Update

Inevitably, the moment arrives. 

Prison visiting hours are over. There’s time for one more embrace. 

“You tell them you love them. Then you turn one way, and they turn the other,” said Faith, of Philadelphia, a mother visiting her son locked up a hundred miles and a world away in the middle of the Pennsylvania mountains. 

“It’s that look when they see you leaving…well, you just have to deal with it,” she said. “You cover your feelings for their sake. You don’t want them to see you break down.”

As heartbreaking as that is, there’s a vehicle for hope.

Engine humming, door open, the 40-seat passenger bus parked outside the prison gates, waiting to take Faith and others back to their homes in Philadelphia gives hope. 

More importantly, as part of the Prison Society’s Bus Service, additional buses will be available in December, April, and July to bring Faith to visit her son, Durand, at State Correctional Institution Mahanoy. 

“You are just thankful — thankful and grateful — that you have someone to take you to the prison and from the prison,” she said. “By taking us up there, keeping that connection — that brings hope. 

“And we all need hope.”

It’s nice that Faith and her son can see each other — each trying to best the other in endless rounds of the card game Uno in the prison visitors’ room. He needs the hope, and so does she, because a mother never stops worrying about her son, even though he’s now a grown man on the far side of 45.

“I need to go from head to toe in a matter of seconds and see that he’s OK,” she said. “I have to see and touch and feel him and then I’m at peace with myself.”

But the impact of these visits goes well beyond one mother and one son, or even many family members and their loved ones, as important as those family connections are. 

Research shows that people in prison who have had regular visitors — even as few as four a year — are 50% less likely to return to prison. They maintain ties with friends and family members who can support them when they re-enter society.

By contrast, nearly two-thirds of people who receive no visitors wind up back in prison.

It’s not a good statistic and that’s why the Prison Society is working to expand bus service for families visiting loved ones in prison. People in prison and their families are able to connect by phone and video chats, but nothing replaces in person connection. 

For 18 years, with funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC), the Prison Society had sponsored bus trips to 21 state prisons — 10 trips a month, facilitating over 3,000 visits a year. 

All that ended abruptly during the COVID pandemic when prisons suspended in-person visits. It was devastating for Faith, who was a regular rider on the Prison Society bus and even took her three young grandchildren to visit their father when he first went to prison in 2009 at age 30.

After the visits and bus trips stopped in 2019, Faith wasn’t able to visit her son for five years. 

The Prison Society considered the trips a key part of its mission to connect incarcerated people and their families, particularly families from the Commonwealth’s largest cities, where many people don’t own cars. And even those that do may not be able to afford the gas, tolls, and wear-and-tear on their vehicles. Sometimes, because the prisons are so far away, it might be necessary to rent a hotel room, raising the price of a single visit to over $300 in expenses, unaffordable for many. 

However, these days, with funding from the city of Philadelphia and with logistical help from the Department of Corrections, the Prison Society is running buses from Philadelphia to four state facilities — Mahanoy, Frackville, Benner, and Muncy, the women’s prison.

“When you are right there and you see the [barbed] wires before you and you see the prison, it’s a feeling of deep depression,” Faith said, describing her emotions as the bus pulls up to the prison housing her son.

 “But at the same time, you have that joy and excitement to see them,” she said. “You feel happy.” 

If you would like to visit your loved one, book your trip here.

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