgia prison system. That was when they really started getting curious about how to support the infants. Mothers were experiencing a lot of anxiety over not being able to take care of their children while incarcerated. Many of them felt helpless while a caregiver, whether that be a grandparent, aunt or friend, took care of the infant and possibly struggled to afford necessities. 

At this point in the interview, Amy used a term that I haven’t had the chance to talk about in my blog yet. The term is Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). Every single kid that was born to a woman in prison already had two ACES. They had been born to an incarcerated woman, and they had a change in their primary caregiver. So, the work that Motherhood Beyond Bars is doing is in an attempt to give the incarcerated mothers and their infants as much support as possible to prevent lifelong effects. 

In 2020, Motherhood Beyond Bars started their Holistic Family Support Program. The program supports moms, infants and their caregivers. This program now supports over 300 infants. 

In an attempt to look for proactive solutions to this problem, one of the things they do is find women before being sentenced to prison, and offer alternatives to incarcerations when they stand in front of a judge that can prevent separation in the first place. The organization realized that at the root issue for a lot of these women is trauma. 

The quote Amy gave that hit me the most was “generally, prison has become the path of least resistance for our legal system, and we thought that if we could meet women in jails and stand with them in front of the judge and do some of the leg work that would make sure that we had a bed and a space for them in a treatment facility instead of a prison, we could avoid that separation and get them the healing they need…” 

Thankfully, it’s starting to work. So far, they have been able to help 26 women and counting to divert from prison. Those women are now getting the treatment they need and are able to form a stronger bond with their infants. 

One amazing thing that this organization provides is infant care packages. Amy told me that one reason a relative of an incarcerated loved one might not be able to take in an infant is because of finances. To make that easier, Motherhood Beyond Bars sends them home with care packages including diapers (the caregivers can even choose the brand!), formula, wipes, shampoo, hygiene items, books, anything the caregiver might need to get started. Then, a program coordinator from Motherhood Beyond Bars (most of whom are certified peer specialists) is assigned to them to make sure they have everything they need to navigate the whole process. 

The peer specialists are all people who have been through a similar experience with trauma, and are now on the other side, able to help others. They are able to build authentic relationships with families that Motherhood Beyond Bars work with in a really powerful way. 

The program coordinators work really hard to make sure the bond between mothers and infants is as strong and healthy as possible. On top of doing whatever they can to keep the infant out of foster care and with a relative, they also pay for the communication in prison. Video calls and phone calls are covered by Motherhood Beyond Bars. They do whatever they can to make sure the infant knows their mothers and can feel safe around them. So, when the mother is released, that reentry and reintroduction is as smooth as possible. 

At the end of the interview, Amy told me that statistically, there’s one child in every classroom in The United States that has a parent in prison. It’s likely you know someone who is affected by this. The effects of having a parent or loved one in prison is something that we don’t research or talk enough about.

Motherhood Beyond Bars is doing incredible work to help mothers and their infants in Georgia. I would like to send a huge thank you to Amy Ard and the entire team at Motherhood Beyond Bars. 

Thank you for reading! Head over to my Instagram to stay up to date on all future blog posts and how to learn more about this organization.