Sun, Sep 07 2008
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Published May 10, 2008 09:29 pm - Program helps moms stay close to kids Inmates, their children get help from Mother’s Touch By Cathy Spaulding Phoenix Staff Writer
TAFT — Eddie Warrior Correctional Center inmate Tina Hendrix is warned about crying while she prepares to record a message to her son. “Push ‘pause’ on the tape if you think you’re going to cry,” fellow inmate Patrice Wooden tells Hendrix as she sets up the tape player. “You don’t want the children to think you’re not OK.” Hendrix gets through the recording, though she must dab tears from her eyes several times before it’s over. Mothers doing time at Eddie Warrior often get emotional when they record messages and stories for their children. With help from the Muskogee Soroptomist Club, the inmates get that opportunity through Mother’s Touch. It’s one chance the women have to “establish media contact with their children,” said Vicky Spradling, immediate past president of the Muskogee Soroptimist Club. Soroptimist is an international organization dedicated to improving lives of women. Members of Muskogee Sorptimist visit the prison two Saturdays each month to help women record CDs of stories read from children’s and teen’s books. The club then sends the CDs, the mothers’ pictures and the books to the inmates’ children. They have a lot of packages to send. More than 80 percent of the 764 inmates at Eddie Warrior have children, said Kathryn McCollum, chaplain at the correctional center. She said they the club tries to let the inmates make a recording every six months, but 100 to 150 women remain on the waiting list. McCollum said Mother’s Touch means a lot to the inmates. “They know they made negative choices,” she said. “This makes them feel like they’re doing something positive.” Sorpomist President Carole Fisher said the program “helps mothers mend fences between themselves and their children.” “Even though the children did not do the crime, they are paying for it,” Fisher said. “These children go to bed by themselves at night and do not have their mothers there to say ‘I love you.’ They do not hear their mother’s voice. That’s what we have with these recordings, the kids can play them over and over.” The Soroptomists set a bin of children’s books outside the chaplain’s office, where the messages are recorded. Ten mothers, dressed in their gray prison fatigues, sort through the books to pick one to read. They line up outside the office, and wait with tense nerves. 
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