When Our Stories Enter the Room: From Lived Experience to Legislative Action

Oct 5

4 min read

An October Reflection from A Mother’s Cry

There is a difference between being talked about and being invited into the conversation.

For years, families impacted by incarceration have watched decisions made about our loved ones in rooms we were never invited to enter. Policies were written. Programs were developed. Sentences were imposed. Prison conditions were debated. Budgets were approved.

And somewhere outside those rooms were mothers. We were answering collect calls. Putting money on commissary accounts. Driving hours for visits. Writing letters. Filing complaints. Trying to understand policies we had no part in creating. Comforting grandchildren who could not understand why their parent wasn't coming home.

We knew the human cost of incarceration because we were living it.

But too often, lived experience has been treated as something less than expertise.

At A Mother’s Cry, we reject that idea.

Our Stories Are Evidence

When a mother describes what happens to her family after a loved one receives a decades-long sentence, that is not merely an emotional story. It is information.

When an incarcerated person describes the psychological impact of prolonged confinement, limited programming, extreme temperatures, inadequate recreation or the constant uncertainty created by institutional decisions, that testimony matters.

When families explain what it takes to maintain relationships across prison walls for ten, fifteen or twenty years, policymakers should listen. These experiences reveal things that statistics alone cannot. Data can tell us how many people are incarcerated. Lived experience tells us what incarceration does to people, families and communities. We need both.

Something Is Shifting

Recently, A Mother’s Cry has had the opportunity to bring these conversations into new spaces.

Students at Salisbury University have been learning about the experiences of incarcerated people and their families while developing projects intended to support the work of A Mother’s Cry.

During one of those conversations, I shared the words of my son, Byron Greene, who has spent nearly twenty years incarcerated.

Then something happened that could never have been planned. Byron called. And I answered. For a few moments, the distance between a university classroom and a prison disappeared. The students were no longer discussing “incarcerated populations.” They heard a person. A son. A father. A man who has spent years teaching, mentoring, learning and continuing to believe that his life has value beyond the worst assumptions society may make about someone behind prison walls.

That moment reminded me why this work matters. Sometimes transformation begins when the person we have been discussing suddenly has a voice in the room.

But There Is Another Room

This month, A Mother’s Cry is preparing to enter another kind of room—the policymaking space. Our advocacy continues to bring us into conversations with people who have the authority to influence legislation, correctional practices and public policy. And when we enter those rooms, we are not entering alone.

We carry mothers with us. We carry children who have grown up visiting parents inside correctional institutions. We carry families who have spent decades waiting. We carry people behind the walls whose insight, intelligence and humanity are too often excluded from conversations about the very system in which they live. We carry stories that deserve more than sympathy. They deserve consideration. They deserve response. And, when those stories reveal injustice, they deserve action.

From Testimony to Policy

This is the next challenge for advocacy. We cannot allow lived experience to become something people simply hear, applaud and then forget. A powerful testimony should lead to a question: What are we going to do about it? If incarcerated people demonstrate years of rehabilitation, should our laws provide meaningful opportunities for review? If families repeatedly report dangerous or inhumane prison conditions, what mechanisms exist to ensure accountability? If people complete educational programs, mentor others, maintain years without disciplinary infractions and demonstrate genuine transformation, how should that growth factor into decisions about their future? If families are expected to support successful reentry, why are those same families so rarely included when correctional policies are developed?

These are not theoretical questions for us. They are lived ones.

We Are Not Asking to Be Observed

There is also something important we must say as this work expands. Families impacted by incarceration are not case studies. Incarcerated people are not classroom exercises. Their pain is not content. Their words, writings, ideas and experiences belong to them. When someone entrusts us with their story, we have a responsibility to handle it with dignity. Advocacy must never reproduce the very thing we are fighting against by taking someone's voice away from them. Whenever possible, people should be given the opportunity to speak for themselves.

And when they cannot physically enter the room, we must make certain their words enter with the integrity with which they were given.

When Our Stories Enter the Room

I have spent years standing outside rooms asking people to listen. Today, some of those doors are opening. Universities are listening. Community leaders are listening. Advocates are listening. Policymakers are beginning to listen. But access to the room is not the destination.

Change is.

A Mother’s Cry will continue carrying the voices of mothers, families and incarcerated people into spaces where decisions are made. We will continue asking difficult questions. We will continue challenging systems that have learned to discuss people without hearing them. And we will continue reminding every room we enter: There is a human being behind every identification number. There is a family behind every sentence. There is a mother behind many of those prison walls—waiting, advocating, praying and refusing to allow her loved one to disappear. Our stories have entered the room.

Now, what will the room do with them?