Women Behind Bars Tuesdays at 10p|9c

Bios

LaSonya Larry

LaSonya Larry was born in 1971 and grew up in Clearwater, Florida. It was primarily her grandmother who cared for her as her mother was on drugs, and living on the street with different men...

Natasha Cornett was born in 1979, and grew up in the small, religious mining town of Pikeville, Kentucky. Her mother divorced her husband when Natasha was young, and raised her daughter as a single mother...

Anita Gonzales

Anita Gonzales was born in 1959, and grew up on the coast of northern Florida. From an early age, Anita tested her parents and defied their rules. She dropped out of high school before graduating...

Lutrische Dancy

Lutrische Dancy was born in 1962, and grew up in a working class neighborhood near Miami, Florida. She was one of nine children in a church-going family...

Diane Fleming

Diane Fleming was born in Colorado in 1957. When she was four, her parents moved back to Fredericktown, Missouri. Her grandfather had some horses, pigs and cows, and for Diane, it was like growing up on a farm...

Shelby Carano

Shelby Carano was born in 1965 and grew up in Richmond, Virginia. When she was seven, her parents separated and she lived with her father. She spent a lot of time with her aunt, who introduced her to alcohol at the age of nine...

Angela Turner

Angela Turner was born an only child in Southern Alabama in 1978. Angela’s mother remarried several times and her grandparents helped to raise her...

Sharon Mabry

Sharon Mabry was born in 1956 and grew up in a middle class community in Detroit, Michigan. Although her mother was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, as Sharon became a teenager, she rebelled against her religious upbringing...

Karen Mullally

Karen Mullally was born in 1952 and grew up in Syracuse, New York. Although Karen’s father left the family when she was very young, her mother soon remarried, providing a stable childhood during her early years...

Linda Pillius

Linda Pillius was born in 1958 and grew up in Orange County, New York. As Linda tells it, although she was close to her mother, her father’s constant alleged abuse was a major contributor to her problems as an adolescent and an adult...

Jessica Gentry

Jessica Gentry was born in Dallas, Texas in 1976. Both of her parents were allegedly alcoholics and by the time Jessica was six, she had two brothers whom she took care of...

Shannon Buard

Shannon Yvette Buard was born in 1969 and grew up in the tough Oak Cliff section of South Dallas. She dropped out of school in the eighth grade when she discovered she was pregnant...

Marion Faye Cason

Marion Faye Cason was born in 1978 in Boaz, Alabama. Her family says she was a happy and adventurous child. Her brother was born when Marion was 11 and the following year the Casons’ moved to Live Oak, Fla...

Donna Buchanan

Donna Buchanan was born in 1962 and grew up in Portsmouth, Virginia. When she was 12 years old, her relationship with her father began to deteriorate...

Patricia Donnelly

Patricia Donnelly was born in 1976 and was raised in El Paso, Texas. She grew up believing that her grandmother was her mother and her mother was her sister...

Alicia Williamson

Alicia Williamson was born in 1965 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her mother was a teenager when she had Alicia and her younger brother Willy. The family lived in the projects west of downtown Birmingham...

Deborah Rolle

Deborah Rolle was born in Miami, Florida in 1960, into a large family of 12 children. She says she always wished she could have had more attention from her mother and father...

Gena Shaughnessy

Gena Shaughnessy was born in Louisiana in 1968. She was the eldest of three daughters, and when she was three years old, her family moved to the working class neighborhood of Canaryville in Chicago...

Heather Frango

Heather Frango was born in Virginia in 1980. Relatives say Heather’s mother separated from Heather’s father a month before Heather was born...

Jackie Alexander

Jackie Alexander, the eldest of five children, was born in 1962 in Charlotte, North Carolina. When Jackie was a young teen, her mother died of cancer. Her inner turmoil became a big problem, and she began a lifelong pattern of acting out her anger...

Dolly Mae Clapp

Dolly Mae Clapp was born in Lackawanna, New York in 1959. When Dolly was very young, her father died, and Dolly and her three brothers were put in foster care for several years...

Shaniqua Brown

Shaniqua Brown was born in Queens, New York in 1983 and was raised by a single mom. When Shaniqua was 11 years old, her mother moved the family to an apartment complex in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where gang members hung out...

Denise Holsinger

Denise Holsinger was born in Lexington, Missouri in 1964. Her parents separated when she was a still a baby. Her mother remarried twice and two younger brothers were born...

Vanessa Crawley

Vanessa Crawley was born in rural Virginia in 1985, the middle daughter of Roy and Robbie Gail Johnson. After ending the marriage, Vanessa’s mother moved to Kentucky, where Vanessa and her sisters visited every summer...

see all videos