GUILDERLAND — For 25 years, Alison Coleman of Guilderland ran a group called Prison Families of New York State that served as support for local families of incarcerated people and an umbrella organization for tackling larger statewide policy issues.

Coleman started the group after her husband, Jay Coleman, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for theft of “$18 with no injuries, no weapon,” she said.

“I sort of naively thought that we should be able to be a family during the prison experience,” Coleman said. “I fairly quickly found out that, way back then, families were really not treated at all well.”

The Colemans had a 1-year-old child when Jay Coleman went to prison who was an adult when her father was released. Jay Coleman finished his sentence 11 years ago, as did his family, which Alison Coleman said effectively served the time along with him.

Her husband spent time in 15 different prisons during the 25 years he spent behind bars. The furthest away, she said, was probably Attica, five hours from Guilderland in western New York.

She regularly drove to see him, both for visits and also for family reunions, which she said allow families to spend about 46 hours with an inmate in a private space behind prison walls. The couple conceived another child through the family-reunion program.

Jay Coleman told The Enterprise that getting visits was always very important to him during his prison stay, for many reasons: it broke up the monotony, it brought news about family, and it made him feel like he hadn’t been forgotten.

“Even if you have a vigorous correspondence with someone, nothing takes the place of human contact,” he said, adding that most contact inside the prison was negative.

Alison Coleman’s organization, which started as a support group, eventually began to focus on getting “families of prisoners to the decision-making table, with the respect that we as a population deserved, and that actually worked,” she said. Her group organized families around the state and helped to create resources and advocacy programs for them.

Eventually, as people who had started early on with the group were doing well, and attendance dropped off, the group fizzled out. “I don’t believe that anything has to go on forever,” Alison Coleman said.

Today, she has several jobs, one of which is running the visitors’ centers at eight state-run prisons. Visitors’ centers are, she said, physical spaces where visitors wait until they are called into the prison to visit. They have bathroom facilities and coffee  and are warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

Over the years, Alison Coleman said, she has spoken to tens of thousands of families around the state about what to expect during the process of reunification, and how to prepare for an inmate’s homecoming, “if that’s what they were going to experience, if their loved one wasn’t going to be in prison forever.”

Asked if her family survived the quarter-century incarceration intact, Coleman said she is not with her husband any longer, but that they remain “close friends and allies.” Both children are “wonderful, and love their father dearly.” Each child has a partner and a child of his or her own. “So yeah, in a sense we did survive,” Coleman said. “Better than some.”

Jay Coleman now works for the New York State Defenders Association, running a program that helps prepare people who are headed to prison, particularly those who are “vulnerable,” Alison Coleman said, because they may be physically smaller, or have mental-health issues or developmental disabilities.

He said that he is currently mentoring 33 people around the state, and that he prepares them to “make prison a positive, instead of the negative it’s set up to be.” He then stays in contact with them and sometimes with their families throughout their terms, and then helps them with re-entry as well.

One way that he prepares them, he said, is by telling them to remember what he calls “the mantra”: Any time another prisoner comes by the cell to offer some kind of temporary distraction like drugs or sex, they should be holding a book or doing a push-up and should respond with the mantra: “All I do is study and work out.” They should say, “Thank you, but no thank you, that’s not for me.”

The key is to keep focused on the big picture, which is getting home as soon as possible, he tells them. He said of the inmates he is now coaching, “No one is in solitary. Most have not ever had a disciplinary ticket. Most are doing very well getting through their bid.” They are already preparing to go home, from the first day, he said.