By Quinn Coffman
The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate
NEW ORLEANS — For the five girls who gathered at the New Orleans Conchetta Facility on a sunny Saturday in April, in some ways, it was a Girl Scouts meeting like any other.
However, most Girl Scout meetings don’t require armed guards.
The young Scouts, between 5 and 7, worked on a small craft with their mothers— constructing a plastic garden toy together, fit with glittery pink sand and a small, seated unicorn.
They ate a warm meal together— Domino’s Pizza and wings, or sandwiches handmade by the Girl Scout troop’s organizers.
The girls held hands with their moms across the tables, each small family spaced out across the facility’s second floor. The girls even learned the Girl Scouts Promise and held up three fingers as they recited it.
But for the girls’ moms, it was anything but an ordinary Saturday. The women had woken up in lockup at the Orleans Parish jail. They had been bused together to the Conchetta minimum-security facility early that morning.
They had their handcuffs taken off long before any of their daughters arrived — the Girl Scout organizers and sheriff’s deputies careful not to let the elementary-aged girls see their mothers in metal.
Even the morning sun streaming in from the floor to ceiling windows at Conchetta was different for the moms. It wasn’t being filtered through a barred windowsill.
These mothers are part of Girl Scouts Beyond Bars, a program from Girls Scouts Louisiana East that connects incarcerated women with their daughters to engage in traditional Girl Scouts experiences together.
While the program aims to remove the trappings of prison for the few hours the girls and moms are reunited, not every reminder of jail can be forgotten for the day.
The moms were still OPSO inmates and had to wear maroon OPSO-branded jumpsuits which crinkled like nurses’ scrubs. As the girls ran into the room, each teary-eyed hug was accompanied by this crinkle sound.
It had been months since any of the girls had been with their mothers. Outside of the Beyond Bars program, there is no in-person visitation available to any OPSO inmate.
A rare reunion
Of all the families gathered there, Kimberly Franklin and her daughter Skye, 10, were the only pair who had been in Girl Scouts before.
Franklin first heard about Beyond Bars back in 2022 from her case manager and applied to the program as soon as she could. Her case manager had explained the benefits not just for Franklin, but her daughter too.
“You get to see them. You get to do the activities, and you just get to spend time,” Franklin said, smiling as she and Skye shared pizza slices together. “And they get to join an organization that is really going to be with them.”
Skye said “painting and drawing” were her favorite activities in the troop meetings.
While the Scouts go home with most of the crafts the moms and daughters make, the moms get to take anything on paper back with them.
“I come up with, typically, hands-on activities for mom and daughter to do together, to laugh, to smile together,” said Lonnie Carter , a community program specialist with Girl Scouts who organizes almost every aspect of the Beyond Bars monthly meetings.
Some of her favorite past activities include a birdhouse the girls had to construct. Each mom then wrote affirmations for her daughter on the birdhouse.
Designing these activities isn’t easy because of the restrictions a carceral environment puts on what the mothers and daughters can do together.
If they paint, they have to use cut sponges, instead of brushes. Carter has to precut any paper crafts. No scissors allowed. She found out long ago that anything involving Popsicle sticks or regular ink pens was out of the question.
Carter said she just wants her Scouts to be able to take something home with them that when they see it they think, “My momma and I made this.”
To make Beyond Bars a reality, Carter also has to delve into the logistics of reuniting a family separated by tragedy and prison walls.
Each August, Carter enters the parish jail to meet with inmates and pitch them on Beyond Bars. Not only must the mothers maintain good behavior within the jail to be allowed to attend meetings, but the girls’ guardians on the outside also have to agree, something Carter says is not easy.
“I’ve had caretakers who have been totally against it, and then I’ve had caretakers who are like, ‘Amazing, of course, she needs her mom,’” Carter said.
The hardest part, however, comes the morning of the Scouts’ meetings, when Carter has to call and reconfirm that the girls’ caretakers will in fact be attending the meetings. These final confirmations come after weeks of communication between Carter and the Scouts’ guardians.
She says, too often, a caretaker might not arrive the morning of a meeting, leaving moms sitting alone, watching other families reunite.
