Martha Rial, Post-Gazette photos Michelle Minko tries to get a friend on the phone while serving time for her fourth drunken-driving charge in the Allegheny County Jail.

Story by Cristina Rouvalis
Photos by Martha Rial
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Michelle Minko called her son collect the morning of his 11th birthday party to explain why she couldn't come. "Tanner," she said, sobbing, "I am in jail."

"Why are you in jail now, Mom?" he asked.

Michelle, convicted on a fourth drunken-driving charge, had been in jail before, a few weeks here and there. But this time, it was bad -- a one-year sentence.

The 30-year-old mother would spend most of it in the Allegheny County Jail, where she survived sleepless nights, spats with other women, the guilt of missing milestones in her son's life.

Six paces this way, six paces that way. That's the extent of Michelle Minko's home in the Allegheny County jail where she returned last fall after being thrown out of a drug rehab program. Doing 200 sit-ups a night keeps her fit, staying out of fights keeps her safe. Click photo for larger image. The Series Part Two: When mom's behind bars: Staying out of jail is the hard part Slideshow: Helping jailed moms to cope

Six months after that tearful phone call, she was released to a West End house for recovering female addicts. Two weeks later, on Oct. 9, Tanner came to visit, a rare high point in the emotional journey he and his mother would take over the year.

The sandy-haired boy in paint-ball splashed pants bounded into the group house, past a few hard-looking women in the kitchen, down the basement steps and into his mother's arms.

"Tanner!" Michelle shrieked.

They hung out like old times, eating from her night-stand stash of candy, jumping on the plaid bedspread together and playing Yatzee.

"He's a Yatzee shark," Michelle announced before putting her arm around him. "I am going to kick your butt."

A Boy Scout and skateboarder with a sweet manner, Tanner beamed at his mom. He has not lived with her since kindergarten, when he moved in with his paternal grandparents. He was proud of his "cool" mom standing before him in a flowing chiffon thrift-store top. She could pass for 20, not one of those moms who look 60.

Michelle was a whirl of nervous energy with a loud, throaty voice, but she was much calmer than the days when she was downing a fifth of Southern Comfort and Amaretto, chasing it with beer.

"She is good," Tanner said. "Much better than before. She would get drunk a lot. She would get crazy."

Photos of her son, Tanner, 11, bring a smile to Michelle's face. The boy lives with his paternal grandparents in Washington County. Click photo for larger image.

'She has to pay for it'
Nationwide, more than 2 million children have a parent behind bars, and a growing number are mothers.

In 2002, some 112,300 mothers with children under 18 spent time in jail or prison, double the number in 1991, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

On any given day in Allegheny County, 7,000 children live with the hurt of having a parent behind bars. They live in every ZIP code, every school district. Half are white and half are black.

"It touches every community," said Claire Walker, executive director of the Pittsburgh Child Guidance Foundation, which conducted a survey of parents in the county jail. "We have a lot of prejudices about who is in jail."

Prison dads are still far more common than prison moms. But a growing number of children are watching their mothers placed in handcuffs and taken away. Or they come home from school to live under a cloud of shame. Or relatives make up stories about Mom going to the hospital or away on a trip.

But Tanner knows the truth.

"Some people said, 'You didn't tell him, did you?' But you have to tell him," said Karen Halligan, his father's stepmother, the kindly woman Tanner calls Gram. "Kids know. People will tell them."

Tanner was upset when his mother went to jail, worried that something awful would happen to her, unsettled when he didn't hear from her during one spell.

"Why did she do it?" Tanner asked Gram.

"Your mother did a bad thing," she answered. "She has to pay for it."

Big steps for both
It's September, five months into her sentence, and Michelle is pacing.

Six steps forward. Six steps back.

Back and forth, back and forth.

Like a tiger trapped in a 10- by six-foot cage.

She does 200 sit-ups a night on her metal jail bed. Twenty at a time.

Michelle and Tanner at a reunion last fall at a house in the West End for recovering female addicts run by the Next Step Foundation. A few weeks later, she was back in jail. Click photo for larger image.

Her cellmate has left, and she is throbbing with pent-up energy. There is no audience for her nonstop talking.

Michelle has argued with a few cellmates but has stayed out of fights. "If you get in a fight with a 200-pound girl, you could lose all your teeth."

She is itching to get out. She can practically taste freedom now that she has been accepted by a drug rehabilitation program. Any day now.

A recent letter from Tanner sustains her.

"Dear Mom, I can do so much more stuff on my skateboard. I'm so happy. There is also a game on the computer that is really fun. I miss you a lot but I don't know if I'm going to see you, but if I do, I can't wait. If I do see you, I can tell you about skool. Sincerely, Tanner."

