A behind-the-scenes look at the making of When the Bough Breaks, taken from Producer/Writer Jill Evans Petzall's journal.

June 10, 1997

The subject of children with mothers in prison has been germinating in me since the early 1990s. I have been drawn into this issue while producing documentaries about spouse abuse, immigration discrimination, and child abuse.

To research this subject from the inside out, I have begun working with a grassroots group of former inmates, Catholic Sisters and other female professionals, including lawyers, social service executives, and me -- one eager filmmaker. Our group is officially called Mothers and Children Together, and its primary raison-d'etre is to arrange cost-free bus rides so families can visit inmate mothers. It turns out, ours is the only free transportation to the female prison in Missouri, and generally about 60 people can be on the bus. The female prison here allows Mothers and Children Together to arrange four such trips each year. With an average of four children in a family, there is, at most, just room for twelve families to visit each season.

As I assist on the bus, traveling to the correctional facility, the ride itself becomes the dominant metaphor for the documentary -- the long physical journey that symbolizes the emotional stretch between an inmate mother and her children. For it is here on the bus that the children come face-to-face with many realities about their mothers: the shyness they often feel face-to-face, their mothers' safety in bizarre surroundings, and their powerful need for their mother's attention.

August 20, 1997

Each time I go to the prison the sky is an absolute blue. Yellow butterflies move freely in the roadside grasses. Nothing on the way to prison points to my destination.

Each time I get inside the prison, I come face-to-face with three surprising facts. First, most of the females are incarcerated for non-violent offenses -- and the whole notion of a 'convicted felon' slips away from its predatory meaning. Second, most female inmates are Caucasian, even though there is a disproportionate number of African-Americans behind bars, given the general population in Missouri. Most surprising is the way most of the children steadfastly idealize their mothers, regardless of their offenses.

October 13, 1997

There is a game cabinet in the prisoners' visiting room. At first I thought it was strange that so many families hovered around their tables moving tiny pieces on a Parcheesi board. The dronelike din of the visiting room was often punctuated by the rippled slush of cards being shuffled. But soon it was clear how important these games were to mothers who too quickly ran out of conversation with their children because they hadn't been together for many months and they were all feeling bashful or angry.

These games bridged the gap of day-to-day ease with one another, after the hello hugs had been exchanged, after grandma gave the family gossip, after the children got Doritos or popcorn from the vending machines, after there were too few genuine feelings one could say outloud in that scrutinized arena.

When a person's every movement must be visible, when hugs between mother and child are

inspected, when nothing in the hour's visiting time is normal, one of the few possible pastimes is the artificial drama of games, with its winners and losers.

Dec 9, 1997

On the surface, as we rode the three hours Saturday to prison, the children and teenagers busied themselves with coloring books, CD headphones, and potato chips. Few cried, none complained. Occasionally there would be a familial outburst, mostly from the younger boys who were bored with sitting in their seats and restless with high hopes. Someone would eventually threaten to smack them, and they would settle into the pinch and shove of quiet roughhouse.

That was the ride toward prison.

The real shift in mood occurred on the way home. It happened in the subtle way a cloud of desolation seemed to wrap itself around each silent child; the way their caretakers, weary after hours of focused supervision, let down their guards and abandoned their parental tasks; the way no one talked mentioned the bustling visiting room of vending machines, plastic chairs, and cinderblocks -- a place that, once left behind, would continue to shape their lives always.

I can't help but wonder: what is our purpose in doing this film, anyway? Today I watched families and saw a mother struggle to feel contact with the growing daughter who was unaccustomed to her lap. I saw children bored with stale cookies and urgent attention. During the two hour visit, I saw mothers hugging their young sons furiously, trying to love them as fast as they could. But then, on the bus ride home, I saw a hefty teenage girl, her eye-shadow smeared across her cheek, curl up in emotional exhaustion (her little sister's coat thrown over her shoulders) as she sucked her thumb to put herself to sleep.

March 21, 1998

After a two and a half-hour ride, the bus pulls up to the state correctional facility at noon, only to depart as required at 2:30. An American flag and a large granite sign mark the entrance. The sign reads Women's Eastern Regional Diagnostic and Corrections Center. This maximum security prison has been designed to look like a cross between a rural college campus and an industrial farm, with groupings of low, red paneled buildings, trimmed with white windows and topped with gray tin roofs. Immense parking lots surround the "campus."

