Three hots and a cot.
If Yvonne Newkirk once thought about incarcerated people at all, that about summed up her attitude – prison meant three hot meals and a place to sleep. End of story.
But then both her brother and her daughter wound up in prison, and her perspective shifted, leading her to become a valued volunteer for the Prison Society.
“Yvonne Newkirk is the best of Prison Society; her time and dedication to incarcerated people is profound,” said Dzemila Bilanovic, the Prison Society’s prison monitoring manager for Eastern Pennsylvania who supervises Yvonne’s work as a prison monitor.
“She is a mother, a sister, a grandmother, and she knows what it means to be a loved one of an incarcerated family member.”
What Yvonne’s brother and daughter told her about the tough conditions they witnessed behind bars tugged at her heart strings and tapped into Yvonne’s hard-wired drive to help others.
“Both of them would tell me, ‘You can’t imagine what’s going on up here. People aren’t getting medical healthcare, people never get a visit, people never get mail,’” Yvonne said.
Her brother would call and ask her to go to court on a particular day to support one of his fellow incarcerated men whose sentence was being reconsidered. Her daughter asked her to find a way to assist a woman who didn’t have any family or friends to advocate for proper medical treatment.
As a mother and sister, Yvonne was helping as best as she could, but didn’t have the resources to accomplish all that was needed. Then, one day, at a friend’s house, she learned about the Prison Society, the access to the state’s prisons and jails the organization has by law, and its mission of helping incarcerated people and their families.
“That sounds like something I’d like,” she thought. “Sign me up.”
At the time, about eight years ago, Yvonne was retiring after a long and satisfying career at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where she helped patients waiting for kidney transplants.
She may have retired from her hospital job, but she didn’t retire from helping others. In Pennsylvania’s prisons, her efforts have paid off.
“I feel as if I made changes,” she said. One time, for example, she visited an incarcerated person who was being held in solitary confinement. As she was ready to leave, the person began crying, saying they were going to be killed as they were transitioning genders.
“He was crying real tears and it hurt me so bad that I had to stand against a wall and get myself together,” Yvonne said. She reached out to the superintendent’s assistant and helped arrange a transfer to a safer facility.
While Yvonne visits incarcerated people all over the state, she primarily concentrates on visiting SCI Chester, about 20 minutes from her home in West Philadelphia.
The main thing she does, she said, is listen – and listen without judgment. “I let the person I’m seeing talk as long as they want. They need someone to talk to. Some people ask, ‘What is he in for? What is she in for?’ I don’t know what they are in for. I don’t look up their records. I’m just there to make sure they are getting treated in a humane way.”
That humanity, she said, can be hard to come by in prison.
“Some of the guards are horrible. Some of the situations are horrible. Some of the food is horrible. They strip search them. They tell them to strip, bend over, cough. They put them in solitary confinement for 30, 60, or 90 days. They strip people of contact visits. They strip people from using the phone for months.”
Sometimes, she said, she gets discouraged by the suffering she sees and she knows other volunteers must feel the same.
But then something happens that restores her spirit.
Yvonne talked about a letter she received from a man in prison thanking her for her visits. Sometimes, he wrote, he gets so down that he thinks about killing himself, or so angry that he just wants to lash out at someone, anyone.
But then, he wrote, he stops himself, because “there are so many people out here supporting me who don’t even know me, and I can’t let them down.”
When Yvonne gets a letter like that, “the cycle starts all over again,” she said. “I can’t give up. It touches me inside. It touches my heart.”