EMILY FENG, HOST:
For women in prison, Mother's Day can be especially hard. A group of activists wanted to let incarcerated moms in Wisconsin know they're not alone. So they got in their cars and headed to a prison. Sarah Lehr of Wisconsin Public Radio reports.
SARAH LEHR, BYLINE: The Taycheedah women's prison in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, is surrounded on two sides by a long county road. That road gave Marianne Oleson an idea.
MARIANNE OLESON: I thought, if we could get a bunch of cars and they all have their headlights on, they're going to see us.
LEHR: Oleson spent several years incarcerated at Taycheedah. She's now an activist with the group Ex-Incarcerated People Organizing of Wisconsin, or EXPO. Since 2025, Oleson has been bringing people together, so they can drive their cars past Taycheedah while flashing their headlights and beeping their horns.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR HORNS HONKING)
LEHR: She refers to the drive-by demonstrations as caravans of love. This one happened a few nights ago. One of the participants was JenAnn Bauer, a mother of three who used to be locked up at Taycheedah. She'll never forget celebrating Mother's Day on the inside.
JENANN BAUER: I felt heaviness. You see it. You see it on women's faces. You know, it's mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers.
LEHR: Now that she's out, Bauer wants to ease that heaviness for other women. So she joined a line of more than a dozen cars as they filed out of a grocery store parking lot and drove about 2 miles to Taycheedah. Deandrea Hardman was one of the drivers. She's also with EXPO and used to be incarcerated at Taycheedah. In Hardman's car were two women who just got out of prison this spring. As they approached Taycheedah, Hardman checked in with them.
DEANDREA HARDMAN: You guys feeling OK?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Mm-hmm.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah.
HARDMAN: OK.
LEHR: Hardman remembers the anxiety she felt when she first saw Taycheedah after getting out.
HARDMAN: Yeah. The first couple times I thought I was going to, like, throw up, especially the first time. It's hard to go back here after you've been here, you know?
LEHR: But as the sun set and the prison came into view, Hardman started smiling and bopping her horn.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR HORNS HONKING)
LEHR: Back in the parking lot afterwards, Oleson was ecstatic.
OLESON: It's amazing. Well, you can see - and just knowing that they heard us.
LEHR: When she drove by the prison, Oleson rolled down her window and blasted "Caravan Of Love."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CARAVAN OF LOVE")
ISLEY-JASPER-ISLEY: (Singing) Join the caravan of love.
LEHR: For NPR News, I'm Sarah Lehr in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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