That this ridiculously long and challenging year is closing with guests back again under our roof is thanks to the generosity and tenacity of your support for prison hospitality here in rural Wisconsin, and we are thankful to all of you who have supported Mary House over the years, and especially throughout the pandemic. We are so grateful to be making the house ready for the families who have made holiday plans to stay at Mary House when they visit the Federal Correctional Facility at Oxford in the coming weeks, and I hope you will consider continuing to support Mary House’s hospitality in the year to come.
2.7 million children in the United States have at least one parent behind bars, and at least 5 million have experienced the incarceration of a parent at some point in their lives. This year has held challenges and uncertainties, distance, longing and sadness, for all of us. For these children and their families the added emotional and financial burdens that come with having a family member behind bars have been heaped on top of that full plate of stress and worries. Prisons, jails, and detention centers in the U.S. “have been among the nation’s most dangerous places when it comes to infections from the coronavirus,” The New York Times reported on April 10, 2021. And while all of us have struggled with decisions about how to keep ourselves and our loved ones as safe and whole as possible, the families of prisoners have had all of the fear and stress over the health and safety of those they love, without any of the choices.
The children who will stay at Mary House this Advent and holiday season have been carrying an enormous burden of worry for their incarcerated parents. A burden that children should never ever have to carry, and one that I greatly hope they will be able to lay down during the time they visit here. Many of us have had the experience this year of finally seeing beloved family and dear ones after months and months apart, and we know now that the chance to sit together in a room with the ones we love is among the most precious and sacred things on earth.
These children could have told us that before the pandemic. For many this isn’t the first holiday they’ve faced in a strange place, or missing a part of their family, so they could tell us all a lot about what really matters. Amidst all our furious holiday preparations they know that it’s not the glitter, or the shopping, or the presents, or the food. It’s the people we love that we really need, and the chance to spend a day together is the best gift ever. During a year that’s seen nearly incomprehensible divisions and distrust grow up between us, when we’ve become so quick to judge that we barely know we’re doing it, these children who are spending their Christmas holiday in cars and planes and busses, traveling to a quirky old house on a dark road on a cold night, have somehow kept an open heart and a willingness to forgive. They are proof to us all that love still wins.
So I am deeply grateful to you for your help in making the house ready for them, this holiday season and throughout the coming year.
I know that I’ve been asking for your help to keep this house open for a long, long time, and I’m so grateful for your generosity and your confidence in Mary House over the years. Without you, our small extended family with the big kind, generous, heart, we would not be here at all.
Thank you for helping us remain here during these challenging months, for helping us re-open to these children and their families, and for keeping our doors open in the year to come. May your own family and loved ones be safe and well this holiday season, and may your new year arrive with courage and hope.
Thank You, Cassandra Dixon, for Mary House
Your donation to Mary House is Tax Deductible. You can donate to Mary House online, using the button below, or by sending a check to Mary House of Hospitality, 3579 County Road G, Wisconsin Dells, WI 53965
Mary House of Hospitality provides hospitality to women, children and families who are visiting an inmate at the Federal Correctional Facility at Oxford Mary, WI. We are a small charity, located in an older farmhouse, and staffed by volunteers. We are grateful for the support of our donors, who have kept the doors open for prison hospitality at Mary House since we opened in 1989. THANK YOU!!!!
Police have killed 781 people in 2020 in the US. Black people have been 28% of those killed by police in 2020 despite being only 13% of the population. The police arrest someone every 3 seconds in the United States. Over 80% of these arrests are for low-level, nonviolent offenses. The cost of policing is a staggering $115 billion per year.It is not possible to discuss prison issues, criminal justice, or the human cost of incarceration, without addressing the impact of 400 years of structural racism and white privilege.
Hello from Mary House, September, 2020
I hope that this finds you well, during this incredibly challenging year. 2020 has been so difficult for all of us, in ways that we could never have predicted, and often can’t even imagine in each others lives. For prisoners and their families,
COVID-19 has brought added misery, risk and grief. The great majority of prisoners and their families have lost the ability to visit each other at a time when children everywhere are already haunted by fears and uncertainties that their parents can do little to alleviate.
COVID-19 case rates are higher and are escalating more rapidly in US prisons than in the US population. As of June 22, 2020, over 570 incarcerated people and over 50 correctional staff had died and the rate of infection in state and federal prisons was five and one half times that of the US population as a whole. Most of the largest coronavirus outbreaks are in correctional facilities. This reflects only state and federal prisons, and the rate of COVID transmission in jails is likely to be even higher due to overcrowding and the complete impossibility of social distancing. Yet the great majority of states have failed to release substantial numbers of nonviolent offenders in order to stop the spread inside jails.
FCI Oxford is completely closed to visitors now, and talking with families who long to visit is heartbreaking. At Mary House, we’re doing the same thing many of these families are doing – trying to keep the bills paid, hang in here, and hope for better days to come. Hopefully a combination of visiting room modifications and a lessening of the COVID-19 infection rate will result in families and loved ones being able to see each other again soon. We’re immeasurably grateful to all of you who have continued to support Mary House during this time – bills like insurance, property taxes, utilities and heat are unchanged here, even though our guests are absent, and we so appreciate your help so that we can stay ready to welcome these families back the minute the federal prison system addresses visitation.
And meanwhile, all of us who care about the particular struggles of prisoners and their families and loved ones can spend some time struggling to better understand and begin to confront the undeniable systemic racism within our criminal justice system, which incarcerates Black people at a rate nearly six times greater than it incarcerates white people. For most prisoners, incarceration begins with policing. A recent briefing by the Prison Policy Institute sheds some light on why we have the world’s largest prison population, and why Black families are so disproportionately impacted. , You can read the briefing below.
