After walking past fences covered in razor wire and through cold concrete hallways and metal detectors, nine social work students entered a nursery. Moms rocked their newborn babies in wooden rocking chairs, and some students played with the babies on the floor.

There was only one major difference between this nursery and others: it was located in the middle of Nebraska’s women’s prison.

“This really gives you a sense of hope,” said Arts & Sciences senior Mary Clare Monahan. “It really breaks the stereotypes I had of prison.”

The Nebraska Correctional Center for Women has a nursery program, where pregnant women who are sent to prison have an opportunity to live in the prison nursery with their newborns until they are released. The social work students visited the nursery as part of a senior perspective class and had the opportunity to learn about the women living there.

“It was a lot nicer than I expected,” Monahan said. “I went in there thinking it was going to be like the prisons on TV.”

She said the nursery program is a great concept and was glad to learn about it. Pregnant women, who are within 18 months of being released after the child’s birth, are able to apply for the nursing program. If they have no violent history, especially child abuse, then they may be selected to live in the nursery.

Like other cells in the prison, the nursery rooms have standard cots and locked doors, but next to those cots are white baby cribs.

Warden John Dahm said that the prison is very strict when it comes to the women accepted into the program.

“They have to have the proper custody level. They have to fit the behavioral criteria. They have to have little time left to serve,” Dahm said. “It also depends on the type of crime, and we interview all the women. We are very careful about child abuse. If it walks, talks, quacks like child abuse, then they aren’t getting into the program.”

At the time the students visited, there were seven babies living in the nursery, including two-month-old Natalya Routh with her mother, Julie. She went to prison when she was five months pregnant.

“I was scared at first,” Routh said. “I was afraid they wouldn’t let me keep her.”

Routh said, after getting to bond with her baby and taking parenting classes, she is a more confident parent. Because she loved the program and the support system within the nursery so much, she named her daughter after one of the program directors.

“That is the great thing about the nursery program,” she said. “I get to bond with my daughter and start over with my whole life.”

Jamie Turdy, who is a caregiver in the nursery as well as an inmate serving time for drug charges, said that the program is wonderful for new mothers in prison.

“I watch people come in here and fall in love with their babies,” Turdy said. “I’m just worried when they get out, and that support is gone, if they will do as well.”

The nursery, however, is what helped turn her life around.

“I am not one of those people who plans on coming back,” Turdy said. “The nursery is all about doing better.”

Turdy said she hopes for a program to help mothers after they are released from prison, like a halfway house.

She said there was nothing she would want to change about the nursery program if she could. She told the nine social work students, who were sitting in a half-moon around her outside the nursery, that there are keys to being good social workers.

“I loved the social worker I worked with when I first came here,” Juanita Decenzo, an inmate, said. “A lot of people don’t like their social workers, but mine tried to understand my situation and had compassion for my position.”

Deb Russell, administrative assistant for the institutional review board, said she is completing a bachelor’s degree in social work this year, and seeing the prison gave her new insight to the lives of the prisoners.

“The nursery program was amazing,” Russell said. “I just wonder if there is a way to provide that service to more women.”

She said, up until the visit to the prison, she wanted to work one-on-one with clients in the social work field. But, after meeting some of the women, she said she is finding herself interested in the legislative side of her work.

Coming back from the correctional facility, she said she was interested in finding ways to provide more learning opportunities for the women, such as how to talk with their children after being released from prison, or how to cope with life afterwards.

“It’s piqued my interest in advocating for the young women when they get out so they won’t go back,” Russell said.