Women living with babies inside Ohio prison

The soft-spoken young woman sitting on the floor with her toddler son playing with toy cars could easily be in any setting. A preschool. A child care center. Or her own living room.

Instead, she and her 22-month-old son live in the nursery of the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, where she is a serving a prison sentence.

“I’m a first time-mom in prison with my first kid,” said the woman, who is scheduled to be released in early January.

She is one of six women and their children in the Achieving Baby Care Success program, the only one of its kind in the Ohio prison system. She agreed to be interviewed as long as the newspaper does not publish her name or her son’s name or discuss the felony conviction that landed her in prison two years ago. She is in her early 20s and from a rural northeast Ohio county.

“I’m just thankful and blessed to be here,” she said. “To be able to take care of your kid and not have somebody else take care of your kid. So even though I’ve made mistakes, my son still gets to be really lucky to be with me and to have me change for him.”

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