By Miller Rogers-Tetrick

Anna Tovchigrechko told a room of fellow University of Maryland students Thursday that the criminal justice system was not designed for children like her, who experienced the reality of family members’ incarceration, but it was designed against them. 

Tovchigrechko, a senior psychology and criminology and criminal justice double-major, founded the UnLocked Project, a student organization that builds community for college students who have or have had an incarcerated parent.

She was one of the three panelists at the “Familial Incarceration and Policy” event hosted by the UnLocked Project on April 16.

Joining her were Ashley McSwain, president of Consultants for Change and a leader in reentry and social services, and Michael Williams, a behavioral health technician who uses his personal experience as someone who was incarcerated for 32 years to support others on their path to healing. 

Tovchigrechko opened by describing the ritual of visiting her mother, who was serving a five-year sentence at a facility in upstate New York, an eight-hour drive from their home.

“We had to go through security. It was pretty dehumanizing,” she said. “Metal detectors at the age of like eight years old.”

Williams entered the conversation from the other side of those walls. He was 17 when he was arrested, and when he asked for a lawyer, he was told he could not have one. 

“I said, ‘Well, maybe they’re right,’” he recalled. “Maybe they know best.”

Williams was sentenced to life in prison plus 40 years. He was released nine months ago under Maryland’s Juvenile Restoration Act, grounded in neurological research establishing that the adolescent brain is not fully developed and that sentences imposed on juveniles merit reconsideration. 

McSwain, a former probation officer, drew a direct line from those individuals’ experiences to the policies that produce them. She cited the Dignity Act, passed in 2017, which prohibited the practice of shackling pregnant women to metal beds during labor and expanded access to menstrual products.

Before the law passed, incarcerated women were issued three tampons per cycle. 

She also addressed the Fair Sentencing Act, which aligned federal penalties for crack and powder cocaine, pharmacologically identical substances that had long been prosecuted along racial lines.

Still, the incarceration process’s beliefs in research conducted on inmates are flawed, as Williams pushed back on how that research gets done in the first place. 

“I think the biggest disconnect for me and my reentry and coming home was that … all, this research, I don’t know where they find these researchers at where they begin the information from, but no, they don’t come talk to us, but they claim they know a lot about what we go through or what we need,” Williams said.

Tovchigrechko felt that gap personally.

She said the UnLocked Project exists in part because it finds resources, provides peer support and educates on the impacts of incarceration. She recalled her own experience during her time in a school environment.

“I went to school, and my mom was incarcerated, and there were no resources for me to help me with my mom’s incarceration,” she said. “There was no peer support group. There was nobody, kind of no counselor for me to go to, and yet, there’s research out there that clearly states that these resources would have helped me.” 

Nationally, approximately 2.7 million children have a parent serving time in prison on any given day, and over 5.2 million have had an incarcerated parent at some point during their lives, according to the Sentencing Project. 

Williams reinforced what he said was the one thing that had actually changed him: restorative justice, a practice he encouraged in prison as a collaborative process focusing on repairing harm and holding oneself accountable. 

“The system doesn’t change, people in prison change themselves,” he said. “That’s what makes us resilient, especially those of us who have life in prison.”

When discussing what is required to allow opportunity for change, having a voice and the courage to speak up is held as a centerpiece, Tovchigrechko said.

“We need our voices heard, and that is not going to happen until people are in these rooms talking about our experiences, talking about what it’s like to go into a prison visiting room, what it’s like to be in prison, what it’s like to feel the shame of having an incarcerated parent,” she said.

Featured Image: Anna Tovchigrechko, Ashley McSwain and Michael Williams speak at the The UnLocked Project Panel on Familial Incarceration and Policy event on April 16, 2026, in Jiménez Hall. Photo by Miller Rogers-Tetrick.