And finally, as you know, Mary House and FCI Oxford are surrounded by the beautiful green farm fields of rural Wisconsin. We are also surrounded by yard signs, and a few days ago, about two miles from the house, I came upon two large flags in front of a house. One is a Trump banner, and the other is a confederate flag. I took a photo, thinking of this newsletter and intending to share it. But it turns out that flag is so abhorrent, so disgusting, so frightening, that I can’t bring myself to print the photo. PLEASE, Vote.
Thank you all so much for your continued care and support for Mary House and the families we serve, Cassandra
The following article was published this summer by the Prison Policy Institute, and is available, along with a wealth of information, reports, slide shows and infographics explaining the humanitarian and financial impact of our criminal justice system, at https://www.prisonpolicy.org
Police disproportionately target Black and other marginalized people in stops, arrests, and use of force; and are increasingly called upon to respond to problems, such as homelessness, that are unrelated to public safety.
Many of the worst features of mass incarceration — such as racial disparities in prisons — can be traced back to policing. Our research on the policies that impact justice-involved and incarcerated people therefore often intersects with policing issues. Now, at a time when police practices, budgets, and roles in society are at the center of the national conversation about criminal justice, we have compiled our key work related to policing (and our discussions of other researchers’ work) in one briefing.
The scale of police use of force is an important fact in and of itself, made more troubling by the racial disparities evident in police stops and use of force. In a national survey, Black respondents were more likely to be stopped by police than white or Latinx respondents, and both Black and Latinx respondents were more likely to be stopped multiple times over the course of a year than white respondents. The survey also showed that when they initiated a stop, police were twice as likely to threaten or use force against Black and Latinx respondents than whites. These disparate experiences have predictable effects on public trust in police: white respondents were more likely to view police use of force as legitimate and more likely to seek help from police than were people of color.
In all, there are over 10 million arrests in the U.S. each year, but many people are arrested multiple times per year. From responses to a national survey, we estimate that at least 4.9 million unique individuals are arrested and jailed each year, and at least one in four of those individuals are arrested more than once in the same year. The massive scale of these police responses means that there are millions of opportunities each year for police-civilian encounters to turn violent or fatal, and an estimated 77 million people are now saddled with a criminal record.
The “massive misdemeanor system” in the U.S. is an important but overlooked contributor to overcriminalization and mass incarceration. For behaviors as benign as jaywalking, sitting on a sidewalk, or petty theft, an estimated 13 million misdemeanor charges sweep droves of Americans into the criminal justice system each year (and that’s excluding civil violations and speeding). And while misdemeanor charges may sound like small potatoes, they carry serious financial, personal, and social costs, especially for defendants but also for broader society, which finances the enforcement of these minor violations, the processing of these court cases, and all of the unnecessary incarceration that comes with them.
Policing costs the public $126.4 billion per year, nationwide. In our report about the fiscal costs of mass incarceration to the government and families of justice-involved people, we used only half of that figure – $63.2 billion – because only about half of police work is devoted to criminallaw enforcement. The other half is spent on things unrelated to criminal law violations, such as traffic control, responding to civil disputes, and administration. Even at half the total cost of policing, $63.2 billion represents a huge public investment in criminalization. As many Americans are questioning the role of police in society, they should know just how much money is available to redirect to more humane community-based responses to social problems.
People who are arrested and jailed are often among the most socially and economically marginalized in society. The overrepresentation of Black men and women among people who are arrested is largely reflective of persistent residential segregation and racial profiling, which subject Black individuals and communities to greater surveillance and increased likelihood of police stops and searches. Poverty, unemployment, and educational exclusion are also factors strongly correlated with likelihood of arrest.
People who are arrested often have serious health needs that cannot and should not be addressed through policing or incarceration. Even a few days in jail can be devastating for people with serious mental health and medical needs, as they are cut off from their medications, support systems, and regular healthcare providers. Even worse, many people are arrested in the midst of a health crisis, such as mental distress or substance use withdrawal. History has shown that jails are unable to provide effective mental health and medical care to incarcerated people, and too often, jailing people with serious health problems has lethal consequences.
7. Women make up a growing share of arrests and report much more use of force than they did 20 years ago, with Black women most likely to be targeted. The experiences of women and girls – especially Black women and other women of color – are often lost in the national conversation about policing. But of course women, too, are subject to racial profiling, use of excessive force, and any number of violations of their rights and dignity by police. Our analysis of national data shows that women now make up over a quarter of all arrests, with an estimated 2.8 million arrests in 2018. At the same time, the use of force has become much more common among women: the number of women who experienced police use of force (about 250,000) was 3.5 times greater in 2015 compared to 1999. A closer examination of the data also reveals racial disparities in police stops, arrests, and use of force involving women. Black women are more likely than white or Latina women to be stopped while driving, and Black women are arrested 3 times as often as white women and twice as often as Latinas during police stops. Black women also report experiencing police use of force at higher rates than white or Latina women.
As the ACLU of Southern California and the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law report, many criminalized behaviors targeted by law enforcement are related to disability: substance use (often used as self-medication for pain and other symptoms), homelessness (an estimated 78% of people in shelters have a disability), and atypical reactions to social cues, which may be interpreted as vaguely defined crimes such as “disorderly conduct.” The Ruderman Foundation reports that in police use-of-force incidents, the media and police often blame disabled people for their own victimization, especially by characterizing disabled people of color as “threatening” and “refusing to comply.”
The frequent use of police as first responders to individuals in crisis only compounds these problems. Too often, officers who are called to help individuals get medical treatment end up shooting them instead. Public funds should be redirected to community health providers to handle mental and physical health crises, rather than trying to meet this critical need with militarized police forces, who sometimes receive little training on crisis response or de-escalation.
A Stanford University analysis of police bodycam footage from nearly 1,000 vehicle stops substantiates what Black Americans already know: police officers treat Black people differently than they do whites. This study, discussed in our briefing, finds that “police officers speak significantly less respectfully to black than to white community members in everyday traffic stops,” and that this happens irrespective of officer race, severity of the infraction, and outcome of the stop. These findings lend important context to the racial disparities observed in police encounters.
