My encore story began when I was 50. I was married to a lawyer, had five children and I was on the boards of a couple organizations. Most of all I was bored. I began volunteering at a career resource center for displaced homemakers. That translates back in those days to the women whose husbands left them in the midlife. It was there that Sister Margaret Beatte asked me to come talk to the women at the Baltimore County jail.
It changed my life. I began a nonprofit in Baltimore, Maryland called Alternative Directions Inc. and we provided civil legal services to men and women in prison. But of real urgency was finding a way that a woman leaving prison could stay out and not recidivate. How could a person get out with $50, find the first month’s rent, get gas and electric turned on, maybe a phone, money for bus fare AND get her children back?
I began a program called the Turnabout Program. We worked with the parole board and accepted women due to be released in 18 months to a year. It would be their choice – stay in prison or spend a year under supervision. The supervised women only had a five-percent recidivism rate.
Then the day came when I became seventy-five, the time people retire. I wanted a new project. So I began Second Chance for Women to provide women with life sentences the possibility of parole. I would go to the prison and interview an inmate one by one to determine if there were a possibility to help her. My main break came when I realized that I needed to carve out of my caseload the women who had been physically, sexually, mentally and verbally abused.
I am now 80 and we have 22 pro bono attorneys working on cases. Two law schools have taken on two women in their 40’s who were convicted when they were 15. One woman is in the Innocence Project. I knew her 30 years ago when she was convicted of setting fire to her house and six children died. I never believed she committed the crime. Two attorneys have been able to reduce two women’s life sentences to 40 years. The governor of Maryland has released two inmates – one was my client. She was a bystander and the man who actually killed the victim had been released 10 years before.
My advice on your encore? There are many ways we can get older - you can believe that you can do good, or you can sit at home and wish you could be doing good.