They met as children. Now married, she’s been visiting him in prison for nearly 20 years.

Saturday, 5:00 a.m. — Kaywonda Banks sits in an unmarked olive green van parked near Barclays Center, two full bags of food and house supplies between her legs and her 8-year-old son in the seat next to her.

This is the starting point for her four-hour, roughly 100-mile trip into the mountains of New York, where her husband, Javon, is incarcerated at the Otisville Correctional Facility.

Maintaining her marriage and providing a father figure for her children means regularly skipping sleep and traveling upstate — without owning a car. For the single-income mother of three, it’s a $500-a-month toll.

Banks tries to visit Javon at least every other weekend. “There’s nothing I feel like I won’t do for him,” she said on a recent evening in her East New York home. “I want him to feel like he’s always still connected to the outside world. He still has somebody that does love him unconditionally.”

In 1973, New York began to offer free bus service for residents of New York City, Albany, Rochester and Syracuse to visit incarcerated family members. But in 2011, the state slashed $70 million from the budget of the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision — so DOCCS cut the program.

Since then, the state agency’s budget has been restored and even increased. There are fewer prisons now in New York State, and fewer incarcerated people, but money for the visiting program never returned.

Private companies have filled the gap, charging parents, spouses and children as much as $75 per person to visit their loved ones. A set of bills that advocates say could help have, so far, stalled in Albany.

Many facilities in rural locations, including Otisville, are not accessible by public transportation. Banks and others without their own cars are left little choice but to pay the price: money, time and stress.

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