Separate reports focusing on policing in Chicago highlighted two law enforcement strategies justified as ways to protect communities – drug stings and asset forfeiture – that facilitate widespread targeting of low-income communities of color. Federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) arranged drug stings that set up fake drug stash houses and lured people into committing new crimes. But they didn’t single out just anyone: At least 91% of the time, agents targeted Black and Latinx people. Meanwhile, Cook County police conducted 23,000 seizures of assets connected to civil and criminal cases, a practice that is supposed to disrupt major illegal drug trades. But an analysis by Reason and the Lucy Parsons Lab showed that police officers were often taking petty property and the lowest-value seizures (valued under $100) were clustered in predominantly poor and Black communities on Chicago’s South and West Sides. These examples illustrate that at every level, the “war on drugs” functions as a war on communities of color.
Acknowledgements: This briefing was compiled by Wendy Sawyer based on previously published writing by current staffers Wanda Bertram, Alexi Jones, Wendy Sawyer, and by Policy Initiative alumns Joshua Aiken, Alex Clark, Lucius Couloute, and Elliot Oberholtzer.https://www.prisonpolicy.org/policing.html
Please Vote. Now. As soon as possible. You can find resources to register, ask for a mail in ballot, find your polling place, and help your friends and neighbors to vote at https://www.whenweallvote.org/vrh/ or https://www.vote.org
Dear Friends, In l989 when Mary House opened, there were just under 150,000 children with a parent in jail or prison in the United States. Now that number has grown to a heartbreaking 2.7 million children. This Advent one in every 28, or 3.6% of children in the United States has a parent behind bars. At least one half of these children are under the age of 10. None of them were ever tried, or convicted, or sentenced. They didn’t have lawyers. They never saw a judge, and there was no evidence against them. They have committed no crimes, and had no voice in crafting the policy that drives our criminal justice system. But they are nonetheless paying a price that will last a lifetime.
Throughout the last 29 years, while the number of families impacted by incarceration has steadily grown, I’ve sat down every year at this time to write to you about the work of prison hospitality at Mary House, and to ask you for your help in providing a safe place to stay for the children who visit family here in rural Wisconsin at the Federal Correctional Facility at Oxford. We are so grateful to every one of you for helping Mary House remain open to our young guests, year after year, season after season.
This year I’m writing again, because this problem continues to get worse instead of better. Your support is more crucial each year to our work to provide hospitality to these children who long to visit someone inside the Oxford Federal Correctional Institution, and for whom the cost of travel and lodging stands as a roadblock to preserving family ties. These are children who very much deserve the basic decency of a clean, safe space while they are far from home. They and their families are all facing tough choices, and the holidays are no break from those. But the children we see here during the holidays and throughout the year all share a determination to maintain relationships within their families, despite the fact that that burden falls unfairly on their own young shoulders. Some of them have traveled a long way to get here and we are so grateful for your kindness and generosity in helping to be sure they will find a warm and brightly lit welcome when they get to our door.
Here in the United States we account for only 5% of the world’s population, but we hold nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners. If all our inmates were counted as a single city, it would be the fifth-largest in the country, with a population between Phoenix and Houston’s. Our criminal justice system incarcerates more than 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 901 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 76 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, prisons in the U.S. territories, and a growing number of immigration detention facilities. One in 110 adults are incarcerated in prison or jail in the United States, making our current incarceration rate the highest in our history.
54% of them are parents. 120,000 mothers and 1.1million fathers.
According to “Shared Sentence,” a recent report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a child health and welfare organization, the impact on children of having a parent incarcerated is similar in severity to that of domestic violence. These children have a greater chance of experiencing physical and mental health issues, including anxiety and depression. Their families are less likely to be financially stable and more likely to be homeless. At school, they are more likely to be suspended or expelled or drop out. More than 5 million U.S. children have had a parent in jail or prison at some point in their lives.
For many of these children of incarcerated parents the trauma they are experiencing is the result of our country’s tough-on-crime policies and mandatory minimum sentencing policies, which have helped to drive a four-fold increase in our overall jail and prison population since 1980. While these children have been growing up, our elected officials have used a raging “war on crime” to build successful careers, and have been unstinting in funding incarceration: Our nation spends about $80 billion a year on imprisonment. But for every public dollar in corrections costs, incarceration generates an additional $10 in social costs, more than half of which are borne by families, children and community members who have committed no crime.
None of these children have had a chance to vote, but all of them are experiencing first-hand the terrible dysfunction of our so-called criminal justice policy. We need to recognize the cost to these families imposed by the need to travel in order to maintain the family ties that are the greatest single factor in a released inmate’s chances of remaining free.
Today as I write to you, some of these children are packing snacks and games and pillows and favorite shoes and t-shirts as they get ready to travel to Oxford this Christmas. The financial impact of incarceration on their families may have limited the Christmas presents purchased and waiting under trees in their own households, but without a doubt these children are carrying the most precious gift in the universe to the dads and brothers and uncles and grandfathers they’re traveling to visit – the gift of their own determined, forgiving and enduring love.
As always at Mary House during Advent these children stop being numbers and statistics and become real. They are eight and five and sixteen years old. They have big brothers and baby sisters. They are traveling with tired mothers and aunts and grandparents. They are excited to see snow, and some of them are cold and cranky. They like oranges and pancakes. They arrived with only one mitten. They might have been carsick on the long ride here from Detroit or Indianapolis. They forgot socks. They remembered love.
As a nation, this Advent finds us in a terrible mess. We’re divided and angry. We’re distracted by our own fears and uncertainty. We long to know what to do to make our world safer, but we don’t remember how to talk to one another with civility, what’s more love or forgive one another. We would do well to pay attention to these children this Advent, because they are navigating the troubled emotional landscape of our unhappy and divided nation much better than their leaders. They are just plain willing to try.
