Via The Guardian US.
The night Abria Sanders got caught by police with a gun in her possession her life changed forever, though not in the way she expected.
“There was some stuff going down on the streets,” the 27-year-old single mother of two recalls, “so I took a gun from my friend’s house and put it in my purse.” She never made it home.
En route, she was stopped by police officers who found the weapon. Before she knew it she was in a Riker’s Island jail cell facing felony charges and a three-year stint in prison.
“I was so mad at myself,” she says, on a recent morning after dropping her seven-year-old daughter off at school. “I thought I’d messed up everything.”
Sanders could be behind bars in an upstate prison right now, with her children either in foster care or split up between different relatives. But thanks to an innovative program called Justice Home, available only in New York, she got to stay at home and look after them instead – an intervention that she says has been lifesaving.
Read more.
|
|
|
|