Caregivers give a host of reasons, from a death in the family, to taking the girl out of town, to something like going to brunch instead. At worst, some caregivers are absent purposely out of spite, which Carter said only hurts the girls.
“I have to be the person to deliver the message,” Carter said.
Jenna Griffin was one of two moms at the meeting that Saturday whose daughters never showed.
She spent the time unsure if her daughter Emma and her caretaker would make it in time on their drive in from Picayune, Mississippi .
“I haven’t seen my daughter in a little over a year,” Griffin said.
This would have been their first Girl Scouts meeting together.
While OPSO inmates get to talk on the phone in 15-minute increments each day, or take longer video calls over the weekends, Griffin says it’s difficult to stay connected.
“She’s five. She doesn’t want to talk to me on a video,” she said. “I have trouble keeping her on the phone.”
Griffin says those phone calls are often dominated by the little girl’s questions about her mom’s life in jail.
“I don’t like lying to her because I don’t want her to think that I’m not there by choice. I want her to know I’m not there because I can’t be,” Griffin said. “She knows Mama didn’t listen, and now I’m punished.”
Griffin worries that her not being there has caused Emma to act out more in kindergarten, looking for attention that she misses from her mom.
On one phone call, Emma asked if her mom had a window in jail where she could see the snow that fell in January.
Griffin said that the holidays and the birthday she missed were the hardest on Emma.
“But I’m home before her next birthday,” she said. “I’m making it.”
‘They’re still mothers’
Beyond Bars started in New Orleans in 2013, modeled after similar Girl Scouts prison programs in other states.
According to Dianne Rose , the outreach director for Girl Scouts Louisiana East at the time, she was urged to start Beyond Bars by students in the Southern University New Orleans Criminal Justice Department who believed it would provide encouragement for incarcerated women to maintain good behavior and plan for their eventual release.
“The basics of the program was to keep a relationship between the moms and between the daughters, and to keep them bonded. So they can just touch each other,” said Dianne Rose .
When Beyond Bars started, with the approval of then- Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman , it was the first in-person visitation option available to any of OPSO’s inmates.
That remains true today, a fact current Sheriff Susan Hutson laments, saying that the manpower necessary to operate those programs is not realistic.
Beyond Bars itself had to take a pause for several months following an incident in 2024 where the teenage daughter of one inmate used a meeting to stash drugs for her mother in a bathroom at the Conchetta facility.
“I wanted to end it. I was so upset about it,” Hutson, who is a former Girl Scout herself, said of Beyond Bars.
Instead, the program was limited to only younger Scouts. Stricter rules were put in place for what caretakers could bring inside with them during meetings.
In the end, the ability of the program to aid in inmates’ rehabilitation won out over fears of future incidents.
“They’re still mothers, and they love their children,” Hutson said.
Selling cookies
These Scouts have all of their expenses covered, from their membership fees, to their uniforms, to the badges they earn, and even to the troop excursions and other troop activities they join outside the meetings with their moms.
These young Scouts even join in on the Girl Scouts’ iconic cookie sale.
Franklin’s daughter Skye, who is still only a Brownie Scout , participated earlier this year, selling cookies outside of the Conchetta facility to deputies as they walked in and out.
Skye sold over 300 boxes of cookies, working her way up through the tiers of prizes scouts can win. Lonnie Carter said Skye’s efforts were extraordinary.
Skye’s grandmother, Dawn Franklin , also said that giving Skye the chance to regularly see her mom has helped her daughter and granddaughter.
“It gives (Franklin) some positivity of coming out and knowing, ‘OK, I’m in here for whatever circumstances, and everybody’s here for different circumstances,’” Dawn Franklin said, “But you still have a life out, and if you have an opportunity to clear whatever’s going on with you, this is what you need to be focused on — coming home and dealing with your family.”
Taymika Sharrieff, the membership director for Girl Scouts Louisiana East with over 25 years of experience, agreed. In her time, she’s seen dozens of mothers and daughters reunited through this program.
Sharrieff says the program gives a participant the chance to reflect and consider that meeting with her daughter is important — realizing that she wants to do better. She wants to see her child grow up.
“No matter what has happened, no matter why you are here, I personally do not care,” Sharrieff said. “I care that you’re having this relationship with your daughter and that she can see ‘my mom loves me.’”
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