This is Advent, and while we might not guess it from the furious advertising and frantic news cycle on our phones and screens, these weeks remain a time to honor those who wait, who are determined, who endure, who can envision a brighter day, whose love is steadfast, and who don’t give up. I know that some of the children I’ve met during the past year are waiting now to make the trip back here, bringing the gift that has the power to change.
While it is undeniably true that hatred and greed and fear have found a new loud voice in our country, the undiminished generosity and courage of these children and their families is a mighty challenge to discouragement and hatred, and if their spunk and determination is any indication, kindness and love will win. If we are longing to know as we face the new year that decency is still within us and that change is possible, we need look no further than the determined belief of these children that the fractured love in their own families can and will find a new and sustainable way to flourish.
Our calendar is filling up now with the names of the families, both strangers and returning friends, who will join us for a small part of their Christmas school vacation. By the time you read this some of them will be here, and others will be climbing into cars. Their willingness to make this trip — getting up early on cold mornings and driving late into the night, packing not for ski trips, or Disney, but for a few days in a stranger’s house and a concrete visiting room beyond locked doors and a metal detector, marks all of them as the season’s most generous angels.
We are so grateful for your help as we get ready to welcome these families, and we ask you now to help us meet the costs of keeping Mary House’s doors open this holiday season and into the coming year.
We’re grateful to you for recognizing the bravery of these children embody as they do their best to remain connected to all the members of their families. And we’re grateful to you for supporting Mary House financially during the busy and challenging holiday season. Without you, we would never have been able to open the doors here 29 years ago, and without your continued support they would certainly close.
The longer I’m here at Mary House, the more astounded I am at the resilience of the children and families we serve. Nothing is getting easier in their lives: the costs of traveling to visit continues to rise, and households surviving on a minimum wage job are struggling every day. But these families are making the trip anyway. This old farmhouse, surrounded by frozen farm fields in rural Wisconsin may not be the season’s most coveted winter getaway destination, but these children are packing up love and getting in cars just so they can get up early and hurry through breakfast, then sit in a car on the side of a county road outside the prison until their moms are allowed to drive into the prison parking lot, stand in a line until they can take off their sneakers and empty their pockets to get through a metal detector, wait in another line, walk down a long hallway, and finally see the person they came all this way to visit.
These children and their familiesare an example to us all of the optimism and determination we will need if we want to make the changes we want to see in our country in the coming months and years . We are so grateful to all of you for helping us to welcome them.
For many of us, travel to see family and loved ones is an expected part of the Christmas season. But for some of our guests it is nearly impossible, and it is your help that tips the balance. Mary House receives no state or federal funding. We rely upon your financial contributions to continue providing warmth and safety, oranges and oatmeal, to the families who stay with us during the holidays and throughout the year. Will you help us once again to keep this old farmhouse warm, and make sure the doors are open as the New Year arrives?
I know that we have asked you before. We have asked you over and over for 29 years to help us keep responding to the needs of these families. Now, this year, I am asking again that you hold our guests in your hearts. And because the challenges faced by prison families are not about to go away, I’m asking you also to help us prepare for the coming years by sharing the work of Mary House and the needs of these families with your own family and friends this year, so that Mary House’s small but vital family of supporters can grow and sustain this work in the years to come.
Our heartfelt thanks to you for all of your support. May your own holidays be filled with the joys of family and loved ones gathered together, and may your new year arrive with courage and hope.
With deepest gratitude, Cassandra Dixon, for Mary House
P.S.: Please know that each dollar donated to Mary House goes directly to providing hospitality to these children and their families. Your contribution to Mary House, in any amount, is tax deductible. Please use the enclosed envelope to mail a check, or to donate online using PayPal or a credit card, please visit our website at www.themaryhouse.org. or use our PayPal link at https://www.paypal.me/MaryHouseHospitality
This August 6, on the 73rdanniversary of the US atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima in l945, long time Mary House friend Fr. Jim Murphy walked into the Strategic Nuclear Command Center at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, Nebraska, to deliver letters to the base commanders. Fr. Murphy is the pastor at Saints Anthony and Philip Church in Highland, Wisconsin and Saint Thomas Church in Montfort, Wisconsin. Jim was released later in the day, and is awaiting charges from the US Marshalls.
Here is Fr. Jim’s statement from August 6th, and an invitation to include your own letter about the continued threatened use of nuclear weapons.
by Fr. Jim Murphy
Three months before I was ordained in May 1981, Pope John Paul II visited Japan and the site of the first use of a nuclear bomb against civilians. In his talk, he repeatedly said: “To remember the past is to commit oneself to the future.” Thirty-seven years later, our and thus the church’s commitment to the future may seem unclear.
Since the 1980’s I’ve made many trips to Offutt AFB near Omaha. Thanks to the leadership of the Des Moines Catholic Worker, many of us remembered the presence of nuclear weapons and reflected, prayed, studied, witnessed, and sometimes crossed the line. The evil of nuclear weapons was not tens of thousands of miles away, as if nuclear destruction is unknown or no threat to our future.
In recent months, with the development of long-range missiles by North Korea, people in the US seemed to have just a passing thought that nuclear weapons may be a threat to us. There seemed to be no connection that US subs, planes and missiles are a constant threat to most other people on the face of the earth at any moment.
Last summer the UN gathered the nations of the world to support a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. As the nuclear powers refused to participate, there was little coverage to the 122 to 1 vote of nations to join the treaty to ban nuclear weapons. In November 2017, Pope Francis addressed an international symposium on a world free of nuclear weapons. He said: “If we take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of an error of any kind, the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned.”
NOW IS THE TIME for me to make the walk up the inclined drive at Offutt AFB and say that my spiritual leader has condemned the work of nuclear war planning. After decades of statements from the church about the evil of the use of nuclear weapons and the loopholes of working toward disarmament, I can now be a local moral agent to communicate the condemnation of the existence of all nuclear weapons.
