Informant38

Mothers in Prison April Rivera, a four-year-old from Miami, is singing the theme song to Barney with her mother. "I love you. You love me," she chirps. "We're a happy family." Even a purple dinosaur, however, can tell this isn't quite true. April's mom Regla Sanchez, 26, is inmate No. 162850 at the Hernando Correctional Institution, 320 miles away in Brooksville, Fla., and April is looking at an image of her mother on a computer screen. This virtual family visit is part of a new pilot program, Reading Family Ties, run by the Florida Department of Corrections in an effort to help incarcerated mothers and their kids bond. But when her mom disappears from the screen, April's face crumples. "It's hard," says Isabel Strausser, the program's Miami coordinator. "A lot of times kids cry and beg me to let their mothers go."