the last book I ever read (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, excerpt four)

from Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond:

Jayme didn’t choose to work at Arby’s. It was her work-release placement. She was in the final months of a two-and-a-half-year sentence. In the evenings, Jayme was transported back to the women’s correctional facility on Keefe Avenue. It was her first time in prison, for her first arrest, and she had mainly kept her nose in her Bible. She’d had a baby in a toilet and left it there. No one in the family knew why; she was already a mother of a toddler at the time. Jayme had been a bookish child, with large round glasses and a mature-beyond-her-years way about her.

Now that her prison sentence was coming to an end, Jayme was focused on a single goal: saving enough for an apartment that could accommodate her son, now six, on overnight visits. The boy was staying with his father.