Event coordinators said they made history as choirs from the Ohio Reformatory for Women and Pickaway and Madison correctional institutes sang together in one room.
‘We need to institutionalize kindness’: local women write children’s book to spark healing conversation
The women worked as clinicians to empower community members within the reformatory to set their course. That is until they lost their contract due to COVID-19. Author: Molly Brewer Updated: 7:24 AM EST March 10, 2021
COLUMBUS, Ohio When Annette Dominguez and Candace Paulucci found themselves out of work after 30+ years helping the women inside the Ohio Reformatory for Women, the two wasted no time finding a new way to serve.
“If you know that you were meant to serve, you can find a way to do that,” Dominguez said. “We had to sort of reinvent ourselves but we did and we still get the opportunity to engage with and serve this population that we’ve been committed to all these many years. The need is great and we just had to figure out how to do it differently.”
With every line she drew with her colored pencils, with every stroke of a marker and chalk that she used to make the little girl with rosy cheeks and dark, curly hair come to life, Sheila Luther erased another sliver of her own long-lingering guilt.
Having raised her own daughter in an unstable environment one filled with anger, addiction and spousal abuse Luther cries even today as she recounts how decades ago she was too consumed by her own lifestyle to see the damage being done to her child.
A book to comfort children of mothers in prison
“My daughter at age 3 used to ask me if she was a bad girl, and she would ask me that because I was a bad mother,” said Luther, now 68 and living in Dayton. “I went to prison at age 41, and my daughter was an adult by then, but it was already too late. She’d already had a lifetime of hurt.”
Maggie Haas leaned forward in her chair and squinted through the welling tears that already clouded her vision as the Zoom boxes popped up like a photo-filled tic-tac-toe board on the television screen in a prison meeting room.
She peered more closely once, twice, then again and again. She really couldn’t believe that there they were, her three beautiful children whose faces she hadn’t seen in a year in a half. She had asked them over phone calls to participate in this Bridges of Love project, a new healing songwriting program run by the local nonprofit, We Amplify Voices (WAV), that recently was piloted at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. But when it was time for the first session in November, Haas’s heart hadn’t let her get her hopes up that the kids would actually appear.