We wait in a long line to get processed, adults and children alike. At the entry desk, we empty our pockets into a tray and we hold out our arms to be scanned by a devise that looks a lot like a cattle-prod. We must bring one photo id and our SS numbers, which verify us as non-felons -- the toddlers too. (No one who has had a felony conviction in the past five years is allowed to visit.) Because each visitor's identity must be "processed" in the computer, it often takes an hour after our arrival for the kids to glimpse their mothers.

Sometimes, a visitor is barred anyway from going behind the huge metal door into the visiting room. Sometimes, an inmate mom has had a behavior violation a day or two before, but no one in our group gets notified. So her children may travel the distance, waiting in line to see her, only to be told they can't go in; they must wait quietly throughout the visit on the bus because their mother is being punished.

Sometimes it feels like the prison authorities are doing everything they can to discourage our organized quarterly attendance. In negotiating dates, we tell the officials we would be encouraging truancy if we took kids out of school during the week, so we go four times a year on Saturdays. Still the prison authorities resist our weekend busloads, and absolutely forbid them on Sundays. "If you must come on Saturdays," they have told us, "then you will not have any special treatment just because you are a large group. First come, first serve, only. Remember, our visiting room holds 150 people at a time. And there are, after all, 1400 beds here. You can not bring any food. Visiting hours begin at 8 am -- but remember, if you get in, the group can't stay more than 2 hours. Only individual families who come in their own cars can stay until dusk." Then they add, "Letting families visit is one of our institutional priorities."

When I enter the prison as a volunteer for Mothers and Children Together, I am not supposed to talk with any inmates whose children are not on our bus. All contact is closely scrutinized by the prison officials.

But I still get to see inmate women with outstretched, tattooed arms reach for their daughters' bitten-down and peeling fingers. I see big boys flush and lean forward after venting to their stored-up rage at separation, often yelling, "Do you know how long the bus ride took?" or "Why do you have to be so far away?" -- and they grab their mothers necks, cheeks, shoulders, to plant kiss after kiss on their mother's warm skin. The act becomes contagious, a newly found way to feel the validity of emotions in the rumbling midst of the more than forty families in the room.

June 15, 1998

For months now, I have been trying to meet women while they are together with their children and caregivers, to see if the families would be right for our documentary. The way I see it, the 'rightness' needs to work two ways. Our production has to offer each family member something that enriches their lives (not dollars, but a connection with their own inner-value). While for us, the families have to fill out my all-too-abstract checklist of racial and gender balances for the "complete picture" we are trying to present.

My criteria also include that the inmate's children live in or near St. Louis (which, being urban, is

the source of so much poverty). I want more white children than black, or at least an even number of white families to black because that is a more accurate representation of what I am seeing. I want some women to have an imminent release date, so our unfolding story can cover the difficult process of reunification. I want at least one child to be with a father to show the role of active men in the story. I am determined to counter all those mistaken racial cliches that the mass media insists upon every day.

July 20, 1998

There is, of course, always an elaborate paradox that arises when you are 'making a documentary'. What is the truth when there's a camera present? What can be spontaneous when everyone appearing there had already agreed to be a "character?" Art has always manipulated the tension between reality and artifice, but as a video artist, I worry: do I lean too hard on that tension? My documentaries aim at avoiding deception, sentimentality, and stereotypes. But it seems that in their very presentation of deeper truths, they must rely upon re-construction of on-going circumstances.

The poet Richard Shelton once wrote, "Don't believe what they say about me. It's true, but it's not the truth." I hear those ideas in reverse in my mind. Believe what we are saying. This is not the only thing that's true, but it is still the truth.

August 4, 1998

I have arranged for fairly regular phone meetings now with the inmates who are working with us. Since no one, not even children, can freely phone their mothers in prison, I have asked the moms to phone me on Sunday evenings -- collect, of course. Every three minutes a digital voice on our phone line reminds us that our conversations are being monitored.

One of the inmates Susie who we've been video taping has just given me a lead on a second white family. She is a friend of hers from grade school who is now also behind bars. She has asked her to phone me collect. Denise, has been incarcerated several times, all brief stays, all for substance abuse and prostitution to support her cocaine habit. "I'm not really a criminal," she told me, "I have a drug problem."