I invite you to join me at the entrance to Offutt AFB, Kinney Gate at 10:00 am on August 6, 2018. Come and pray and reflect and announce that nuclear weapons are evil and need to be condemned. Bring or send me a letter to Col. Michael Manion or STRATCOM commander Gen John Hyten and I will attempt to deliver these letters.
(It’s not too late to include your voice! Send your letters care of Mary House and we’ll forward them. maryhousewis@gmail.comor Mary House, 3579 County Road G, Wisconsin Dells, WI 53965)
Like much of Wisconsin, Mary House had wind and water damage late this summer, from which we are still recovering. A number of big trees were blown down by tornados that passed through the area, a shocking amount of rain fell in a short time, and then continued for days and days, and our power went out, which meant water poured into the basement with the pumps unable to pump it out. Mary House was incredibly fortunate during the storm, as there was no real damage to the house itself, and the flooding here was much less than elsewhere in the state.
Thanks to the amazing efforts of the crews that work for Adams Columbia Electrical Co-op, a hastily purchased generator, and many many kind and helping hands, we are weathering the storm and its aftermath.
Many heartfelt thanks to my dear girlfriends Jan (and grandchildren!) Jean, Lynn, & Eileen who all provided food and traveled here, despite road closures, detours, flash flood warnings and uncertain whether to help cut trees and clear brush, clean, wash dishes, cook delicious food, and generally set to rights all that went wrong in the days after the storm.
In the weeks since the storm we’re so grateful for the hard work and the kind and cheerful spirits of friends from the Madison Mennonite Church and members of the Madison Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).
For the last 28 years I’ve sat down at this time of year to write to you about the work of prison hospitality at Mary House, and to ask you for your help in providing hospitality to the visiting children and families of federal prisoners here in rural Wisconsin. We are so grateful to every one of you for helping Mary House remain open to guests, year after year, season after season.
Last year I wrote that I had never had such a hard time being positive – about what lies ahead for the families who visit here, and especially our youngest guests. About the rough roads ahead in their lives as they navigate the challenging terrain that comes with being family to prisoners in the United States. About the struggles of these families to move from chaos to calm, crime to well-being, and poverty to security in the months and years ahead. And about the space that remains for love and forgiveness, even as we seem, as a country, to have chosen a path rooted in selfishness, distrust, unkindness and greed.
Now, one year on, the unchanged resilience and generosity of our guests, and the steadfast and enduring nature of children’s love, are proof enough to me that love still wins. If we are longing to know that change is possible, we need look no further than the determined belief of these children that the fractured love in their own families can and will find a way. While it is undeniably true that hatred and greed and fear have found new voice in our country, the undiminished generosity and courage of these children and their families is a mighty challenge, and will win.
Our guest-room calendar is nearly full with the names of the families — some of them strangers and some of them returning friends, that will join us during the Christmas school holiday season. Their willingness to make this trip, driving through long dark nights and cold early mornings, eating crackers and peanut butter on long bus rides, arriving tired and cranky and happy and expectant and impatient, offers a peek at the season’s most determined angels walking among us.
This is Advent. It’s a time to honor those who wait, who are determined, who endure, who can envision a brighter day, whose love is steadfast, who don’t give up. I know that some of the children I’ve met during the year are in that number, and are waiting now to make the trip back here, bringing the very best gift under any tree anywhere – their own persistence and love.
This season’s guests are planning their travel now from Indiana, Minnesota, Detroit and Southern Illinois. They range in age from two years old to one great-grandmother. They work in service stations, bakeries, schools, and offices. They are members of churches and the US armed forces and girl scouts. They attend daycare, and kindergarten, third grade, high school and community college. They are from small towns in the Midwest, and the big cities of Chicago and Detroit. They love to read. They like to play pool. They are excited to see snow. They like to dance. They are Americans. They love their families.
Throughout this year, as I’ve talked with families making plans to visit here, I’ve heard a heartbreaking increase of wariness about driving and staying in this rural and unknown place. More families are worried that they won’t be safe or welcome. “.. we want to be sure we have directions – the cellphone reception is bad, and I don’t want to stop…. Will the house be open? I don’t feel great waiting in the driveway if you’re still at work….” They want to be sure there is someone here when they arrive, and have good driving directions. Our guests have reminded me that they worry as they travel these roads that their families may be met by the hatred and violence that can sprig from a fear of strangers. They know how our state voted, and are less sure of a welcome for it. But they are also undeterred, and thanks to your generosity and understanding Mary House is still here at the end of that long drive, warm, light, and open.
We are so grateful for your help, and we ask you now to keep Mary House’s doors open this season and into the coming years.
The American criminal justice system holds more than 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 901 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 76 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories. The US accounts for only 5% of the world’s population, but we hold nearly 22% of the world’s prison population. One in 110 adults are incarcerated in a prison or local jail in the U.S., which marks the highest rate of imprisonment in American history.
Clearly this is not working and is anything but sustainable. The cost of warehousing human beings is staggering – both to our national spending priorities and to the thousands and thousands of lives and families impacted. And it is a trend that’s not about to reverse course: the Justice Department under Jeff Sessions now seems intent on increasing rather than decreasing incarceration rates. Since 1980 our prison population has quadrupled, and now fully 1.6 million American children will face this holiday season with a parent behind bars. These children were never tried, or convicted, or sentenced. They have committed no crimes, but are nonetheless paying a terrible price.
This Advent finds many of us struggling to find a way to defend and strengthen the kindness and generosity that that makes us who we are, and Mary House is no exception. In this time when many of us are questioning our lives and struggling with how best to stand up for what we believe in, what does persistence look like for Mary House?
This Advent, as we wait for the children who will visit us, and the parents and relatives that care for them, we are grateful for the miracle of hospitality, and lucky to be celebrating the willingness of these children to travel all this way, through bad weather in cramped back seats of uncertain cars on snowy, dark roads, and spend Christmas is an unfamiliar place with strangers – just to visit someone they love in prison. We need to recognize the cost to these families, and the economic hardship imposed by the need to travel just to maintain the family ties that are the greatest single factor in a released inmate’s chances of remaining free. We are so honored to have the company of ALL our guests.
