[humanser] How Prison Undoes Family Values

[Mary Ann Robinson]

How Prison Undoes Family Values
  Sadhbh Walshe, Comment Is Free April 1, 2012
  When Laura Kaeppeler was 14 years old, her father was sentenced
to 18 months in prison for mail fraud.  She found the experience
of having an incarcerated parent so traumatic and shameful that
when she was crowned Miss America in January of this year she
announced that rather than using her position to champion a
nebulous cause like world peace, she would be focusing any
attention that comes her way on what has become a very American
problem, the growing number of children have lost a parent to
prison.
  In the last 30 years or so, the rush to lock people up for
ridiculously long sentences even for minor crimes has led to an
explosion of the prison population.  And as the majority of
prisoners are also parents, the population of children with a
father or mother in prison has also exploded.  Since 1990, the
number of children with a parent in prison has increased overall
by 82%, and the number of incarcerated mothers has increased at
almost twice the rate of incarcerated fathers.  There are now an
estimated 10 million American children who have had a parent in
prison on parole or under some kind of probationary supervision.
And, as is always the case when you are talking about the prison
population, there is a disturbing racial disparity; one in 15
black children have a parent in prison, compared to one in 111
white children.
  It's hardly surprising to learn that the experience of having a
mother or father in prison does not tend to be an empowering one.
But there is evidence aplenty to show that, like Miss America,
these children are often deeply traumatized by the experience.
Their school work suffers, they can become emotionally withdrawn
or aggressively act out.  The negative consequences tend to be
exacerbated if they are unable to maintain meaningful contact
with the parent they love while he or she is in prison; even more
so if, as often happens, they lose contact with that parent
permanently.
  Maintaining contact with an incarcerated parent is challenging,
to say the least, and certainly not something that the state or
federal authorities seem to think is a priority.  If they did,
they surely would not have more than half the prison population
in institutions that are between 100 and 500 miles from inmates'
actual homes, and some over 500 miles from home, making visits
next to impossible for struggling families.  This distance factor
alone goes a long way to explaining why, as of 2004, 58.5% of
inmates in state prison and 44.7% of inmates in federal prison
had never received a visit from their kids.  If a child in
Philadelphia wants to see their mother in the women's prison that
is an eight-hour drive away on the other side of the state, they
have to be up at 1am to board a special charter bus to take them
there.
  These visits are crucially important for the children, however.
One foster mother who was looking after two sisters whose parents
were in prison for drug offenses described bringing the girls to
visit their father whom they hadn't seen in years:
  "On the day of the visit, we got up early to hit the road in
time to make visiting hours at the prison.  Once we arrived, my
purse was searched, the children's colored drawings for their dad
were inspected and we had to walk through a metal detector,
before being locked into the family visit room.  I was relying on
my girls to remember their father, since I had no idea what he
looked like.  They lit up like Christmas trees when they caught
sight of an Abraham Lincoln-esque figure in prison blues who
walked across the room.
  "As a foster parent, I didn't want to intrude on the first
visit in years with his children, so I never really talked with
their dad.  But he looked very happy to see them and promised his
little girls the world.  I heard him promise to get out of prison
and to get a house where all of the family could be together
again.  Since the family included four other siblings, my heart
broke a little when I realized how very tough that task would be
for him, a former felon.  Later, I heard that he, like a lot of
prisoners, had his parental rights terminated, which is only one
of the tragic outcomes of incarcerating parents."
  This is, indeed, one of the tragic outcomes of parental
incarceration -- that even a short prison sentence can result in
the lifetime loss of one's children.  In 1997, Congress passed
the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) which requires foster
care agencies to file termination of parental rights if a child
has been in care for 15 of the last 22 months.  So, if a mother
gets a median 36-month sentence for some minor drug offense, she
is at risk of having her parental rights terminated.  Once that
happens, the termination is permanent and irreversible.
  Across the US, advocacy groups are trying to have the ASFA law
amended so that incarceration by itself will not be grounds for
losing one's children.  They are also fighting to have prisoners
placed closer to home or, better still, in halfway houses if the
offense was a minor one, so that visiting is not as difficult or
traumatic.  Parenting classes for prisoners and better visiting
conditions in general will help also.  But unless we stop using
incarceration as a one-stop shop for all social ills, stop being
"tough on crime" and start being tough on the causes of crime,
it's impossible to see how this cycle of despair will ever end.
  Sadhbh Walshe is a film-maker and former staff writer for the
CBS drama series The District.  Her opinion pieces have also been
published in the Chicago Tribune and Irish Times.
  ininB plus Alterationet Mobile Edition
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