None of Denise's seven children has seen her in over a year. The three oldest are teenagers, John, Angie, and Tanya. They live with their grandmother, Margaret who is approaching sixty. She has had legal custody of the three kids on and off for the past five years. Denise's next three youngest children were already adopted out. When her last son, James, was born in prison, the baby was placed in foster care three days later. Only he has a chance to be returned to his mother's custody when she is released.

August 6, 1998

Dear Susie,

I can't thank you enough for all the help you've been in finding another "white family." Each time I write this to you or to Roosevelt's mom, I feel so peculiar, for the purpose of this documentary is, in part, to help erase racial implications when it comes to women in prison. And here I am, specifically asking for a woman of particular race! I know you both understand my method, for we can not tell a false story or paint a fake picture. But still, it feels odd to ask!

August 16, 1998

I visited Margaret, Denise's mother, today. The family lives in three rooms on the street level of a shotgun row house. In their humid kitchen, the high ceiling was all but caving-in while the two girls began to talk with their grandmother about whether mom got arrested for prostitution that last time or was it something else drug related. None of them agreed on the circumstances; each one was remembering something different.

Each child has lived through disparate emotions, although their experiences revolve around missing a mother who is in prison. Angela, dark and gawky, tells her girl friends that her mother is in jail; while Tanya shyly says she has no friends she wants to tell, only her 4th grade teacher. Tanya has a sweet, chubby face with pale, solemn eyes, and she hides her changing body within thick folds of youthful fat.

Denise is due to get out of prison in November this year, and she will return to this house to live with her mother and three kids. Margaret isn't sure this is a good idea.

"Mothers on drugs shouldn't be living with their kids," she says, "because they're listening to the drugs, not their children." Margaret told me that a few years ago she had to hot-line her daughter because Denise was living with another addict and neglecting her kids. She says none of the kids' fathers take any interest in them.

When a roach nudged its way from between some papers on their kitchen table, Margaret said, "I wish I could get me a better house. When I get my gas bill paid, then I will find a place and leave all this here. That way I won't take the bugs with me." I looked around at their possessions, clothing in cardboard boxes, mattresses on the floor, Tanya's stuffed animals. I was sad that her belongings had so little worth that she would abandon them to the roaches.

Margaret lives on disability insurance for manic-depressive disorder and advanced emphezyma, but somehow she manages to get the three adolescent children back each time they are placed with Family Services. She says she can't take on another baby -- but if Denise gets James back, she probably will. She smokes three packs of cigarettes a day, and punctuates her apparently unguarded conversation with deep, grueling coughs.

When I asked Angie, the thirteen year old counts her foster-homes at five; while next-to-oldest Tanya guesses she has lived in four. Their older brother John, diagnosed with an emotional disorder, has spent most of his teenage years in a home for troubled children,. He has recently been released, from a Children's home, medicated, and he returns there via a city bus each day for schooling, even during summer.

Scruffy and quite hulking for his fifteen years, John barged into our conversation, cigarette perched behind his ear. Angrily he announced he could not talk to anyone because he had a bad day. His thin eyes focused on nothing. Margaret never stopped talking through the children's conversations, but it was clear that John's bad mood made her nervous.

August 20, 1998

Yesterday we did a shoot with Denise's family. The contrast between the vintage appearance of their neighborhood outside and what goes on within the confines of those sweating, plaster walls is striking. In the stifling heat of summer, this is a flat without a fan or air conditioner, and no one dares open the windows for fear of enticing the druggies who regularly rifle through the trash.

It is hard to imagine what the family owned that would be worth stealing. The stained sofabed, their sagging easy-chair with one wooden arm jutting from the torn apolstery like a broken bone, the wobbly table and rusted metal stacking-chairs, the torn cardboard boxes piled in corners, holding all everyone's clothes and toys.

Taking out a stack of small albums, Angie and Tanya didn't seem to mind the heat while they

were infants and toddlers. The noncommittal teenagers turned into joyous children at the sight of their mother holding the babies -- as if she were their favorite character in a 50's TV show. After they closed the scrapbooks, the girls giddily put on knapsacks, left the house and headed down the cracked sidewalks towards the corner store, looking carefree as sitcom kids.