Michelle and 19 other female inmates in red scrubs are in a pre-release program in jail run by Lydia's Place, a nonprofit group for female inmates and their children.

Many mothers get discouraged when they can't find a job or a place to live once they get out of jail. Most are aching for their children back.

"Most of them want their lives back instantly," says Vernetta Byrd, program coordinator with Lydia's Place.

But their lives are a complicated mess, hard to untangle, even without adding the stress of motherhood.

Michelle often sounds as if there is a three-ring circus in her head as she lurches from subject to subject, laughing one moment, fighting tears the next, blaming herself one moment, blaming everyone else the next. Her long thick mane of brown hair frames haunted brown eyes.

She divulges the painful details of her past to help other incarcerated mothers and their children. Even as a girl growing up in Oakdale, she had emotional problems and was always fighting with her parents, her teachers, everyone and anyone.

"I was an out-of-control kid," she says. Her parents thought she was hyperactive, but she was diagnosed as bipolar when she was about 13. When she was 16, her parents sent her to a group home in Peters. Michelle burned with resentment, particularly toward her mother, who did not visit for several years.

At age 19, she gave birth to Tanner, and, about a year later, she broke up with his father. She says she married another man, had a daughter with him and divorced after a few years. The girl now lives with her father.

Michelle, 30, cries tears of joy as she is led from Common Pleas Judge David Cashman's courtroom in February after receiving a sentence of house arrest instead of more jail time. She's out of jail, but she will probably miss another of her son's birthdays because she can't leave the county without permission. Click photo for larger image.

Michelle worked on and off as a stripper. She was good at it. Flirting and dancing came naturally. The money was good, tips of $200 to $500 a night. Even though she had earned a degree as a pharmacy technician, she never pursued it.

Michelle says she became unhinged at age 22 when her mother killed herself. It was then, she says, that she became an addict, first heavy drinking, then cocaine and later crack. Her life dissolved into a self-destructive blur.

So she moved Tanner to the Washington County town of Prosperity to live with his paternal grandparents, the Halligans, far from the temptations of her partying life. "It's Ma-and-Pa's Boarding House. They would give the shirt off their back to help other people. They are angels. If it weren't for them, I don't know what I would do."

Michelle knows she did the right thing. But she is wracked with guilt over not seeing her daughter, of living apart from Tanner.

"I never did drugs around Tanner, but I did take him to the bar. He would throw darts. There are situations my son should have never been around.

"Every time I tell my son I am done drinking, he says, 'Yeah.' That's bad, when your son knows you have a drinking problem and he is 11 years old."

But Michelle resolves to stay clean this time. She says she wants nothing of her old hard-partying life. Not even her old clothes.

Two weeks later, she gets her wish of freedom. She is accepted into a drug rehabilitation program run by Next Step Foundation.

Fresh air again
Waiting on a bench by the jail exit Sept. 28, Michelle looks tiny in her size 5 jeans and a blue sweat shirt, toting a clear plastic bag of toiletries, her only worldly possessions.

David Francis, who runs the McKees Rocks-based transitional housing program, greets her at the door.

Michelle runs outside and inhales the crisp fall air. As she climbs into Mr. Francis' car, she flicks cigarette ashes out the window, her eyes welling with tears. "Oh, my God. I want to hug you. I am so glad you are here. I am so happy I am not in a cop car."

Once inside the West End group home, Michelle bubbles on about her clean room, the rose petals her roommate put on the bed, the luxury of a pillow. She can't stop talking. "I am hyper even on meds," says Michelle, who takes Seroquel to calm her manic swings.

She asks Mr. Francis: "How long until I get to see my son?"

"That depends on you and how serious you are about staying clean," he responds.

Her elation turns to fear when she looks in the mirror over her dresser and catches the reflection of her pale, thin self. "I am so scared I am going to screw up."

Tanner's doubts
During his second visit to the group home, Tanner and his mother play with a remote-controlled motorcycle he found there. He rides the toy off the picnic table.

"You are going to jail for reckless driving," quips Michelle, who was charged with reckless driving and has had her license revoked.

He drives it at her ankles. They hoot together as Michelle zooms the toy off of a slope fashioned from her slippers.

Cathleen Kilonsky, executive assistant at Next Step, watches the mother/son camaraderie and says, "Her son is a great kid. He is really forgiving. He is young still. It is harder when they are a teen or a college kid. Sometimes they get mad."

After playing with her son, Michelle broaches a serious subject, living with him again.

Tanner loves the small-town life at his grandparents' place in Prosperity and is flourishing there, getting mostly A's and B's in sixth grade, playing soccer. "I think it is the best place," Tanner says. "You can see one side from another. Half of the town is made up of kids, and I know all of them."

His memories of living with his mom are less idyllic. Once, another boy pushed him into the street near their home.