We need to cherish these visiting children and their families, and be grateful for the small miracle of hospitality – the presence in our lives of the unexpected joy and struggle of strangers.
This year more than ever before, we are so grateful to you for recognizing the struggles faced by these families, and for your generosity in helping Mary House continue to provide basic hospitality while they are far from home. We’re grateful for your awareness of these children, and for your appreciation of their generosity and kindness. We’re grateful for your faith in them, and your insistence that they have the right to see and know their whole family. We’re grateful for your prayers and your encouragement.
And we’re grateful to you for supporting Mary House financially during the busy and challenging holiday season. Without you, we would never have been able to open the doors here, and without your continued support they would close.
Each year at Mary House I am more and more in awe of the women and children and families who grace our door. For many of the families we serve, life has gotten harder and more uncertain. Immigration changes have impacted many of these families. Minimum wage jobs fall farther and farther short of what it takes to raise a family. Health insurance has again become uncertain, and the cost of care threatens to rise for many. The costs of traveling here to visit continue to rise.
Yet these families make this trip at Christmas carrying love in the trunks of their rented cars, and grit and determination in suitcases and child-sized backpacks. While some of us are packing up skis or swimsuits in hopes of escaping the working world, these children have packed up hope and brought it along to an old white farmhouse in a cold field in Wisconsin.
These children are full of anticipation – despite the fact that before they get through the door at FCI Oxford they’ll have to sit in a car on the side of a county road outside the prison until the exact minute their moms are allowed to drive into the parking lot, then stand in a line until they can take off all their shoes and sweaters and hairclips and belts and hope to make it through one single slow metal detector, then wait in another line, to walk down a long hallway, to wait again. Quietly. They are so generous with their energy and so willing to carry their love such a long long way, over and over and over again, that they easily put the rest of us to shame.
These children and their families are an example to us all of the kind of determination we will need in order to make the change we want to see in our country in the coming months and years. With enthusiasm, with determination, with creativity and humor and stubbornness, and above all with bountiful and enduring love. We are so grateful to all of you for helping us to welcome them.
For many of us, travel to see family and loved ones is an expected part of the Christmas season. But for some of our guests it is nearly impossible, and it is your help that tips the balance. Mary House receives no state or federal funding. We rely upon your financial contributions to continue providing warmth and safety, hot chocolate and warm blankets, to the families who stay with us — during the holidays and throughout the year. Will you help us once again to keep this old farmhouse warm, and make sure the doors are open as the New Year arrives?
I know that we have asked you before. We have asked you over and over for 28 years to help us keep responding to the needs of these families. Now, this year, I am asking again that you hold our guests in your hearts as all of us struggle to find a way to stand strong for kindness and generosity, respect and human decency as we work to change landscape of our country for the better.
Our heartfelt thanks to you for all of your support. May your own holidays be filled with love, with hope, with courage, and with the joys of family and loved ones gathered together.
With deepest gratitude,
Cassandra Dixon, for Mary House
Your contribution to Mary House, in any amount, is tax deductible. To donate online using paypal or a credit card, please visit our website at www.themaryhouse.org.
Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.
Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.
We question ourselves.
What have we done to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?
Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.
It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.
Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.
Excerpted from Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem, By Dr. Maya Angelou
A busy summer has given way to fall at Mary House. We’ve had a steady stream of lovely children here in the past months, including some very young ones, accompanied by moms and grandparents and aunties. It’s always a little chaotic here when everyone leaves after the weekend, but among the lost socks and dust bunnies I recently found this beautiful thank you from a young guest.
We’re very grateful for your help, and happy that thanks to you Mary House has been able to welcome this summer’s guests.
We’ve had some wonderful help this summer, including a deep cleaning project of our guest rooms, the donation of a great new vacuum cleaner, and a long day of yard cleanup and driveway resurfacing from Madison friends and members of the Madison Mennonite Church. And we’re now able to offer visiting children a much nicer assortment of toys and snacks, thanks to the incredible shopping of an extremely generous donor this summer.
To all of you who help Mary House, buy visiting, by working, and by donating to the costs of keeping the house open throughout the busy summer and fall months, THANK YOU!!!!! We are grateful for your help and would be unable to stay open without you!!
We’ve had some wonderful help this summer, including a deep cleaning project of our guest rooms, the donation of a great new vacuum cleaner, and a long day of yard cleanup and driveway resurfacing from Madison friends and members of the Madison Mennonite Church. And we’re now able to offer visiting children a much nicer assortment of toys and snacks, thanks to the incredible shopping of an extremely generous donor this summer.
To all of you who help Mary House, buy visiting, by working, and by donating to the costs of keeping the house open throughout the busy summer and fall months, THANK YOU!!!!! We are grateful for your help and would be unable to stay open without you!!
How are we persisting? Recently a couple of people have asked me what the future of Mary House looks like – and it made me think about what we’re up to, in this era of renewed tough talk on crime, longer and longer sentences and booming private prisons. Apparently the answer is “more of the same”. We intend to continue offering the best hospitality we can to ALL of our guests, and we continue to hope that one fine day there will no longer be a need for hospitality for the children and families of inmates.
Mary House got some much needed care and maintenance over the summer.
Friends from Madison and members of the Madison Mennonite Church recently spent a day at Mary House – they cheerfully cleaned up some minor storm damage from earlier in the summer, tidied up the trees and plants along the front of the house, and recoated the driveway. We would be lost without these cheerful hearts and many helpful hands!!
We Have New Toys!!
A kind friend collected the complete cast of the Toy Story characters off the curb on her street and relocated them to Mary House’s toy room, and now they’ve been joined by an extremely generous donation of brand new toys from a generous donor. All of these characters have enjoyed lots of attention this summer.
And we’re counting on Sunshine!
