The challenge

Since mandatory sentencing for federal drug cases was established two decades ago, the number of women in U.S. prisons—particularly African-American women — has increased dramatically. Most of these women are untreated substance-abusers, and most are single mothers. The supply of treatment programs falls far short of demand. Most programs are so brief – 90 days – that the therapeutic community refers to their services as "drive-by" treatment.

Only about five percent of such programs are family-focused, according to Johanna Ferman, medical director and chief executive officer of the Center for Mental Health in Washington, D.C. Eighty percent of parents who come to the attention of child-welfare services are suffering from addiction to alcohol and other drugs, Ferman adds. Malika Saada Saar and Imani Walker believe that mothers with substance abuse must be afforded access to family-based treatment where they can heal from the disease of addiction. The two leaders call for the expansion of family based treatment as a critical alternative to the increasing incarceration of mothers for non-violent drug felonies.

Seeds of commitment

Malika Saada Saar has been a forceful advocate for the defense and protection of Low-Income families. Previously, Saada Saar directed a Bay Area advocacy organization for low-income and homeless families in San Francisco. During her first year of law school at Georgetown University, she established Crossing the River, a written and spoken word workshop, for a family drug-treatment program at the Center for Mental Health, in Washington, D.C.

Imani Walker was one of the first participants in Crossing the River. The workshop helped Walker, who had struggled with drug addiction, to emerge as a powerful thinker, poet and speaker. After receiving 12 months of comprehensive, family-based drug treatment at the Center for Mental Health, she founded a leadership network of mothers in recovery called Sacred Authority. She has remained clean from drug addiction for the past five years. In 2001 Saada Saar and Walker merged and expanded Crossing the River and Sacred Authority into The Rebecca Project for Human Rights.

Accomplishments

Based in Washington, D.C., The Rebecca Project is a national advocacy and human-rights organization for families struggling with poverty, substance abuse, the criminal justice system and access to family-based substance-abuse treatment. Most of these parents are African-American mothers with primary custody of their children. The key to the Rebecca Project's work with substance-abusing parents is that it frames lack of access to treatment as a human-rights violation. Through workshops at treatment centers and in prisons, the organization helps parents in recovery become leaders in the movement for better addiction treatment as an alternative to incarceration. The Rebecca Project leads Congressional staffers, White House domestic advisers, D.C. Family Court judges, and members of the D.C. City Council on monthly site visits to the Mental Health Center's family-treatment program. These visits help policymakers to feel more personally connected to the challenges faced by parents in recovery.

In a time of tight budgets, the Rebecca Project and a coalition of advocacy groups persuaded Congress to raise the 2004 funding of family-treatment services nationally by $10 million and in Washington, D.C., by $750,000. This marked the first time since 1995 that funds were set aside to expand family treatment. Saada Saar and Walker also helped to extend substance-abuse treatment as a Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) work activity to six months; thanks to this change, recovering families will not be forced to choose between work and longer-term family-based treatment. In collaboration with the Sentencing Project and the Drug Policy Alliance, The Rebecca Project sponsored and developed a documentary film critical of the Drug Felony Ban, which allows states to deny TANF, food stamps and Medicaid benefits to custodial parents convicted of a drug felony. In 2003, The Rebecca Project published Families in Recovery: In Portraits and Words, based on the Congressional Photo-Exhibition and Briefing on family treatment. Saada Saar and Walker distribute the book to policymakers, journalists, foundations, and organizations interested in the issue of families struggling with substance abuse.

Leadership style

Saada Saar and Walker localize the national. The program is notable for "bridging local voices with national policy work," says Johanna Ferman, who terms their approach "intersectional," braiding together disparate communities. "The interactions between the lawmakers and mothers in recovery are always transformative," she says. Through Saada Saar's and Walker's "intersectional leadership," as Ferman calls it, lawmakers listen to the impact of legislation on the real lives of parents who are struggling to stay clean and to raise their children. The mothers, who never envisioned themselves in the halls of Congress speaking to legislators, present the truth of their own experience. Such leadership encourages women in treatment and recovery to learn to use the gift of their own minds, voices, and spirits. They gain the training, advocacy skills and sense of self-worth to become persuasive leaders in their own right.

The future

Today, most Crossing the River workshops are held at family-treatment centers and the Washington D.C. Women's Jail, where mothers are either entering treatment or still trying to find a way toward recovery. Another goal is to document and intervene in human-rights violations endured by mothers in jail. Saada Saar and Walker continue to believe that substance-abusing parents must have the opportunity to heal, with their whole family, as an alternative to incarceration and the breaking of family ties.

More about Saada Saar, Walker and The Rebecca Project

"Slick lobbyists are a dime a dozen. These women have the passion. They have the stories. And they have the solutions because they've lived it. In the struggle to secure treatment on demand, this organization and these women are the key."
— Joel Segal, legislative assistant to U.S. Rep. John Conyers

"They are shaking up people's ideas of advocacy on the Hill. It is so much more real coming from someone who has actually experienced these policies. They are an incredible team."
— Chai Feldblum, director, Federal Legislative Clinic, Georgetown University