Returning Home From Prisons

 The Baffler published Open House Decolonizing the family, one tiny home at a time. Disregard the title for a moment, this is a story about a person returning home from prison. It is a different story, and it is the same story.

Beauvais was born in Syracuse and raised on Akwesasne, a Mohawk Nation reservation on the northern edge of Franklin County, New York that includes land across the border in Canada. She had three children, ages five, four, and eighteen months, when, in June of 2011, she was sentenced to twelve-and-a-half years in prison for burglary in the first degree and assault and criminal mischief in the third. Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the maximum-security women’s prison where Beauvais was incarcerated, is a six-hour drive from Akwesasne and her children. During her incarceration, her son would cry when his school bus stopped and he’d see other mothers waving, knowing his was gone. Her daughter would point to a picture of Beauvais on the wall when friends asked where her mom was. Confined to a six-by-eight-foot cell, Beauvais survived her incarceration by imagining reunification with her children. “My children kept me alive in there. I needed to get out for them, they were without representation or support. It was them who went to prison with me most,” she tells me.

Shortly into her incarceration, Beauvais found a lawyer to appeal her conviction. In 2013, the appellate division of the New York Supreme Court ruled in her favor, and her sentence was ultimately reduced to two years. The appeals court rejected the felony burglary charge for what should have been the misdemeanors of criminal trespassing and mischief

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Beauvais returned to Akwesasne without the money needed to rent a home for her family, a criminal record that made it difficult for her to get a well-paid job, and parole stipulations that prohibited her from driving for six months, as well as from crossing state and international borders. Beauvais’s children had been living with her father and stepmother on the Kanesatake reservation in Quebec during her incarceration and continued to until she was able to provide a home for them. In the interim eighteen months, Beauvais stayed in her eight-year-old cousin’s bedroom, a period she describes as continued displacement.

“I didn’t feel like much of anything when I got out. They want you to fail,” Beauvais says, referring to the state-sanctioned authorities that continued to dictate her life. “There is no support, just a numbness after experiencing so much violence. I only started feeling like a human when people started treating me like one.” She found work as a sales representative for Discount Cigarettes and as a cashier at the Akwesasne mini-mart. She started to save up money. And in the fall of 2014, Beauvais was able to rent a home on Cornwall Island and regain custody of her three children.

While incarcerated at Bedford Hills, Beauvais had worked with survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse, and she continued doing so with survivors on Akwesasne. This time, however, she had the chance to work with men as well. “I noticed the men coming home from prison—our husbands, brothers, and fathers, the ones who are supposed to be our protectors, our family—were the ones causing the most pain,” she says. “And I saw a pattern. They were coming from violent homes and looking for belonging but getting it from other places, like gangs,” she added.

Beauvais knows how hard it was to come back from prison and reestablish a family home. And by 2018, she had witnessed enough family breakdowns due to incarceration and heard enough recently released men express feeling a lack of belonging that she began to think of ideas. “Family was the medicine they needed. I also wanted to decolonize our people and land, and thought how do we go the opposite direction of the past?” The answer she came up with is now known as the “Welcome Home Circle”—so-called tiny homes built expressly for Mohawk Nation members returning from prison or rehabilitation.

Not all of us can do this, but we all face this problem: upon ourselves is placed the job of reforming ourselves to re-enter society. What we can do for one another is limited. Most felons cannot have any contact with other felons. Yet, who else can help those who want to remain out of jail, who want to maintain a life that does not lead back to incarceration? If you do not want to, cannot, deinstitutionalize the incarcerated, then why let us leave prison alive?

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