Prison life gives women new perspective on drug addictions

FRANKLIN, Ind. -- When relatives pour into Atterbury Correctional Facility for Sunday afternoon visits with female offenders, Anita Emery finds a quiet place to write letters to her sons.\nShe has not seen her children, Brandon, 18, and Caylan, 14, for 13 months.\n"That's the hardest part," Emery says tearfully, "when you don't get to see or touch or smell your children or hug them or tell them you love them every night."\nFor 11 months before being sentenced, Emery, 40, could only peer at her boys through glass when they visited her at the county jail in Elwood. \nEmery's story began as a high school student in Elwood. She was a tall, thin, attractive middle child of five, the oldest daughter of a passive mother and an alcoholic father.\nHer dad worked hard every day. But he drank heavily on weekends, Emery says.\n"When he was home, he was drinking," she says. \nAs a high school student, Emery was arrested twice for underage drinking.\n"It was pretty much a slap on the hand," she says. "Just six months of informal probation."\nAt 23, Emery relocated to Indianapolis. She worked in factories or waited tables or tended bars. She completed an advanced travel training course at community college.\nBut alcohol got in her way again.\n"I started getting arrested for (driving under the influence)," she says. "I got five DUIs and one arrest for habitual offender."\nBy age 38, Emery had been raped at a party, anhad been arrested for driving under the influence for the fifth time.\n"I never really knew how to express my pain," she says. "I learned early in life that alcohol could numb that pain."\nSince her incarceration at Atterbury Correctional Facility, she has discovered another way to live her life, Emery says. She attends substance-abuse education classes and a 12-step program. She is learning how addiction affected, then stole, her relationship with her sons.\nIn the end, alcohol took her freedom.\nShe sleeps on a bunk in a crowded dorm room every night. And she aches when she glances at photographs of her boys, taped on the front of her metal locker.\nBut she is not bitter, Emery says.\n"When I get up in the morning, I thank God for another day," she says. \nSandra O'Bannon, 47, was the oldest child raised in a loving single-parent family in Elkhart. She dropped out of high school her junior year but never drank alcohol until her 21st birthday.\nO'Bannon was a happy wife and mother of two until 1988, when she says a relative introduced her to cocaine.\n"He told me he wanted me to try something," she says. "And that's how it started."\nFor a while, their use was controlled, O'Bannon says. \n"Then I was using every day," O'Bannon says. "I was smoking it. He had taught me how to cook it up."\nOne evening in January 1999, O'Bannon had a beer with her uncle, left his house and on her way, an acquaintance asked if she could help him score some cocaine.\n"First, I said, 'Are you 5-O?' Like, are you police? And he said, 'No. Are you 5-O?' I even patted him down," O'Bannon says. \nO'Bannon instructed the acquaintance to drive to her friend's house. With his $20 in hand, she went inside the dealer's home and returned with the cocaine.\nShortly after the buy, the man stopped his vehicle, popped the trunk and stepped out of the car.\n"That's when two task force cops got out of the trunk," O'Bannon says.\n"I knew I was going to prison. It was a $20 rock. That was my demise."\nIn the 13 months since arriving at Atterbury, O'Bannon has earned her GED, become a tutor for other women. She attends substance abuse classes and Narcotics Anonymous meetings.\n"There's only two ways to go when you're drinking and using drugs: to prison or you die," shes says.\nO'Bannon shares her story with high school students as part of a Speaker's Bureau, sponsored by the Atterbury Correctional Facility.\n"I really enjoy speaking to the younger kids," she says. "It's very encouraging for me, and I'm glad to do it for them. It helps me as much as it helps them."\nOther inmates, like O'Bannon, offer tutoring and nurturing to new offenders, or participate in community service projects such as Speaker's Bureau.\n"For them to be able to do something worthwhile for someone puts self-worth back in their lives," says Jane Burns, superintendent at the Atterbury Correctional Facility.\n"When they get here, they're already feeling pretty insignificant," Burns says.\nO'Bannon says being apart from her children causes her pain. Watching other offenders deal with being separated from their children also hurts her.\nBut she looks for the life lessons and tries to help other offenders find new beginnings while they are incarcerated.\n"I'm just thankful for the time I've spent here," O'Bannon says. "I didn't start growing up 'til I was 35. Things started happening to me. And I started having to take responsibility at that age"