The ‘prison’ with no fence: Go inside a Charlotte women’s center changing lives for good
Two gray houses stand on a small plot of land in northeast Charlotte.
Inside, women swipe paintbrushes across canvases, mince vegetables with steady hands and, on occasion, glue their eyes to TV screens. Outside, they turn their faces upward to the sun, stroll through the green grass and water growing cucumbers in the garden.
There’s not a fence in sight.
To these women, it’s a home. But it’s also a prison.
The Center for Women serves up to 30 incarcerated women at a time from all over North Carolina, helping them adjust to the community before the completion of their sentences. It’s the only residential work-release program of its kind in the state.
Compared to most of the women’s prison experiences, it’s a paradise.
But paradise doesn’t usually have a warden.
The mission
Charlotte’s Center for Community Transitions (CCT), a nonprofit organization that provides reentry services to people and families who have experienced incarceration, works through a three-prong approach.
In their employment program, they prepare incarcerated people to return to the workforce and work with people whose past arrests are barriers to getting jobs.
Another CCT program works with families and children of incarcerated people and focuses on their social and emotional wellness.
About 80% of the women at the center are mothers, and most of their children are under the age of 18. Research shows that parental incarceration can have residual effects on children that show up as behavioral issues and other health issues. That’s why leaders of the CCT say that a holistic approach is so important.
And their residential program takes women out of prison cells and into the Center for Women, where they live full-time without full freedom but with more rehabilitative support and resources than a traditional jail provides.
Curating it all is a former corporate human resources professional whose door is always open to the women of the center.
“We’re really proud of our program in the way that we are able to address both the parent and the child simultaneously to disrupt the cycle of incarceration, lower recidivism rates for adults that may find themselves in situations where re-arrest is probable and improve public safety in our communities because we’re contributing to the economic development of our neighborhoods where people can thrive,” said Patrice Funderburg, executive director.
Women hear about the program through mostly word-of-mouth and can then apply for acceptance. There are certain stipulations — they can’t have infractions from prison correctional officers for a certain period of time, and must come from lower-security facilities.
Since the 1980s, the number of women locked up has skyrocketed, many of them Black and Latino. While there’s not one reason or one pathway, Funderburg said some research attributes it to the increase in the number of men incarcerated and women becoming the primary caregivers in the home — loaded with more responsibility and at a higher risk of poverty, putting them at a higher risk of incarceration. Some research says the trend started with the war on drugs in the 1970s.
Many of the women swept up into the criminal legal system struggle with substance abuse, mental illness and histories of physical and sexual abuse. They haven’t gotten the help they need, in or out of prison.
Kenny Robinson, who was formerly incarcerated, leads Freedom Fighting Missionaries, an organization that helps people recently released from jail or prison reenter the community. He says his female clients often face more barriers.
“It’s a very different dynamic for them. The same challenges exist for men, but it’s even greater simply because that person is a woman,” he said, citing motherhood and domestic violence as added elements. “The challenges are much greater.”
When they are released from prison, formerly incarcerated women are more likely than men to experience homelessness. It’s just one example of the ways their incarceration continues to affect them and their families for the rest of their lives.
Funderburg says that’s where the Center for Women comes in.
The paradox
When Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer near Minneapolis in 2016, Funderburg decided she had to make a difference.
“It was very much a divine intervention moment for me that just kind of threw me into work that I was called to do,” Funderburg said. “It was during that time that I also began to really get interested in movement building and activism and advocacy and who even does criminal justice work in the Charlotte community, which is how I found out about CCT back in 2016.”
She joined the CCT board in 2017 and took the helm in 2020.
“It’s the hardest work that I’ve ever done,” she said. “I don’t have a law degree or any of those kinds of things, but it means more than words can articulate for me to come to ... the Center for Women, and work alongside women as they’re preparing to transition.”
And Funderburg said she’s at a unique intersection, where she feels comfortable disrupting what people think about second chances. Despite having a sibling who was incarcerated, she’s hesitant to center her experience — she said it’s most powerful hearing from the women she serves.
