Linda Poor had a rough year. The 56-year-old single woman has no income and a debilitating ache in her hip that never goes away.
But nothing weighed more heavily on Poor than her son's incarceration in August. Benjamin Poor, 25, needed help during a mental health crisis, she says, and instead was thrown into jail.
Linda Poor calls it an injustice, and she has reason to be upset.
What happened?
One Saturday morning, Benjamin Poor went for a stroll down the middle of a road in Earl Township - not a sensible thing to do.
Even more bizarre, he was carrying a bouquet of flowers and saying he wanted to steal a horse. An alarmed resident understandably called the police.
Until the cops showed up, though, Benjamin Poor had not broken the law. Because he felt he hadn't done anything wrong, he resisted when officers put their hands on him. According to the police, he kicked one of the patrolmen. Long story short, he was charged with aggravated assault and ended up in a jail cell, where his tenuous grip on reality only got worse.
For years, he has been under psychiatric care. He deals with several heavy diagnoses - intermittent explosive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizo-affective disorder, hyperactivity. Jail only made things worse.
Benjamin Poor spent his first two months at Lancaster County Prison in its restricted housing unit, the place unruly prisoners are kept. While there, unable to have visitors, he decided to ward off evil using his fingernail to carve a cross into his forehead. Later, he tried to slit his wrist with an eggshell, landing him on suicide watch.
A mom's courage
As a young mother in the 1980s, Linda Poor stood up to authorities in Lewiston, Maine, for the right to homeschool her children. In doing so, she helped to change the system.
In October, two months into her son's incarceration, Linda Poor again summoned the courage to take a stand, this time at a county prison board meeting.
She took the elevator to the seventh floor of the county government center, sat patiently through the meeting and then, at the time for public comment, went to a lectern and looked out at the seven important men in suits looking back at her.
She said what was happening to her son was not right.
"I'm not trying to criticize the prison at all," she told them. "I know they've been trying to do their best with him. But I really don't believe they are equipped to handle his mental illness properly."
Her voice began to quaver. "He's falling through the cracks," she said. "This is making him worse. A lot worse."
Scott Martin, then a county commissioner, commended Linda Poor for advocating for her son. But while Martin agreed her son probably didn't belong in a cell, he pointed out the problem: State hospitals are full, and waiting lists are long.
So Benjamin Poor remained ensnared by a system that too easily criminalizes acts of mental instability when a compassionate response and treatment would be more humane and rehabilitative.
Mental health court
About two weeks before Christmas, things began to get better for Benjamin Poor. Judge Margaret Miller accepted him into mental health court. It's hailed as a way to reduce recidivism among parolees with serious mental illness by connecting them with treatment and services while holding them accountable for their recovery.
Linda Poor was elated. She saw the two-year program as exactly what her son needed.
The next afternoon, he was supposed to be released, and she waited two hours for him outside the prison. Finally, she saw him striding toward her, much leaner and having grown a full red beard. He was wearing street clothes for the first time since the middle of August.
Linda Poor laughed almost giddily as she stood up from a bench. Using a cane, she began walking toward him. "I wish I could run!" she cried.
Mother and son then came together for a long, tight embrace, a hug 117 days in the making.
Their struggles, at least for a moment, didn't seem quite as heavy.
Postscript
In January, Benjamin Poor began working 29 hours a week on the graveyard shift at Engle Printing & Publishing. He and his mother recently lost housing and are staying in a motel room paid for by church friends. Still in mental health court, he broke the rules by using marijuana - once.
Judge Miller kept him in the program but sanctioned him with a 24- hour prison stay Friday into Saturday - days he doesn't work. "It will be a reminder," Miller told him Wednesday as he stood before her, "that prison is a place you will not want to go back to."
"It won't happen again," he told her as his mother watched from the gallery.
"This Life" is a new column written by a rotating team of LNP staffers, focusing on ordinary people who have extraordinary stories to tell. Look for it on Mondays.