Facts About Women In Prison:

• The female prison population has risen 275% since 1980.
• The crimes these women tend to commit are survival crimes to earn money to put food on the table, feed a drug addiction and escape an abusive relationship.
• 75% of these women are mothers.  Suffering along with these women are over 160,000 children left behind.  These children who are growing up in the shadow of the prisons are paying the highest price.
  

  John Hagan, Ph.D. in his document, The Next Generation:  Children of Prisoners, states:  The children of women in prison have a greater tendency to exhibit many of the problems that generally accompany parental absence including:  low self-esteem, impaired achievement motivation and poor peer relations. In addition, these children content with feelings like anxiety, shame, sadness, grief, social isolation and guilt. As these children reach adolescence, they may begin to act out in anti-social ways.  Searching for attention, pre-teens and teens are at high risk for delinquency, drug addiction and gang involvement. (Women’s Prison Association, 1995:9).

  We at Passion Flower Productions, Inc. believe that in order to help these children and stop the cycle, we have to go upstream and provide support, education and healing to the mothers of these children (and women in general).  We do this by providing relevant topic-driven events that weave education, discussion and the arts together to create interactive, multi-sensory experiences that are filled with grace. 

  These programs are voluntary and offered to the women at Hillsborough Correctional Institution once a month.