Cynthia Tilley has a black-and-white photograph of her, her brother, and her father. She doesn’t remember the occasion, but she believes it must have been taken at their Texas home around Christmastime. Wrapped gift boxes surround the father and his two tiny children.
That Christmas together, frozen in the photograph, was rare. Cynthia’s father spent most of her childhood behind bars.
“He got out once,” she remembers, “and went back in. We never had much of a relationship.”
As she grew up, young Cynthia realized her father was in prison because of the state-issued identification number stamped on his occasional letters home. No one told her what he had done to be separated from his family, and she still loved him, but she instinctively felt the weight of shame attached to his incarceration. She kept his whereabouts a secret.
Today Cynthia, better known to colleagues and prisoners as Warden Tilley, works for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). A 30-year veteran of the field of corrections, she is the senior warden at the Ellen Halbert Substance Abuse Facility for women in Burnet, Texas. Because of her father’s incarceration, she is eager to bring Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program into every facility where she works, so that incarcerated parents behind bars can connect with their children.
The Halbert facility houses 612 women recovering from drug and alcohol addictions, and Warden Tilley manages the administrative staff, correctional officers, and volunteers who make it all run. Her present position of authority is a long way from the projects where she, her mother, and her brother struggled to survive in her father’s absence. In those days, the siblings ate peanut butter and drank sugar water to assuage the pangs of chronic hunger.
“People would say, ‘They’re going to be like their dad. They’re going to prison. They’re not going to be anything,’” she recalls.
But their mother worked hard to make sure her children had an education and opportunities, and Warden Tilley chose a life of service in “the family business” – her mother and her stepfather both worked for the TDCJ – instead of a life of crime.
After joining the TDCJ in 1984, she rose steadily through the ranks, but she never shared her deeply personal connection to the correctional system, even after her father died of cancer while still behind bars.
Although Angel Tree started in 1982 and soon spread throughout the United States, Warden Tilley was first exposed to the program in December 2006, the first weekend she was assigned to the Carol Vance Unit, which houses Prison Fellowship’s InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI) near Houston, Texas. In the vast majority of cases, children receive Angel Tree gifts during scheduled home visits or church-sponsored Angel Tree Christmas parties and open houses, but IFI-Texas does something special: prisoners’ children and their caregivers come into the prison for a special celebration with their dads!
When Warden Tilley heard that children were coming into the prison, her first reaction was one of alarm.
But Tommie Dorsett, IFI’s director, reassured her.
“Warden, I’ve got it,” he said.
When Warden Tilley walked into the IFI Angel Tree Christmas party, she noticed immediately how much love and effort Prison Fellowship staff and volunteers had invested in the event for prisoners’ families.
“With my history, and my dad’s incarceration, it moved me to tears, to see how consumed with love a dad can be for his children, or a mother for her children,” she remembers.
When Warden Tilley was transferred to Halbert in 2012, she brought Angel Tree with her. She knew that it would work as well for mothers as it had for the fathers in the IFI unit.
Like at IFI, Warden Tilley arranged for prisoners’ children to come into the prison for a special Angel Tree Christmas party with their mothers. Caregivers came, too, and volunteers from a local church provided gifts. There was pizza and a cake walk, pictures with Santa, and a station for decorating Christmas cards.
Warden Tilley encouraged the incarcerated mothers to be as involved with their children as possible, re-building broken relationships. Because the women at Halbert are substance abusers, many have missed out on years of their children’s lives while they struggled with addiction.
“These children had a gift from mom for the first time in years,” explains Warden Tilley, “because if she has been out on the street, on drugs and alcohol, there was no money for a gift, unless grandma provided something. For a child to get a gift from Mom, and see that Mom is healthy and not laying around out of it, has to be one of the most important things for the child to see … You should see their faces, some of them carrying around boxes that were too big for them. ‘Oh, my goodness! I got a gift! What’s in this?’ they would say.”
Wherever she goes in the future, Warden Tilley plans to keep Angel Tree an integral part of her service to prisoners and their families.
“My mission is, wherever I go, and whenever God moves me to another facility, I am going to have Angel Tree on my unit, and I want the new warden here to understand that this a program she needs to have,” says Warden Tilley. “It doesn’t cost us anything, and it continues to develop relationships between incarcerated moms and their children.”
Angel Tree Christmas parties at IFI in Texas brought healing for Warden Tilley’s painful childhood memories
Angel Tree has also helped bring Warden Tilley healing for the lingering pain left of her father’s incarceration. After he died, she went to pick up a box of his personal effects: photo albums, letters, books, and other mementos of a man she had never known well. Though she had long kept her silence about her father’s incarceration, she now wondered if she could now help people by sharing where she came from. When she saw home much the fathers of IFI loved their children, her last ounce of reserve melted away.
“I am your daughter,” she told them, urging them to fight to stay connected to their children in love. As she told her story, tears fell from her eyes and the eyes of the prisoners.
She also tells her story to volunteers to emphasize the importance of Angel Tree, and to prisoners’ children, to encourage them to choose a better future for themselves.
“I am here to testify that they can make it,” she says, “They don’t have to be a number. They don’t have to be like their mom or dad. They have to put their mind to it.”
And to the mothers under her supervision at Halbert, she says, “Fight for your children! Put tools in your toolbox. When you feel the urge for drugs, take out your toolkit, say a prayer. Call somebody and ask for help.”
As Angel Tree volunteers help incarcerated parents connect with their sons and daughters, and as inmates overcome addictions and learn to fight on behalf of their children, a new generation may be spared some of the hurt and alienation that Warden Tilley knew growing up. To that end she prays and works.
“If you don’t have that connection with your parents, if you only see them through a glass enclose, you don’t really have a relationship,” she says from experience. “Angel Tree binds that up and brings [families] together, so that when prisoners get out, their children have a relationship and are not afraid.”