Slowly but surely we are getting closer to installing solar panels to generate electricity at Mary House. On one sunny day this summer we got a start on the second of two roof structures to support them, where there is good sunshine.We are about one third of the way along towards a fundraising goal of $18,000, and would welcome your donation towards the project. We do indeed intend to be here to use that electricity!
Jerry Zawada, Presente!
Mary House lost a dear friend and inspiration this summer. Fr. Jerry Zawada OFM – peace and justice activist, Franciscan friar, and frequent prison inmate – joined the Heavenly Cloud of Witnesses on July 25, at the age 80.
Jerry encouraged the formation of Mary House long before the doors opened to our first guests. His own steadfast belief in justice and his sense of personal responsibility took him inside many jails and prisons, and he understood the challenges faced by families struggling to visit. We are deeply grateful for his encouragement.
Jerry served his early years as a Franciscan priest in the Philippines, and later worked with the homeless, war refugees and survivors of torture in Chicago, Milwaukee, Mexico, Las Vegas, Tucson and elsewhere. Jerry was imprisoned for two years in the late 1980s for repeated trespass at nuclear missile silos in the midwest; served three six-month prison terms for trespass at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning Georgia, and two months in prison in 2007 after crossing the line to protest torture training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. A few years ago, his advocacy for and celebration of mass with women priests earned a disciplinary letter from the Vatican.
Mary House Wish List
Toilet Paper & bathroom cleaning supplies, Hand soap, Laundery detergent, Dish and Dishwasher soap, Swiffer (or similar) cleaning pads for laminate floors, Firewood, Money for bills, milk & fresh produce, Juice, Coffee, Tea, Creamer, Sugar, Poptarts, Healthy snacks for kids, Breakfast cereal, Small denomination gift cards for guests to use for gas on the way home
Special Project: donations towards installation of solar panels next summer!
Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here. -Wendell Berry
In 1989, when we began clearing the weeds and snakes from the foundation of this old farmhouse, there were 673,565 people incarcerated in the United States.
Fritz Eichenberg
This Advent there are 1.57 million people in our country’s prisons. About another 12 million inmates move through the county jails each year, and countless more are locked up in immigration detention facilities, adding up to an estimated total of 2.4 million people incarcerated within our borders. That’s three and a half times more inmates behind bars.
25 years ago when we hosted our first guests at Mary House, one in 125 children in the United States had a parent in jail or prison. This year, 2.7 million children — one in every 28 of our own brightest treasures — will celebrate the coming holidays with a parent behind bars. Two-thirds of these incarcerated parents are locked up for non-violent offenses.
Our nation’s prison population is both greater in numbers, and represents a larger percent of our citizens, than that of any other country. And it is not possible to talk about our prison system without talking about race: Today one in every three black men can expect to go to prison, compared with one in every 17 white men. There are more black men in prison than in college in the United States.
At Mary House, we’ve been doing our best to offer shelter and respect to the families that travel to visit prisoners doing time in the federal correctional facility at Oxford, Wisconsin, for just over 25 years.. Oxford houses 1121 inmates — a small portion of that 2.4 million. And the children Mary House serves are a tiny percentage of the 2.7 million children who will start the coming new year missing a parent who lives behind bars.
But the children who stay with us are unique, special, one- of-a-kind, and as they clamber out of cars in our driveway this Advent, I’m in awe of their steadfast love and good humor.
If you and a child dear to you could pick a holiday destination to visit, it would probably not be a crowded noisy room made of concrete, down a long chilly hallway through many heavy steel doors, behind an electrified razor wire fence in a small frozen town in Wisconsin.
And if you are lucky enough to be a parent, or a grandparent, and if you were to imagine how to spend a handful of hours with a child or grandchild that you saw rarely — perhaps only once every year — this is probably not the setting of which you would dream.
But here is where these children will be for a portion of their holidays.
In recent days I’ve talked with some of the moms and grandmothers who are getting ready to make the trip here. This year these particular families are waiting in Ohio, and Indiana, and Michigan to travel here in the coming weeks to visit fathers and grandfathers who await their visits. They’re waiting quietly, and with a lot of patience.
My daytime job takes me into lumber yards a lot – Home Depot, and Menards and Lowes – big echoing stores where patience is in short supply, and it is harder and harder to find screws or saw blades because they have been taken over by a shocking profusion of plastic evergreens, plug-in angels, and endless, endless gifts. These are the days of shopping. But when I get back to Mary House I’m reminded that while we may be spending our days buying trees, and lights, and plastic santas and reindeer that glow in the dark, and racking our brains for the perfect, unforgettable present, these children are ticking off the days, patiently or impatiently, packing and repacking backpacks, stuffing sleeping bags and pillows and toothbrushes into cars and cramped bus seats. The perfect gifts of brightness and light and joy that they’re bringing across the states don’t require wrapping or packing, but it’s still no easy thing to bring them all this way.
Some of the families planning Advent visits this year have made the trip before, and will be familiar faces. Some of this season’s young guests will be new to me, and for some separated families this will be the first visit together in many many months, or even years. This isn’t an easy place to get to in the winter. Wisconsin’s roads are snowy and dark in December, and the journey here often starts late, after a long day of work and school. Many of our guests have jobs without flexibility, or paid vacation time, so they’re squeezing in this trip by driving through the night. And so many of our guests have been hit hard by the rough economy in recent years – and have yet to experience the recovery. Women have lost jobs, had their hours cut, survived foreclosures and moved their families. And still they are managing to get here.
Greeting these children and families when they arrive here is the biggest and brightest privilege and delight that anyone could ask for. They are tired and hungry, bright-eyed and curious, cranky and opinionated and determined. They are amazingly trusting – willing to fall asleep in a strange bed and eat breakfast at a strange table. Things that could unsettle even a seasoned traveler. But thanks to all of you, these children also find some familiar and comforting things in this house. Poptarts, and fuzzy blankets, and the entire cast of Toy Story sitting on a shelf just waiting to be noticed in the morning.
