Eleven times Deborah Mosby had been before the state parole board – and eleven times she had been denied.
“I knew on that eleventh time going into the hearing that I wasn’t going to be paroled,” Deborah said.
And she was right.
Feeling hopeless, she sat on her 3’x6’ rack knowing she had to do something to keep her sanity. It was that night before her eleventh parole hearing that she wrote out the plan for the program “Angel’s Eyes” which would later be implemented at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County.
One of the notes that was brought up at Deborah’s parole hearing was an RVR she had received. An RVR is a rule violation report.
“I was an A custody prisoner,” she said, “but after receiving an RVR for having a mechanical pencil, it cost me everything. I lost my A custody status.”
Deborah was devastated.
“Those were the kinds of things that the parole board looked at and when they saw mine, I was denied,” she said.
Hope in the Midst of Despair
“I realized that I was never getting out of prison and began to accept that this was my life. I had to find a purpose in life and that’s how Angel’s Eyes was born. It was born out of desperately wanting to find a way to give purpose to so many like me who had lost that behind bars.”
Deborah began outlining in detail the program which went to the superintendent of the prison.
“I had no idea if they were going to let us do it,” she said, “but I knew I had to try.”
Angel’s Eyes, named for Deborah’s late daughter Angel who was born with spina bifida and died at age 36, was an art program for the ladies at CMCF. It was designed to be a safe place where the ladies could go and create pieces of art that would be sold to benefit the program. In Deborah’s plans, she knew she was going to have her students come out of B building.
“That was the throw-away building,” she
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