Sister Elaine Roulet spends her energy and creativity helping some of society's most sharply disadvantaged people - the children of women in prison.

A Sister of St. Joseph, Roulet has been family liaison with the Bedford Hills Correction Center in Bedford Hills, New York since 1970. In 1980 she became founder and executive director of Providence House, Inc., affiliated with Catholic Charities, which includes multiple sites offering shelter for battered women and families, homeless women, temporary housing for women released from prison, and more. In the same year Roulet founded and became director of the Children's Center at Bedford Hills, which includes a parenting center, children's playroom, nursery and infant center. She has created support programs for mothers and their babies in prison, where this unique program permits mothers whose babies are born in prison to keep them for as long as one year. The Bedford Hills program has become a national model for prisons, overturning conventional wisdom about prisons, women and their children. Roulet says, "Some people say that babies shouldn't be in prison. The baby doesn't know he is prison, but he does know that he's with his mother."

Additional Resources:Harris, Maria. Proclaim Jubilee! A Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, 1996.

Smith, Ali. Laws of the Bandit Queens. Three Rivers Press, 2002.