Our set lights made it even hotter and stickier in the house. By the time we got around to packing up our gear, we had been shooting for four hours. In the exaggerated heat, my hair was plastered to my face and I felt like I was combustible material. On the sidewalk the ninety-five degree temperature outside was a relief to us. John and Margaret stayed indoors, their windows closed.

September 20, 1998

Half way through the year's shooting of the documentary, already we prepare to edit some of the more than fifty hours of footage we have gathered so far.

This preliminary editing will help guide us where we need to aim our camera in the future. As we screen our tapes, I find it is too easy to get lost in our inmate mothers' realities -- and when I do this, I lose sight of their children and their lonely horizons. I remind myself that a mother's crimes, her possible innocence, her hopes and her hopeless mistakes -- these are not our topic.

As we begin to screen our tapes, I am finding that it is so easy to focus on our inmate mothers' problems -- and then, to lose sight of their children and their lonely horizons. I remind myself that a mother's crimes, her possible innocence, her hopes and her desperate choices -- these are not our topic.

I come back and back to what I think is the underlying issue: does love help people or not?

With all the race and class and cultural differences present in this film, love is the one priority we all relate to -- strong connections between family members, their absolute and arbitrary love. As we move through this terrain of convicted felons, we are visiting remarkable places where the language of love is spoken differently. But this pressing need for love can be the lens to understand the broken families we encounter -- and it is by understanding the ambiguities of love that we can relate unintelligible mistakes to the familiar ones we know all too well.

November 5, 1998

I read somewhere that if you incarcerate a woman, you incarcerate a family.

As I survey the children's histories, the pattern that surprises me the most is that with five out of our six families, the kids lived away from their mothers long before, during, and even after their mothers' confinements. They have primarily lived with other caregivers, regardless of whether or not their mothers were in the correctional system. Of the eleven children I am working with closely, only two of these youngsters, Missy and Laurie, have been nurtured or raised at all by their biological mother. In a way, it is the mothers -- not their street-wise children -- who are so ill-prepared for life....

This documentary started out concerned with what happens to kids when their mothers go to prison. But I find it isn't just about the time their mothers spend in prison.

To my surprise, most of our children (those who are old enough to think about it) tell me that they think their moms are better when they are behind bars. They are not trying to punish mothers who deserted them, for even as they say this to me, they miss their mothers terribly. At the same time, they don't quite know what it is they miss.

I keep going back to the day more than a year ago at a research meeting when our criminology

consultant, Dr. Richard Rosenfeld, startled me when he calmly proclaimed, "Moms are often at their very best when they are behind bars. That is the period of time when they have their acts most together." I was skeptical about this, but now the children are telling me the same kind of thing.

So I now wonder: must the belief that moms are better off in prison really mean that kids are better off as well? I find myself questioning whether these kids are in turmoil because their mothers are in prison, or is their tragedy due more to their mothers' drug addictions -- whether in or out of prison? And what is it in their mothers' own impoverished childhoods that brought them to that point?

Old habits recycle strangely between one generation and the next. But as Deeds, my Director, said to me the other day, "It is a vicious cycle. And the people who are the most vicious about it are the ones who are outside the cycle."

February 25, 1999

Denise was released earlier this month -- actually, she is on probation -- and within 3 days of her freedom, she had run away and slid back to drugs, prostituting to get them. At the same time, the police want the family out of the neighborhood, and Margaret told me on the phone that the officials have had their rented flat condemned by the city building inspector. This means the family has four days to move somewhere -- anywhere -- and they have nowhere to go.

Margaret thinks that no shelter will take them because of John's violent fits, (he has gotten them kicked out of every shelter in the city but one). Margaret lives from disability payments month to month. Because this is the end of the month, she will not have rent money for two more weeks, and no landlord will reserve her apartment unless she has the rent money in hand, as well as a month's deposit.

Denise tells me, her words thick and slurred, that if she has to move to a shelter, her parole officer will immediately put her back in prison. She claims she has been trying to enter a residential drug treatment program, but she is already hooked and everyday postpones her initial sign-up appointments which would only get her on their six week waiting list anyway.