It is your generosity that makes this welcome possible, during Advent, during the coming holidays, and throughout the seasons.
Mary House has counted on the generosity of our small but generous extended family of caring donors for all of our years here. You’ve helped us to open our doors and keep them open, and you’ve warmed the space within with quilts and crackling fires, well-loved books and blocks and toys. You’ve put cups on the table, mirrors in the bathrooms, and salt on the icy driveway. Your generosity and the knowledge of your care for them has eased the travels and warmed the hearts of these dedicated families.
As 2014 comes to an end our national commitment to imprisonment continues unabated, and sadly it seems there will be children greeting the holidays with a parent behind bars for many years to come. And although studies show that maintaining family ties is more effective in preventing inmates from committing another crime after release than anything else, the burden of these visits continues to fall on children who have never been tried or sentenced or committed any crime themselves.
So we are grateful for your help. We’re grateful for your awareness of these children, and for your appreciation of their generosity and kindness. We’re grateful for your faith in them, and your insistence that they have the right to see and know their whole family. We’re grateful for your prayers and your encouragement. And we’re grateful to you for supporting Mary House financially during the busy and challenging holiday season. Without you, we would never have been able to open the doors here and without your support now, they would close.
For many of us, travel to see family and loved ones is an expected part of the Christmas season. But for some of our guests it is nearly impossible, and it is your help that tips the balance. Rising gas prices, increased bus and train fares, and precarious employment combine to make travel harder and harder for our guests, and for some of them the trip would not be possible without your generous help in sustaining the services that Mary House provides.
It is your support that makes Mary House a home away from home. That provides pancakes with syrup, movies with popcorn, and ready-to- assemble ornaments with glitter. For 25 years you’ve eased the burden on these families spending Christmas far from home.
So I am writing now to ask you, once again, to help us keep Mary House open during Advent and the new year.
Mary House receives no state or federal funding. It is not a project of a large and healthy church, or the United Way. It is staffed entirely by volunteers. We rely upon your financial contributions to continue providing warmth and safety to the families who stay with us — during the holidays and throughout the year.
Please know that your tax-deductible donation, in any amount, will be received with the deepest gratitude, and used with great care to provide for our guests.
Thanks to your help, the families who spend the holidays with us this year will be warm and treasured. Thanks to you there be someone here to greet them who thinks they have accomplished an amazing thing in just getting here. Thanks to your kindness there will be construction paper, and stars, and felt and glue and scissors for small hands.
It is thanks to your faith and confidence in the work of prison hospitality, we are able to welcome travelers to our door this Christmas, and it is you’re your generosity we rely on to carry this house through the winter months.
I know that we have asked you before. We have asked you for years and years and years to help us keep responding to the needs of these families. And each new year has brought new and different children to our door. Will you help us once again to keep this old farmhouse warm, and make sure the doors are open as the New Year arrives?
Our heartfelt thanks to you for all of your support. May your own holidays be filled with warmth, with hope for peace, and with the joys of family and loved ones gathered together.
With deepest gratitude,Cassandra Dixon, for Mary House
Members of the Ebenezer Reformed Church traveled to Mary House from Oregon Illinois this summer to do an amazing amount of work in one week! They were joined this year by members of the Presbyterian Church in Wisconsin Dells, and together they accomplished an awesome amount in a week. They removed some terrible old concrete, making the front yard easier to mow and clearing the way for a front deck. They repaired siding, helped clear up the debris left over from having a well drilled last year, moved and stacked firewood, installed a ceiling in the back porch, cleaned guest rooms, repaired screens, made beds, fixed playground equipment, cut down a huge dead tree – you name it, they did it!
We’re very grateful for all their help hope they’ll return next year. This group of dedicated volunteers have traveled to work projects in Mexico and a half-dozen states, and we’re so lucky and grateful they chose to spend a week of summer in Wisconsin!
Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie A Prison Policy Initiative Briefing By Peter Wagner and Leah Sakala March 12, 2014
This briefing presents the first graphic we’re aware of that aggregates the disparate systems of confinement in this country, which hold more than 2.4 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,259 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.
While the numbers in each slice of this pie chart represent a snapshot cross section of our correctional system, the enormous churn in and out of our confinement facilities underscores how naive it is to conceive of prisons as separate from the rest of our society. In addition to the 688,000 people released from prisons each year, almost 12 million people cycle through local jails each year. Jail churn is particularly high because at any given moment most of the 722,000 people in local jails have not been convicted and are in jail because they are either too poor to make bail and are being held before trial, or because they’ve just been arrested and will make bail in the next few hours or days. The remainder of the people in jail — almost 300,000 — are serving time for minor offenses, generally misdemeanors with sentences under a year.
Offense figures for categories such as “drugs” carry an important caveat here, however: all cases are reported only under the most serious offense. For example, a person who is serving prison time for both murder and a drug offense would be reported only in the murder portion of the chart. This methodology exposes some disturbing facts, particularly about our juvenile justice system. For example, there are almost 15,000 children behind bars whose “most serious offense” wasn’t anything that most people would consider a crime: almost 12,000 children are behind bars for “technical violations” of the requirements of their probation or parole, rather than for a new specific offense. More than 3,000 children are behind bars for “status” offenses, which are, as the U.S. Department of Justice explains: “behaviors that are not law violations for adults, such as running away, truancy, and incorrigibility.”
Turning finally to the people who are locked up because of immigration-related issues, more than 22,000 are in federal prison for criminal convictions of violating federal immigration laws. A separate 34,000 are technically not in the criminal justice system but rather are detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), undergoing the process of deportation, and are physically confined in special immigration detention facilities or in one of hundreds of individual jails that contract with ICE .
Now that we can, for the first time, see the big picture of how many people are locked up in the United States in the various types of facilities, we can see that something needs to change. Looking at the big picture requires us to ask if it really makes sense to lock up 2.4 million people on any given day, giving us the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world.
