September 6th, 2026
Karin and I took the little boy to see his mama. She currently resides in a minimum-security prison on the northside of Milwaukee. The facility is a relatively small structure that only houses 98 inmates. It sits on a tiny piece of land on the corner of a busy intersection. There is a sturdy metal fence around the prison, but no razor wire crowning it. The Milwaukee Women’s Correctional Center (MWCC) is probably the best-looking building in the neighborhood. That part of town is a little rough.
We are trying to go to the prison every weekend. The visits help his mother to deal with her incarceration. There is no actual visitor’s area. The meeting place is in the cafeteria. We use the same tables that the inmates use for their meals. The room has two vending machines. Neither of those contains food that is even remotely healthy, and the inmates can’t use them anyway. Only visitors can use the machines to buy snacks for themselves or for the prisoners. There are a number of board games available to help pass the time.
The prison has limited visiting hours. There are three-hour blocks on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and three-hour blocks of time on Saturdays and Sundays in the early afternoon. When we were there on Saturday, I saw nine inmates with visitors. Usually, an adult was there with the child (or children) of the incarcerated woman. So, on that afternoon only 10% of the inmates had visitors, and based on my limited observations, it seems like it’s always the same people who have people come to see them. That means the vast majority of the inmates are essentially isolated from the outside world. That’s a sobering thought.
This prison has a very different vibe from the last residence of the boy’s mama. Taycheedah was a maximum-security facility, and it felt like it. The guards at Taycheedah were polite and professional, but the atmosphere was always tense. At MWCC the folks working there are friendlier and it’s more relaxed. It is still obvious to everyone who comes to visit that they are entering a prison, but it isn’t quite as scary as other places.
The boy’s mother is unhappy. She does not like it at MWCC. They make her do janitorial work five days a week. She thinks that they are stricter at MWCC than they are at another minimum-security prison where she did time. She has a roommate who talks constantly. Yeah, it sucks, but what can she do about it? Nothing. This is her home for the next 17 months. It is finally sinking in that she is not getting out of that facility until February 4th, 2028. That is a painful realization.
As I said, it is helpful to her when her five-year-old son comes to see her. They hug and laugh. I buy her a Baja Blast (a variety of Mountain Dew) and they share a couple Take 5 candy bars. A rule states that any vending machine food has to be removed from its wrapper and place on a large coffee filter before being consumed at the inmate’s table. I guess that is some security issue. I bought her son got a bottle of lemonade which he managed to partially spill in his excitement. I expected that to happen.
I am not entirely sure what benefit her son derives from the visits. Going there every weekend gives him some stability and routine. He needs that. I know that he misses his mama and this is the only way for them to physically connect. The mother does call the boy at least once every day., but that isn’t enough. For most of the visit the boy and his mom got along well. Then he needed to go to the bathroom. I took him there.
When we returned from the bathroom, he suddenly became upset. He had been playing a game with his mama when we left, and my wife and his mama had completed it in his absence. The boy had a tantrum. His mother became very anxious because she thought that she would get into trouble if he made a scene. Eventually, he calmed down. It took a while. Why did he flip out on us?
His new kindergarten teacher has experience working with children who have trauma. She lent us a book to read. It is called Building a Trauma-Informed Compassionate Classroom. One of the causes of childhood trauma listed in the book is having an incarcerated parent. Well, here we are. The boy’s mama is doing time and that’s the reality of it. The boy is trying to deal with a situation that I, as an adult, struggle to process. He is going to have difficulty regulating his moods. We are going to have to help him to feel loved and safe.
We have to work through all this.
Frank is Emptiness 