How one LI mother became an unlikely advocate for prison families

Her meetings begin with the Serenity Prayer, a simple plea about accepting some things as they are but, after deciding what can be changed, having the courage to take action.

It hasn’t always been an easy lesson for Barbara Allan, who for nearly 50 years  has run a support group for people struggling to cope with the toll of having a loved one in jail or prison.

Like many of those she counsels, it took a while for Allan to realize she couldn’t change her husband, a violent alcoholic who killed his father in a drunken fit and once pointed his gun at her and set their home on fire.

But what Allan, a former Deer Park schoolteacher, realized she could do is change the criminal justice system — even if just in small ways — to help families like hers, who found themselves suddenly thrust into a harsh and unforgiving world that viewed them with as much suspicion as their incarcerated loved ones.

“For 50 years, I have been advocating for families in one way or another,” said Allan, who lives in Central Islip. “It’s always been kind of a forgotten population of the criminal justice system.”

At 82, Allan has begun looking back on her unexpected life of advocacy. She has self-published a memoir, “Doing Our Time on the Outside: One Prison Family of 2.5 Million,” and she recently sat down to discuss her work.

Emotional Prison

On Dec. 8, 1966, Allan was a 30-year-old mother living in Hempstead with her husband, Gene, and their two toddler girls. But on that day, Gene shot and killed his father in the Allans’ kitchen after a night of heavy drinking.

Gene pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was given a short prison sentence. But while the Gene Allans of the world move through the courts and county and state correctional systems, the Barbara Allans and millions of other families across the country endure an incarceration of their own, she said.

Families say they endure an emotional prison stemming from the separation that their loved ones’ acts cause. They claim their problems are made worse by what they see as counterproductive policies, laws and attitudes of workers in the system, who view the families of people in prison with disdain.

Many like Allan protest the harsh treatment they say they receive from some officials in jails and prisons, as if they, too, deserve punishment. They bemoan inconsistencies from institution to institution in visiting policies, and how seemingly arbitrarily those visits can be denied. And they fear that if they speak up too assertively, they could lose the privilege to visit.

It was these types of injustices that spurred Allan to form an informal support group for the families of incarcerated men and women. Then in 1974 she founded Prison Families Anonymous, a safe space where people who love someone in prison can seek help, offer advice or just listen to strangers who often become extended family.

Through the group, Allan has successfully lobbied for reductions in the costs of phone calls from prison and jail, which used to be much more expensive than regular calls and were paid for by the families of the incarcerated. She created a handbook for new families to help them navigate the criminal justice system, and even brought in cookies and change for cigarette vending machines in the inmate visiting rooms.

Allan had railed against non-contact visits, the practice of separating visitors to jails and prisons from their loved ones by Plexiglas. Her husband was first sent upstate to Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a reception institution for everyone sent to prison and the only facility where contact visits were allowed.

“Where was the logic?” Allan asked. “The people in that visiting room ran the gamut from white collar criminals to serial killers. If it was safe for us to have contact with our prisoner here, what changed when they were sent elsewhere?”

Allan has also long been opposed to the death penalty and solitary confinement, once serving on the board of directors of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, and she is a supporter of alternatives to incarceration, which keep nonviolent offenders out of jails and reduce overcrowding, while allowing them to pursue productive lives with monitoring.

Many of the reforms she has sought have become reality. Today, New York prohibits the death penalty and alternatives to incarceration are widely used throughout the state, easing population stress on a once-overcrowded system. The non-contact visits she endured when her husband entered the Nassau jail are a thing of the past, too.

Prison Families Anonymous also has a tradition, along with the prison ministry of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, of sponsoring an annual holiday toy drive for children who visit fathers and mothers in the Nassau and Suffolk jails during the yuletide season.

“Barbara Allan has been a longtime and steadfast supporter of families with loved ones in jail and prison,” Suffolk County Sheriff Errol Toulon said. “For many years, she and volunteers with the organization Prison Families Anonymous organized toy drives for children with parents in the Suffolk County jail, and she continues to be a strong advocate for all individuals affected by incarceration.”

But it is the monthly group sessions in Nassau and Suffolk that have been PFA’s main contribution — touching perhaps thousands of families, if without fanfare, for so many years..

It’s in these environments where families who are often ashamed of their loved ones’ actions can speak freely without enduring judgmental comments.

Attendees take turns spelling out their plight as listeners advise or comment. Some speakers become overwhelmed with emotion and openly weep, as others nod or offer a pat on the shoulder in solidarity. Allan brings both a box of tissues and sweets to each session.

For one Suffolk resident whose son has been in prison for nine years, the impact has been profound.

“They gave tremendous moral support,” the father, who chose to remain anonymous, said of his first PFA meetings a few weeks after his son’s arrest. “You’re talking about like a club of family members of people that are either incarcerated or in the process of going through the court case. ... They made us feel comfortable that we didn’t do this crime. It was my son that did the crime and they tried to make us understand that we can’t feel guilty for what was going on. It was his issue.”

JoAnne Page, executive director of the prison re-entry program The Fortune Society, which is based in Long Island City, Queens, praised Allan for her work.

“She learned by life experience and had the capacity to see things in much broader context than her own experience,” Page said. “She’s created a community among people who feel alone and abandoned and stigmatized and lost. I don’t know how many generations this woman has affected, but her work has multigenerational impact.”

Now, half a century after she began her advocacy, Allan can point to many changes — but also some setbacks.

Gene died of cancer at 61, three decades after his actions changed a mild-mannered suburban mom of toddlers into a feisty advocate. After several years in and out of jail, he, too, had changed dramatically, giving up alcohol and his violent ways.

Prison Families Anonymous now operates without a budget, relying on donations collected in a tray passed around at the monthly meetings, which are often held in churches. And some of the progress she pushed for, like Saturday visits at the Nassau jail, have been rolled back.

“As I get into my octogenarian years, I do so with a sense of sadness,” she writes in her book.  “I have lived to see the cycles and watched as the system swallowed itself and grew us into an era of mass incarceration, where punishment, revenge, and a lack of humanity is the norm.”

But her devotion remains as strong as ever for the families, the men, women and children caught up in a system not of their choosing.

“I write this book to celebrate prison families all over the world, we who have never committed a crime but have been sentenced to a prison of our own,” Allan said. “I hope I have been a part of the solution.”