Then Denise mentioned, more like an afterthought, that a few weeks ago she wrote her DFS caseworker and gave them permission to have James adopted. She said she hasn't told her kids yet.

I keep thinking about filmmaker Les Blank's words when I once asked him what was the hardest part for him about making a documentary. He thought about it a long, slow time and answered, "Knowing where to point your camera, so that you're not missing something better going on behind your back."

And now I can't decide if our crew should be at Margaret's house on eviction day to shoot this event. Would we be exploiting the family? What would more footage say about the fates of children with inmate mothers if we got shots of John crying about being placed in Juvenile Hall because he couldn't go to the shelter -- or Tanya stomping around the ramshackle house because, when they are evicted, she will lose the soft friends she sleeps with each night, for she won't be allowed to bring her stuffed animals to the shelter with her.

As a filmmaker, I cannot influence what is happening to this family's life, but whether I shoot this day or not, I am going to try to store Tanya's stuffed animals in my basement, secured in a tightly knotted trash bag. I need to be careful about the cockroaches.

January 20, 2000

Someone at a party asked me recently when I said I'm just completing this documentary, "Is your program going to take sides?" As I answered an emphatic, "NO! We have tried hard not to have it have any particular slant -- not after all we've learned." As I said this, I thought, we are all coached by those around us as to what should matter, from the moment we are born. If issues matter enough to Deeds and me to create a documentary, how can a point-of-view not show?

In the years of working on this project, I have come to believe that what matters would be easier to sort out if there were someone to blame unequivocally. Like knowing, ahead of time, where to point your camera -- at some wicked monolith against the ideal of the Good, some malicious force.

Of course, on the horizons of our story, there is the everyday, omnipresence of human greed; there is greed's underbelly: relentless poverty. There is the specter of the deep pocket politics of drugs, bulging with legal double-standards at every turn. Rock-stars and famous athletes go to treatment spas to kick their habits, while medically uninsured men and women are punished for the same afflictions. It is a criminal activity to self-medicate with narcotics, but TV ads fill their living rooms with blissful images of the prosperous, happy-family life on anti-depressants and other Schedule II psychotropic drugs. Most glaring (and invisible) is the fact that the only item a prison visitor like me or a woman's child can bring an inmate mother is not a book, or walking shoes, or writing paper, but instead, unopened packs of cigarettes. And during visiting hours, women (even pregnant women) are allowed ten minutes each hour to go outside with their visiting children and light up. Most of them are behind bars because of drug addictions.

An ex-offender I work with insists she would have gladly remained behind a locked door for several years, if what took place behind that door was real treatment for her addiction. She admits such cures take their time. And this treatment "time" costs no more than do wardens and guards and foster care and court costs and jail cells -- and the punitive hard-knocks taught to the addicted women's children.

But despite these politics of drugs, what I encounter at the everyday level is a sad series of competitions among best intentions: a poor woman's best intentions to mask feeling powerless or abused; the criminal justice system's intentions to keep order in our communities; the judicial system's requirement to carry out our laws and weigh the safety of an individual against the safety of others; the department of corrections' best intentions to house many angry individuals; social services' best intentions to juggle too many human needs together with too few resources.

Despite these best intentions (or perhaps because of them) there are major gaps in policies and in routine communication between the public agencies established to protect children. Throughout this country, there are no routine procedures established to protect a child's well-being when a mother goes to prison. There is not even a policy requiring that an arresting officer, as he drives a woman off to jail, inquires whether there are dependent children left behind at home. And if the women are asked, some mothers are so fearful of the judicial system that, to protect their children from being put in foster care, they may not even say. Then if the child is persistently truant in school, there is no protocol to consider the disruption that maternal incarceration causes at home. And if the child is in the care of family services, too little about the child's emotional history is explored before or when the youngster is placed in foster care.

And then (getting so very lost among the bureaucratic cracks) there are the inmates' children whose best and most natural intentions are to form identities according to the rules and norms around them -- in this case: anger, frustration, chaos, violence, and depression. So the kids remain on the outskirts of our nation's opportunities, and off-balance on the wavering tightropes of their families' instabilities. Ironically, it is not the inmates' children who feel hopeless; it is the rest of us who have no great hopes for what these children can become.