“When I get to do that, together with folks that have the lived experience of incarceration, that’s a different kind of power that Charlotte isn’t used to,” she said.
The CCT was founded in 1974, and the Center for Women opened in 1987 as a contract work release program for state female offenders. Women must have at least a year left in their sentence and no more than three.
Funderburg is a prison warden, but she’s anything but a conventional one. When women at the center are having a bad day, she gives them hugs, sits down and talks to them.
And she’s clear about what she needs to keep doing the work she loves: more community support.
Of Mecklenburg County’s $2 billion budget this year, the CCT only received $75,000 in additional funding, bringing their total allotment to $175,000.
And though she’s looking for more support through community partnerships, she doesn’t have plans on expanding the Center for Women.
“I have to pause because my activist hat comes on ... why would I want to create another prison? I live inside of a paradox,” Funderburg said. But, according to her, the dilemma is natural: “I’m a Gemini.”
Robinson, who identifies as an abolitionist, said he understands her situation. The prison abolition movement calls for the elimination of the prison system, replacing it with rehabilitation.
“We do know that in order to have ultimate progress, it starts somewhere. She knows that no matter how many abolitionists there are, there’s still a person that has to be taken care of at the end of the day,” he said.
“I’d rather that person be in the hands of a Patrice Funderburg.”
The work is far from done, Funderburg says.
“For every woman who is released from here, there’s another one coming. So my work isn’t done until all of the women in the state prison system are not incarcerated,” she said. “What does that look like? I don’t know. But I’m here for all the disruption, all the pioneering, all the trailblazing ways that we can have conversation and think about re-imagining that.”
The solution
Funderburg sees the CCT as a model for what the criminal legal system could look like.
At the center, women are allowed small freedoms that compound to a feeling of dignity that’s been missing for decades. For some, it’s the first time they’ve felt it.
They cook the meals they want, they wear what they want, and they can shower whenever they want for however long they want.
It’s a stark difference from many of the prisons the women come from, where there’s documented mistreatment and safety concerns. Sometimes, they are denied the medical care they need and sexually and physically abused by officers.
“The current carceral state in the prison system anywhere in the country really is cages that are modeled after a militarized style of congregate living,” Funderburg said. “The focus here at the Center for Women is to provide not just a therapeutic environment, but a residential environment to begin to create an opportunity for women to remember and restore what it feels like to be at home.
“It really isn’t a prison because we’re restoring lives.”
And, most importantly for some, they feel human again.
Delilah Montalvo, director of the Center for Women, doesn’t know why many of the women are incarcerated — she doesn’t check their records when they arrive at the center.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” she said. The realization often brings tears to the women’s eyes.
Montalvo is a former correctional officer. She knows firsthand, she said, how punitive prison systems are.
“They’re pretty much thrown out of prison after doing so many years without any experiences to the world or any help with mental illnesses. It feels very much like caged animals, when you’re there,” she said. “The difference in here is we see them as people.”
She’s been at the center for 11 years, and said the feeling of seeing each woman leave as a different person is still as rewarding as it was the very first day.
“They enter here, their anxieties are high, and the prison is still kind of all over them,” she said. “During this transition, we’re stripping away that prison mentality and using different language and all of that so by the end, they’re just like butterflies.”
Robinson said that difference is because the CCT is rehabilitative, not punitive — and that the approach has been proven to work in other countries.
“Our criminal system is punitive in its forms and has no intention of rehabilitation — it only has the intention of punishing... because the ultimate result would be that people would move forward,” he said. “Most of the people that are in prison are Black or Hispanic. If you created programs that help them, they would move forward ... and that’s the ultimate fear.”
Since Funderburg began leading the center, they’ve had zero women return to prison after their releases.
Although it’s a statistic she’s proud of, Funderburg said the next step is no longer marking progress with recidivism rates and involving more of the Charlotte community in the CCT’s work.
As Charlotte continues to grow, she’d like to partner with more of the businesses headquartered here.
Corporations and their leaders influence state legislation, Funderburg said.
“That influences legislation at the federal level, and Charlotte is the kind of community with the power and resources to be able to do that. Why not through the CCT?”
This story was originally published July 8, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
