Interrupted Life: Incarcerated Mothers in the United States

Interrupted Life: Incarcerated Mothers in the United States is an exhibition of eight linked installations which deal with the facts and experiences of incarceration for mothers and their families in the United States. Interrupted Life invites viewers to become educated, active community members, searching for information and solutions to this major and growing problem in our society. The show aims to be both a vibrant visual presentation and a pedagogical intervention, stimulating new perspectives and learning opportunities.

Screening of Prison Lullabies, 2003, 83 minutes, directed by Odile Isralson and Lina Matta. Post-Screening remarks and discussion with filmmaker Odile Isralson and one of the inmates she worked with, Lavonne K. Jackson.

Prison Lullabies presents four women struggling with drug addiction, indicted for dealing and prostitution, and serving prison time with one common bond – arrested pregnant, Amy, Monique, Joann, and Anne Marie have all given birth behind bars. For these women who are on intimate terms with sexual abuse, poverty, and addiction, the Taconic Correctional Facility in New York State offers a rare gleam of hope.  One of only five prisons in the U.S. to provide a nursery program for inmates, Taconic allows the women to keep their babies for the first 18 months, while insisting that the mothers participate in a rigorous series of classes that range from basic child care to anger management and drug counseling.  Each woman is released in the course of filming. Each must choose whether to find a job, break the cycle of relapse and re-arrest that has led to the loss of her other children, or pick up the crack pipe, abandon the child, and return to the streets.