Atlanta-area nonprofit helps reunite incarcerated moms with their families

This Mother’s Day will have special meaning for Chabreya Hampton.

Hampton, 30, said she was recently reunited with her 15-year-old daughter after a brief stint in jail on drug-related charges. She was helped by Women on the Rise, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to bail out women from detention.

“When you see them again, it’s just the warmth, the embrace, the unconditional love that your child always sees you as the mother, nothing else,” Hampton said. “They don’t see the flaws, the troubles, the addictions, what you had to do, what put you in that situation. They only see ‘my momma is back home.’ And you feel the amount of warmth and unconditional love, it’s kind of unexplainable. It’s very overwhelming.”

Women on the Rise was founded in 2013 to help formerly incarcerated women get out from behind bars and back on their feet. In 2020, they launched an annual Mother’s Day bailout event, and they have since paid out $441,000 to release nearly 70 women from jail. It’s carried out in partnership with National Bail Out, a Black-led prison abolitionist group.

Women, and particularly mothers, face challenges reintegrating with the outside world that men typically do not, said

“When men come home, they have the baby mama, they got the mama, they got the grandma, they have a lot more support,” she said. “And then they don’t come home and the first thing they think of is how do I get my kids back? As a woman, we come home and we don’t have as much support, and we are also either thinking how do I get my kids back, or if your family member has your kids, it’s ‘OK here, take your kids back,’ and you’re not even stable enough.”

Part of Women on the Rise’s mission is helping mothers to become stable enough to take care of their children and avoid future arrests.

“All of our work really is based on, when women come home, we want to make sure that they are whole,” Hasan-Simpson said.

For Hampton, that help includes paying off a school fine that she incurred as a result of her arrest. She is in her third year of a bachelor’s degree in business administration.

Hasan-Simpson, like everyone else at Women on the Rise, was once incarcerated herself.

“And so we understand when you come home what you need and the barriers that are put up,” she said. “So we basically show them how to break past those barriers. Like this is what we did to gain employment, what we did to become homeowners, and we really just want to share that it can be done, while we’re still fighting the system for it to not be this difficult in the first place. So we do the policy work as well as the reentry work.”

Hasan-Simpson said one of her top policy priorities next year will be pushing for a bill that would make courts send text messages to people who are scheduled to appear, the way many doctors do to remind patients about upcoming appointments. She said too many mothers become incarcerated for failure to appear in court and a simple text reminder could help keep families together.

Hasan-Simpson and Hampton said they will be spending part of Mother’s Day with other formerly incarcerated mothers for an event that will include conversations about motherhood as well as lessons like how to make their own all-natural face masks and bath bombs.

All moms deserve some pampering on Mother’s Day, but Hasan-Simpson said a little bit of self-care can go a long way for formerly incarcerated mothers.

“We address the physical things of what you need, but something a lot of people forget is we need to talk about the mental things as well, because if we don’t address that, then going back to jail will happen,” she said.

Hampton said she’s looking forward to the event, but also to spending time with her daughter.

“It warms your heart because you know that this person solely depends on you,” she said. “You want to lead them in the right direction. You don’t want to lead them down the path that you were on.”