Vigil challenges governor, North Carolinians to reimagine criminal justice system

BY KELAN LYONS | DECEMBER 7, 2023 5:55 AM

Toia Potts’s son was so young when he visited her in jail that he couldn’t understand why he could see and hear his mother through the glass in the visitation room, but wasn’t allowed to touch her.

Potts did not struggle with drugs or alcohol, but she enrolled in a substance abuse rehabilitative program because those who successfully completed it were allowed to invite their family members to a pizza party.

“That’s what made me actually request to start programming, because I thought it was more traumatizing for him to see me behind glass and not be able to touch me,” said Potts, who was incarcerated for eight months before being released once her charges were dropped in 2019.

“I just wanted to join the program simply so that I could see my son in person,” she said.

Potts, now an organizer at Emancipate NC, recounted her experience to a Zoom panel last week. The conversation was about “keeping families together,” emphasizing the ways incarceration affects not just people charged with crimes, but also their entire families.

“Every time you see something online, we overhear conversation or there is something in the newspaper or in the news about an adult being arrested, let’s ask the question, ‘Are their children being left behind?'” Melissa Radcliffe, the program director of Our Children’s Place of Coastal Horizons Center, said during the panel.

The conversation was a part of The Vigil for Freedom and Racial Justice, an ongoing campaign calling on Gov. Roy Cooper to use his clemency powers to reduce the number of people in state prisons and address racial disparities in the justice system. Last week’s Zoom discussion was not about clemency but how imprisonment and poverty can affect children and families. It encouraged listeners to think more broadly about the purpose of incarceration and the ways support services can be used to address root causes of crime and parents’ involvement in the child welfare system.

Read more at: https://ncnewsline.com/2023/12/07/vigil-challenges-governor-north-carolinians-to-reimagine-criminal-justice-system/