It’s lonely when you love someone in prison

Joyce Bell was 77 when her youngest son was arrested and charged with murder, in what he insists was a case of self-defense. In a time of life when many expect to find peace and calm, Bell, who is now in her early 80s, spends long hours trying to help her son, who struggles with chronic pain and PTSD, and has autism. She follows up on his postponed appointments and prescription issues. She talks to his lawyer and reads case records to prepare for his appeal. Every day, she worries that her son will be attacked or killed. Every day, she agonizes.

I met Bell while researching the horrific and inhumane conditions in Georgia state prisons last February. The agony I heard in her voice on the phone made me wonder how lonely she felt. I asked her if she had anyone to talk with about her burden. “The Lord,” she said firmly. “And he helps me!”

At that moment, she made me think of my prayerful but often lonely grandmother, whose brother, Huey, got a life sentence for murder in 1964. Though decades apart, Bell and Ma-Ma (pronounced MAH-MAH) found themselves part of the same enormous, struggling, and usually ignored class of women: Those who love somebody behind bars.

In the U.S. today, around 2 million people are incarcerated in jails and prisons. More than 60,000 people are in immigration detention, a high in modern history. With most prisoners living in extreme deprivation, it’s often left to women on the outside to help with emotional, financial, legal, and medical needs.

As an investigative journalist, I’ve spent my career speaking with wives, siblings, and mothers who have no support networks to help them cope. Though they are numerous, many feel alone.

Ma-Ma certainly did. Rocking in her recliner, I remember, she couldn’t help nearly shouting. They stole his life! She used to stare straight ahead, through big bifocals, barely glancing over at 8-year-old me, sprawled out on the couch. It was wrong, wrong, plain WRONG! Ma-Ma believed Huey’s protestations of innocence. She couldn’t imagine her sweet little brother taking a life. Whether he did it or not, what mattered most was that he was trapped in prison. For many years, my grandmother visited Huey and checked in on how he was doing frequently.

Huey died in 1994 in prison. Afterward, my grandmother was only able to talk about him with me and the Lord. Everyone else who’d known Huey was too upset about how much pain he’d been through.

It shouldn’t have to be this way. In California, Alice Coleman’s story shows how support can help women with loved ones in prison.

I met Coleman while researching Essie Justice Group, a groundbreaking Los Angeles-based nonprofit that brings such women together to help one another and to push for an end to mass incarceration. “It wasn’t just that I saw the need,” founder Gina Clayton-Johnson said in an interview, “I saw the potential. What would this group look like as a political force?”

Coleman, a longtime advocate for people in trouble, was a natural fit to join. In 1996, Coleman’s husband got life under California’s then-new three strikes law, which mandated sentences of 25 years to life for people convicted of their third felony. Years later, Coleman’s son got a crushingly long sentence, too.

The only way Coleman could survive having a husband and a son locked away was to do something with her pain. She began seeking out other women with incarcerated loved ones, and helped them monitor prison healthcare and living conditions. She sent the loved ones care packages with necessities, snacks, and colorful notes. She even made visits when families lived too far away. At one point, she was regularly visiting 37 prisoners.

Coleman was nominated to join Essie Justice Group by her husband and two friends. (Anyone can nominate a member, and you can also self-nominate.) New members take a free nine-week program, “Healing to Advocacy,” which trains isolated, hurting women to become confident, organized advocates for themselves, their loved ones, and their communities. The course, available to women nationwide, was life-changing for Coleman, who learned to talk about her feelings and loneliness. Since 2019, she’s been a facilitator, teaching other women supporting relatives in prison to undergo the same changes she did and find renewed purpose.

Sometimes, in prison or jail parking lots, Coleman dances and sings: “Ain’t no stoppin’ us now, we’re on the move!” Now 68, she feels that she has a new wind to carry her through life.

Can someone like Bell find the same kind of hope? Could Ma-Ma have? After Huey died, my grandmother’s belief that one day she would see Huey again, unbound in Heaven, sustained her until she passed at 86.

Faith guides Bell, too, now as she tries to help and protect her son. But she can only do so much for her son from the outside.

Things are especially bad in Georgia, where prisons have become increasingly violent since 2020. Bell’s son is serving time at Telfair State Prison, where 13 men were killed in homicides from 2020 to 2024 — a stark increase from before the COVID pandemic. Others have died from neglect amid a historic staffing shortage. One family filed a lawsuit alleging that in 2023 guards killed their 27-year-old loved one when they left him in an unshaded cage in the prison yard, on a day when the heat index was 105 degrees.

Bell hears about these horrific conditions and abuses, mostly on Facebook groups for people with loved ones in Georgia prisons. She reads about stabbings, men bleeding to death without getting help, bodies going undiscovered for days. It all scares her. Sometimes she feels her son’s problems are her fault, because she was not there enough when he was growing up. “I was living for me,” she told me, sobbing. “I wasn’t living right. I could’ve done so much better.”

Women supporting loved ones in prison need more attention, more resources, more understanding. While there are great nonprofits and groups helping women in communities across the country, like Essie Justice Group, which has more than 559 members and growing, their numbers and budgets are too small to lift up many who need help.

Whether or not Bell could have done more to save her son from trouble in the past, she certainly tried. And she could not do any better than she is doing for him now. A mother hurts no matter what, when her child is incarcerated. So does a sister, a daughter, grandmother, a partner, an aunt. Even buoyant Coleman sometimes sits by herself at the end of the day and breaks down, thinking of her son and husband and what their lives could have been.