Dorothy Gaines knows firsthand the burdens prison can put on a family. She was in federal prison for seven years with three children at home.

"My oldest daughter was 18," she says. "She had to come out of college and try to take care of them. So it was a lot of stress on her, as well as a lot of stress with me worried about them."

Gaines, now 67, has been out for 25 years — long enough, she says, to see the effects she believes her prison time had on all her children, but especially on her son, who was 9 years old at the time. For more than 10 years now, he has been serving his own prison sentence.

Now, Gaines tries to make sure she never misses a phone call from him and sends him money so he can buy food from the commissary, even though she can't always afford it. This year, she's worr

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