The Birmingham News
Dave Parks
February 10, 2008
 
 
Jennifer Callaway remembers the day 2½ years ago when she was arrested at a Kmart pharmacy in Scottsboro while attempting to fill a phony prescription for narcotics. It was her daughter's fifth birthday.

"I was being led out in handcuffs, and she pulled up with her daddy while it was going on," Callaway, 38, said. "So that's what I gave her for her fifth birthday: `Happy birthday. Mama loves you. I'm driving off in a police car.' And I haven't been home since."

Callaway ended up in prison, but because of an early release program and the Lovelady Center in Birmingham, she has managed to restore the relationship with her daughter. The center has sprung up the past two years at the old East End Memorial Hospital, filling the large building in East Lake with a mixture of children and mothers who are newly released from prison or seeking refuge from the streets.

Most of the moms are recovering from addictions, and Lovelady is one of the few drug treatment centers in Alabama that allows residents to bring in their children for overnight visits and extended stays.

A 2006 survey of 3,834 residential drug treatment facilities in the United States showed that 640, about 16 percent, provide beds for children of residents. In Alabama, four of the state's 38 residential treatment centers allow children, according to the survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Unfortunately, substance abuse and parenting often collide. National authorities estimate that 8.3 million U.S. children are living with at least one parent who abuses drugs or alcohol.

Studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health have found that allowing mothers to take children into a drug treatment center often benefits the entire family. The women are less likely to continue using drugs and are more likely to work, stay in treatment and develop parenting skills.

Ministering to moms:

The evolution of the old East End hospital into a combination day care and addiction treatment center came under the direction of Brenda Lovelady Spahn, who succeeded in business and then shifted into a ministry helping women just freed from prison.

Spahn started in 1997 with five former inmates living in her home, but Alabama's crowded prison system provided far more clients than she could accommodate there.

A couple of years ago Spahn bought the old hospital building in the South East Lake Neighborhood. It can hold 400 women, but staff and finances limit the population to about 280 women, plus about 70 of their children.

Spahn estimates that more than 80 percent of the women released to the Lovelady Center from prison have some kind of substance abuse problem. So in addition to serving as a halfway house for inmates, the Lovelady Center has been certified by the state as an addiction treatment facility. Most residents enter a nine- to 12-month rehabilitation program.

The faith-based program includes GED and job training, money management classes, parenting courses and therapy for domestic violence and sexual abuse. Everybody works or goes to classes.

About three-fourths of the women at the center are there because of parole, probation, a prison-sponsored re-entry program or a court order. The other fourth have been homeless or abused, or just walk in seeking help.

Financially, the center makes sense for taxpayers, who normally would pay about $1,000 a month to house a woman in prison.

Women at the center pay $100 a week for room, board and program fees. The real cost of housing and treating a woman at the center is about $800 a month. The center has a budget of more than $2 million a year, and raises money through flea markets, donations, grants and its day care center.

When the center first moved into the old hospital, no children were allowed, but one woman asked if her daughter could visit for a weekend, Spahn recalled. Then another mother asked, and another. It was summertime, school was out and pretty soon children were all over the place.

"I had about 150 kids," Spahn said.

It got so crowded that one day Richard Allen, state commissioner of corrections, was visiting the center and "got clipped by a bicycle," Spahn said. "I thought, `What have I done?'"

That's when she decided to turn the hospital's old emergency room into a "kid zone," safe for both adults and children. That 5,000-square-foot area has been licensed as a day care center, and the sounds of children's voices singing "Jesus Loves Me" echo through the classrooms and hallways.

"That's their trademark song," Spahn said.

Beyond the joy they bring, children are an important part of healing and restoring families, Spahn said. More than 75 percent of the women at the Lovelady Center are mothers.

"You can't change a woman without her child," Spahn said. "I didn't mean to get into children. I just had to."

Pain plus addiction:

Callaway said she started taking pain pills for rheumatoid arthritis. She built up a tolerance to the prescription narcotics and developed a powerful addiction.

"What I was getting from the doctor was no longer sufficient," said Callaway, a mother of two who worked in Scottsboro as a cosmetologist. "So I resorted to buying the pills off the street."

She managed to function for years, taking too many pain pills, writing bad checks and stealing.

"I was safe in my secret," she said.

But she went too far in attempting to fill a phony prescription for narcotic pain patches. She received a 10-year sentence and spent 11 months in the county jail, six months in Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women and eight months in a private prison in Louisiana. She went through the state Department of Corrections substance abuse program, and in August was sent to the Lovelady Center, where she manages a beauty salon.

Her husband, a radiology technician, has stuck with her through the ordeal, and overnight visits with her daughter, who is 7, have helped her heal.

"I lay in bed at night and hold her in my arms," Callaway said. "She needs her mama, and I need her."

Restoring the relationship with her teenage son has been more difficult, but they are making progress, she said.

"At first he was real angry," she said. "He had a hard time with it. He's come a long way."

At least he has learned from his mother's mistakes, Callaway said.

"He hates drugs and what it's done to his family," she said. "In my addiction I did things that I never would have done had I not been sick. I lied, I cheated and I deceived the ones closest to me."

Back to News