This Sunday I am celebrating my first Mother’s Day as a free woman.

In January, I was released from prison after serving 20 years. I was originally sentenced to 40 years, but then-Gov. Pat Quinn granted me clemency and reduced my sentence by half.

Until now, I’ve never experienced motherhood as a free woman. Because even before my incarceration, I was trapped in a prison of domestic violence.

I got married at 18, mostly to escape my abusive family. At first, my husband hit me occasionally, but before long, he beat me daily. Sometimes he hit me with his hands, other times with objects like a wooden board or metal bed frame. He locked me in closets, he strangled me, he raped me. He once slammed my head into a medicine cabinet. My face shattered the mirror, leaving me with a severely broken nose and six stitches in my eye.

When I became pregnant with my first child, I naively thought that excitement for the baby would temper my husband’s violence. But when I was five months along, he beat me so badly that I lost the baby, a perfect little boy. I lost two more pregnancies the same way.

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During my many trips to the hospital, medical staff treated my injuries but ignored obvious signs of abuse. Friends and family looked the other way, often terrified of violent retaliation from my husband or his family.

Why didn’t I just walk away?

My husband made leaving nearly impossible. He controlled my movements, telling me what to wear and where to go. When I did leave the house, his friends would follow me. He controlled the money. He didn’t want me to work, but when our financial situation required it, my husband would stalk me or lock me in the house during my shift, sabotaging every job I found.

After years of abusing me, my husband threatened to physically and sexually abuse our surviving children. I went into shock. I don’t remember what happened next, but we both ended up in the hospital, where he died a week later. I was charged with first-degree murder and took a plea deal, which means I basically waived my right to a trial and threw myself on the mercy of the court. The abuse I experienced was barely discussed, and I was sentenced to 40 years.

Incarcerated survivors like me are the rule, not the exception. Eighty-six percent of women in jail have experienced sexual violence, and 77% experienced partner violence. There are nearly 1,500 women incarcerated in Illinois right now; for most of them, there is a direct line between their abuser and incarceration.

Prison is worse than whatever you imagine. I lost all hope there and attempted to take my life three times. I spent much of my time in the mental health unit, along with other domestic violence survivors who never got the help they needed.
Another woman in my unit was convicted of murder after her boyfriend killed her daughter. Despondent and without any support or treatment, she hanged herself on Mother’s Day.

For women experiencing domestic violence, the criminal legal system is unspeakably cruel, and in desperate need of reform at every level. We need more resources for community-based domestic violence programs. We need to change laws that allow prosecutors to punish survivors for the crimes of their abusers. We need more and better ways for courts to consider evidence of abuse when survivors are accused of harming their abusers.

Changing laws takes time, but there is something we can do right now to help domestic violence survivors trapped in Illinois prisons. Gov. JB Pritzker has hundreds of clemency petitions sitting on his desk awaiting review, many of them from survivors like me.

For me, clemency was the only path to freedom. I filed a clemency petition with the help of volunteer attorneys and advocates. My prayers were answered when in 2015, Quinn commuted my sentence, changing my release from 2045 to 2025.

I now pray the current governor will use clemency to give others the same opportunity Quinn gave me.

Today I am finally free and grateful to be alive. Far too many mothers who experience domestic and gender-based violence do not survive their abuse; many others don’t survive their incarceration.

I beg Illinois lawmakers to create reforms that protect and support survivors — especially moms like me — and for Pritzker to grant clemency to survivors still trapped in prison.

Whether the prison is domestic violence or incarceration, every mother deserves the chance to be free.

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