New program helps prisoners' wives cope with stress when life brings love and incarceration
SALINAS VALLEY (KPIX) -- As she enters a world of secured gates, endless barbed wire and concrete as far as the eye can see, Adrienne Kennedy is reminded with every step of just how surreal her life has become.
"I promised myself that I would never get used it," she said.
Kennedy's husband, Tom is an inmate at Salinas Valley, a Level Four maximum security state prison.
They were introduced by a mutual friend while Tom was serving a 52-year sentence for an assault with a firearm on a police officer.
She wasn't expecting to fall in love, but she did. They married in a prison ceremony in 2018, much to her family's dismay.
"As soon they found out that I was with somebody that was incarcerated they took 10 steps back from me," she said.
PART 1 - Norway's reform inspires California to make prison life more humane
She sees him every weekend for a few hours. Once a month, they're eligible for a conjugal or "Family Visit," of up to 40 hours in an apartment on prison grounds.
But even though he's the one convicted of a crime in many ways, she says, they're both doing time.
"Every week you're retraumatized because you don't know what's going to happen," she said. "As soon as you get here you don't know what the staff is going to be up to, you don't know if they're going to be having a good day or a bad day."
Coping with the incarceration of a loved one can be overwhelming. The stress of supporting a family member in prison can cause lasting health issues for those on the outside.
It's something Fritzi Horstman is trying to change. The founder of The Compassion Prison Project, Horstman has been helping prisoners face the trauma that landed them behind bars.
"The more compassion we can bring to prison the better," she said. "Prisons are not an isolated event. The violence that happens here reverberates into our community."
Which is why on this particular day, Horstman was focusing her session not on prisoners, but their families.
"I got to see the pain that they're facing every day, how much they have to drive, how stressful it is for them to walk into this environment," she said.
PART 2 - Identifying childhood trauma a key to rehabilitating, reintegrating prison inmates into society
Research has consistently shown that inmates are less like to return to prison, if they have close relationships with their families on the outside.
To that end Horstman invited the women to participate in the same exact exercise their partners went through the day before. Using a quiz approved by the Centers for Disease Control, Horstman helps the women assess their own childhood trauma.
When people realize they're not alone, they connect and start to share.
And that, Horstman says, is when the healing begins.
"The more we're aware of our traumas and why we're behaving the way we are, the better we can regulate our systems and we'll create a safer society," she said.
That shared experience, according to Adrienne, has brought her and husband closer together and in a way, made her feel less alone.
"Knowing that he was part of the circle and willingly participated helps me to know the wheels are turning," she said. "And if the wheels are turning then I can possibly introduce some healing that can happen between both of us."
This is Part 3 of Itay Hod's three-part series on prison reform.
