While I was incarcerated, the first thing that happened.... I was five months pregnant with my daughter, and eventually I was sentenced. While I was pregnant and incarcerated, the goal of the police service and everybody around me was to apprehend my baby as soon as she was born. Because I was smart about everything, I had everything in place so that when my daughter was born, she would go home with my family, and my family only.
Today, she lives with me, obviously, because I got her back when I was released from the penitentiary. She was there to pick me up with the people in my family who looked after her. Just for that.... There was no system set up so that she would go with family. It was immediately children services: “Let's take her away; let's get her. She's a gang member's child, a gang member's baby; let's get her and take her away.”
There was no system in place. There were no resources for anybody to come to visit me while I was incarcerated to ask what I wanted for my unborn child and where I wanted my child to go. There was nothing like that. It was my own smarts that gave me the intuition that said I do not want my daughter to be involved in children services; I do not want my daughter to be in foster care; I do not want my daughter to be stripped of all her cultural identity.
That's what I did. I set it up so that my younger brother would take her home from the hospital when she was born, and that's what happened.