He suggests that his mom move closer to him on a bus route. That would suit his grandparents, who don't want to keep Tanner from his mother but aren't thrilled with driving more than an hour each way for visits.

"You can move into a house I can skateboard to," Tanner says eagerly.

"What if Mom wanted you to live with her?" Michelle asks.

"I want to live next to my friends," Tanner says. "I would live with her if she didn't get drunk and do drugs. She gets too crazy."

"Tanner, how many times have you seen me drunk?"

"Seven," he says.

"Three or four," she says. "I didn't know you weren't planning to move in with me if I moved into a good area and got a job. I want you to keep an open mind. You could have new friends."

He looks down and says weakly, "OK."

Michelle messes up
Several weeks later, Michelle feels even closer to her son, but she is clashing with her housemates.

At a house meeting, the other women pile on the complaints. They accuse Michelle of blasting her radio at 2:30 a.m., arguing all the time, monopolizing the phone. She has not followed instructions to start writing a self- evaluation for her recovery. Mr. Francis orders Michelle to hand over her cell phone and to start working on her recovery.

"No," Michelle screams. "I just paid $60 for it. I need it." It's her lifeline to Tanner.

"Do you want to go back to jail tonight? I suggest you get humble. This is not Michelle's house."

He jolts her with a single sentence: She is out of the house.

"I am so screwed," says Michelle, who had been kicked out of another rehab program three months before.

Sue Rua, a drug and alcohol therapist, hugs Michelle and says, "You need more help than you can get here. You have had a heck of a life."

Mr. Francis relents and lets Michelle stay. But two weeks later, after a clash with another woman, Michelle is kicked out. She is escorted by sheriff's deputies to jail, the last place on earth she wanted to go, a giant step away from her son.

"Tanner is confused as hell. He says, 'Why are you back in jail?' He was upset. I told him I didn't use. I didn't run," says Michelle, who has to await another court hearing.

"We were having such great visits. That is what destroys me."

Michelle is upset that Tanner will go snowboarding without her, that they won't spend Christmas together, that she won't be able to buy him a gift.

Christmas alone
Tanner gets an iPod from his uncle for Christmas.

He stays busy, snowboarding every other weekend, playing with friends, trying not to think too much about his mom stuck in jail.

"I never get to see her and she ends up in jail where I can't see her. I am pretty sad," he says from his grandparents' house. "It is bad, but not horrible, horrible, horrible."

His grandparents were planning to take him to jail once, but she was released to a drug rehab program before they could arrange it.

He doesn't want to see her behind bars now.

"It's jail," he says squeamishly.

Her letters, in which she begs him to write, depress him. Tanner doesn't like writing letters, and dashed one off only at his grandparents' insistence. "I wish they had cell phones in jail."

Occasionally, other kids will ask him why his mother is in jail. He says she missed a probation hearing.

"Why was she in jail in the first place?" a friend once asked.

"Beer and drugs."

Another setback
Michelle is shaking Feb. 6 as she walks into Common Pleas Judge David Cashman's chambers.

Wearing a blue Kmart suit, she cries and begs for mercy before the public defender pleads her case. Instead of a lengthy sentence, she is given a year of house arrest. She walks out of the courtroom sobbing with joy.

It will be another five weeks in jail before the electronic bracelet is placed on her left ankle.

She is released to a friend's house in suburban Pittsburgh on March 14, and she begs to see Tanner. For the first time in a year, he stays overnight in the same house as his mother. He looks different. Not so skinny. He has filled out. He looks good.

She has dyed her hair red from a dollar-store kit.

"I like her hair better brown or black," Tanner says, grimacing. "She looks different."

Michelle tells him she wants to see him every weekend.

"Not every weekend. I can't. I have things to do" -- soccer, Boy Scouts, skateboarding with his best friend, visiting his father.

But even though he has a full life at his grandparents' house, Tanner likes visiting his mother, who is searching for a job, getting mental health treatment and attending recovery meetings.

"She's nice. She likes to do everything I do, except soccer."

"I like soccer," she says.

Tanner says his mom is more caring now that she doesn't drink. When he goes to the park to skateboard, she can't go with him because of house arrest. But she sends a friend, something the old drinking Michelle wouldn't think to do.

"It makes me feel safe," he says.

Tanner talks about his 12th birthday party, another bowling party.

Since she missed last year's party -- he told everyone she had slept in and missed the bus -- he asks eagerly if she can come this year.

"I can't," Michelle says. "It's not in the county."

"How come?" Tanner asks, confused.

She explains the rules of house arrest. She doubts her probation officer will let her go.

Mother and son, who are sitting next to each other on a sofa, momentarily turn away from each other, looking off into space in opposite directions.

Another birthday apart.

Tomorrow: Staying out is the hard part.