Adjusting to home

By: Jeff Kelly LowensteinBrittany Brown didn't want to wake up on the morning of May 28, 1999. Sharee Williams, her mother, had told her many times that she was going to prison, but Brittany says now that she was too young to understand. Eventually, Williams roused the 10-year-old, walked her to the Joseph Warren School in the Southeast Side's Calumet Heights neighborhood and told her that she would not be back to pick her up after school.

After dropping her daughter off, Williams said a tearful goodbye to her son, who was not yet two months old, and reported to the Federal Correction Institution in Pekin, Ill. She would not be back for nearly seven years.

Although the family's connection was maintained during her stint through nearly monthly visits, regular phone calls and letters by Williams, everyone is still adjusting to the changes more than a year after her release.

Brittany and Williams used to spend time together all the time, but the two now butt heads sometimes. No longer a 10- year-old girl, Brittany is a 17-year-old young woman with a group of friends, college and travel ambitions, and a steady boyfriend-changes that Williams still has trouble accepting.

At age 7, Williams' son cannot read or write, and has not fully bonded with Williams, of whom he had no memory before her release from prison.

"My family-I feel like they're strangers to me," Williams says softly, seated on a comfortable couch in the basement of her daughter's paternal grandparents' house.

Williams and Brittany used to be inseparable. "She was my roll dog,"Williams says, smiling wistfully as she remembers the outfits they used to wear together, joint shopping expeditions for dresses and Barbie dolls, and Brittany scampering around the beauty salon where Williams used to work.

But that changed during a weekend in April 1999, after Williams carried what she says was a nondescript package that contained kilograms of cocaine to the home she shared with her son's father, from his mother's apartment two doors away. Federal authorities were in on the bust, which snared Williams and her boyfriend's mother.

The effect on Brittany was immediate. She took the Illinois Standards Achievement Test the week after her mother was arrested and, despite being a top student, did poorly. In part because of that, Brittany says, she initially was told she would be retained in the same grade for the next school year. Due to her mother's help-Williams was on house arrest during her trial-Brittany passed the test to rejoin her grade.

Williams says she did not know what was in the package and that she never used nor dealt drugs. She did have a previous drug-related conviction from being in the house when another former boyfriend, who was a member of the Gangster Disciples, was arrested.

Her mandatory sentence for the two counts related to her second arrest was 97 months.

Williams became one of thousands of women subject to mandatory sentencing for drug related offenses. According to the Women's Prison Association, a New York City-based service and advocacy organization for women with criminal histories, the number of women jailed nationally rose more than 750 percent from 1977 to 2004.

The association said the increase corresponds directly to mandatory minimum sentencing laws, maintaining that, since women are convicted for nonviolent, drug-related crime more than for any other, the sentencing policies have had a pronounced effect on women.

Brittany's struggles continued after her mother was sentenced to prison. "The hardest part was when I would wake up every morning and not see her," she says.

Her grades dropped from nearly straight As to Bs and Cs, she says, and stayed down for a long time. Despite her grandmother's repeated admonitions, she would not come home after school, often staying outside with her friends until 6 p.m. or 7 p.m."I was acting too bad," she says. "I always had an attitude."

After several months, at her mother's direction, she moved to her great-aunt's house, switching from Warren to the Frank L. Gillespie Elementary in the Roseland neighborhood.

Brittany told her fourth grade teacher about her mother's absence but did not talk to any of her peers about it for four years. "I kept it private for a long time until I made some close friends, and then I told them," she says.

At times Brittany felt anger and resentment toward her mother, but she would not tell anyone. "I would just cry," she says. She wasn't the only one.

At Pekin, Williams says she wept constantly, unable to look at her children's picture or write a letter to them for weeks. During much of her first year, she also exhibited a bad attitude, acting as if she had to "check everyone "who she felt disrespected her.

For Williams, change was precipitated when an older inmate, nicknamed "Money," spoke bluntly to her. "She said, 'You ain't always got to check a motherfucker every time they disrespect you. … If you keep the attitude you have, you're going to lose a lot of good time and you ain't going to get home to those kids. People ain't going to want to be around you. "'And in this environment you need friends, so just be cool,'" Money concluded.

Money's words made an impression on Williams, who subsequently enrolled in a positive attitude class and started to change her behavior.

Throughout Williams' imprisonment, her mother drove the children three hours each way for a visit nearly every month. During these times, Williams would make sure to spend individual time with her son, mother and daughter, trying to give some guidance to Brittany. The family also spoke regularly on the phone.

Williams wrote many letters to Brittany but never received an answer from her daughter-something that annoyed her. Brittany says she doesn't know why she did not respond. But she does know that she was excited for her mother to get out of prison.

It's been more than a year since Williams' release in December 2005. And while life on the outside is a great improvement from being behind bars, it's far from easy.

As much as she did not like being confined, she has had to get used to not having her daily schedule and routines completely controlled by others. Williams could not find work for months before connecting with the Negro League Café, where she cooked and was on television for a FOX News Chicago piece about how to cook healthy soul food.

Since December, she has been cooking part time at Breakthrough Urban Ministries, a faith-based service provider for homeless men in the Uptown neighborhood. Traveling from the Far South Side-she is staying in a cozy, red-brick, single-story house in the West Pullman neighborhood- to the North Side means waking up by 5 a.m., dropping her son off at school and rushing back as soon as her shift ends. Sometimes, she cannot get there in time.

Work is not her only struggle. Her son has no memory of her from before she went to prison and has not yet fully bonded to her. "If I'm upstairs, he really doesn't want to come around because he doesn't know me," she says.

In addition, the boy has received failing grades in math and can neither read nor write, in part,Williams believes, because her parents overindulged him out of sympathy for absences of his mother and father, who was killed in gang-related violence.

Williams often goes to his school to advocate for his needs but is frustrated that he only has a tutor once a week for 25 minutes. "It's not enough," she says firmly.

Williams has distanced herself from her mother's side of the family, many of whom make comments that appear judgmental and make her feel defensive. On the other hand, her son's family does not want to have anything to do with her, blaming her for the arrest of the boy's paternal grandmother.

And with Brittany, Williams works to rebuild the closeness they once had but is often aware of the time that has passed.

"I go into stores and I say, 'Can you be 10 again?' "She'll say, 'No, Mom,'" Williams explains.

Instead, the two occasionally butt heads when Brittany displays what she acknowledges is a negative attitude.

Still, there are positive signs. Brittany's grades have improved, and she has applied to colleges like Roosevelt University and Chicago State University. She aspires to become a professional dancer and to travel to places like Hawaii and Paris. She has a boyfriend who she sees regularly and a supportive group of friends with whom she has shared her experiences.

She and five of her girlfriends have sleepovers on the weekends, talk on the phone, and go to restaurants like Red Lobster and Ed Debevic's, where the notoriously rude wait staff said the girls needed no insulting because they did it themselves.

And even in moments of conflict, Brittany sticks to the issue at hand and does not bring Williams' past absence into the argument.

Williams says her experience has taught her valuable lessons: "I've learned that I don't have to compromise myself for a relationship," she says. "Drugs lead to one of three things: addiction, death or imprisonment."

Brittany appears to be heeding Williams' words. "I learned not to get involved in that kind of stuff," she says.