Numbers and Stories Posted on January 9, 2008 Giving policymakers a scenario might help them understand your position, suggests Barbara J. Guthrie (bio).

When you’re talking with policymakers, because the level of discourse has to be everyday, they want to know the numbers and the eventual impact of those numbers on society at large or a subgroup of people, so you have to come in with numbers. You have to come in and help them understand how maybe, even though there are a lot of men in prison, what is it about women that we need to pay special attention to?

And when you think about health, women are the gatekeepers for health. So families are often defined in terms of the woman’s health. So you use terms like that to help them understand that and how the disruption of both the mother leaving impacts the children’s well being, because then they’re dispersed to foster homes.

So you really have to break it down for them, to say things like, “Think about this scenario. A mother leaves, her children are dispersed to five different areas, the city or the state, with no family members. Those same children will show up later on in the juvenile justice system, or as a statistic, homicidal statistic."

I tell them the story, and telling it within the context of something that they can relate to. “Can you imagine growing up not knowing where your mother is? Can you imagine growing up as an adolescent and having to tell somebody that your mother or father was in prison? What would that be like? What are the kind of things that you think you would do to not have to tell that story?”

So trying to make it personal, but also getting them to understand that there are people that are experiencing this. And looking at the policies. What are the policies that you think are important for them to change? One of them, for women, would be, “Once they have been sentenced, in your state, what things do they lose?” For instance, voting, never can vote again. For women, it’s government-subsidized housing. So what happens?

What we know about women in the juvenile justice system is their crimes are related to economic hardship. So they go in, they serve us, they come out. The only way that they know to earn money is through prostitution, connecting up with somebody who may be selling drugs. To deaden the pain, they engage in the drugs,and so it becomes a vicious cycle. So the legislation that you should look at is, "Is it all prisoners that should lose this, or should there be some exceptions to the rule?"

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