Decarcerating America
Page 21
Advocates for decarceration need to be careful: claiming that criminal justice reforms will result in fewer people in prison but that those incarcerated will be “the worst of the worst” demonizes incarcerated parents and their families even more than they are now. The criminal justice system creates these distinctions and then reinforces them. A campaign that humanizes parents and all people involved in the justice system is a key component of decarceration, but it must be very careful not to create classes of unworthy people based on their crime. Drug law reform is a separate (and important) component and should not be conflated with the need to reduce incarceration on its own merits.5
While the most efficient way to reduce the number of children directly affected by parental incarceration and parental arrest is to arrest, detain, and incarcerate fewer individuals, that approach alone will not be effective in shifting the paradigm of punishment. It will not reduce the demonization of the parents who remain incarcerated, continuing to serve extremely long sentences, and the shaming of the children and families whose loved ones have been characterized as “the worst of the worst.”6 A more humane and rehabilitative approach to justice (not “criminal” justice) would also consider the pathways to crime and the growing body of research revealing that those who have committed acts of violence were often victims of crime first, and it would need to confront racism and anti-poor sentiments as among the intricate and fertile roots of our current punitive stance.7
A growing body of research has linked parental incarceration with several adverse effects on children. Some of these effects are economic: incarceration can diminish parents’ economic support for their children and lead to material hardship, ultimately contributing to an increased risk of housing instability and homelessness.8 Unsurprisingly, these impacts of parental incarceration are better recognized in health circles than by those in the justice system: parental incarceration is one of ten adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that are associated with health and social problems as an adult. The ACE Study, a landmark in epidemiological research, also demonstrates that the more ACEs a person has as a child, the more likely he or she will be to experience negative health outcomes as an adult.9 For most children with an incarcerated parent, and particularly for children of incarcerated mothers, the incarceration was preceded by other challenges and other ACEs.10 As a result, it can be difficult or impossible to distinguish causality of negative outcomes for children of incarcerated parents. For example, was it the parent’s incarceration or the preceding domestic violence, parental unemployment, and substance abuse that led to the negative outcome?
Parental incarceration has been linked to effects on children’s educational outcomes: for young children, parental incarceration has been found to lead to behavioral problems and diminished school readiness.11 According to a study in Law and Society Review, having a mother imprisoned at any point between birth and the age of eighteen is associated with a roughly 0.35-point decrease in cumulative high school GPA.12 However, many of these negative effects can be linked to the stigma associated with parental incarceration; in other words, the negative external response to a parent’s incarceration is also damaging to children and families.
The stress of parental incarceration has effects on children’s health and health behaviors. For girls, paternal incarceration is linked with an increased body mass index and obesity, due to girls’ distinctive internalizing behaviors.13 Children of incarcerated mothers have also been found to show increased depressive symptoms.14 Paternal incarceration is associated with significantly higher illegal drug use among young adult children, likely a response to high levels of stress.15
The significant costs associated with incarceration—extended to the health and well-being of both the incarcerated and their families—is well documented in a report issued by the Ella Baker Center in 2015, Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families.16 Of the people surveyed for the report, about one in every two formerly incarcerated people and one in every two family members experienced negative physical and psychological health impacts related to their own or a loved one’s incarceration. Families, including their incarcerated loved ones, frequently reported post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, hopelessness, depression, and anxiety. Yet families have little institutional support for addressing and healing this trauma and becoming more emotionally and financially stable during and after periods of a family member’s incarceration.
And while the increased risks associated with parental incarceration are primarily associated with children’s health and not with delinquency, future criminality, or incarceration, many are unfortunately quick to make that assumption and treat children of the incarcerated as “criminals in waiting.” How much this contributes to increasing the risk for children’s negative outcomes is worthy of pause and consideration. One study examining teachers’ responses to students revealed that when they learned that a student had an incarcerated mother, the teacher’s expectations for the student went down.17 Is it any wonder that many families choose not to disclose the incarceration of a loved one, even to a teacher or health care provider? And is it any wonder that there is little support for maintaining a relationship—between a child and his or her incarcerated parent—that is assumed to be harmful?
Over the last decade, however, the number of children affected by a parent’s arrest and incarceration and the increasing volume of their voices have garnered attention beyond the systems typically associated with the well-being of children (e.g., health and mental health, child welfare, and education). More and more, the justice system is buzzing with phrases such as “family engagement,” and research is demonstrating that justice-involved people show better outcomes when they are able to make, mend, and maintain family connections. As a result, these children are now getting some attention from law enforcement, courts, corrections, and community supervision.
Yet even the systems that are charged with the responsibility of children’s well-being and protection have largely failed to support relationships between incarcerated parents and their children. Family Court and child welfare systems nationally have leaned away from keeping families together when a parent is or has been incarcerated. The ACE study and other research can be easily misinterpreted to suggest that a child’s attachment to a parent and the critical nature of this relationship following an arrest or during incarceration should be discouraged or ignored. Even neutral interventions such as mentoring can appear to suggest that the parent needs to be replaced, not reattached.
In no other context is the parent-child relationship so easily dismissed. In fact, elsewhere it is recognized as essential for a child’s healthy development. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics: “Any intervention that separates a child from the primary caregiver who provides psychological support should be cautiously considered and treated as a matter of urgency and profound importance.”18 In recognition of that fact, the U.S. military goes to great lengths to support children’s relationships with their deployed parents, including providing Skype programs and life-size photos of the parent for their children to “live with” while Mommy or Daddy is away.19
In part, the lack of attention to what mass incarceration has meant for children—unprecedented parent-child separation and ruptured attachments—comes from equating lawbreaking with bad and even abusive parenting. The ACE study, for example, asks adults to reflect on their childhood experiences to identify factors that might correlate with current deficits and challenges. This includes abuse or neglect at the hands of others as well as factors that do not constitute child maltreatment (parental mental illness, death, or incarceration). When factors such as parental incarceration are confused with experiences that constitute child maltreatment, the natural impulse is to remove the cause (i.e., the parent), interfering with attempts to support children in maintaining their relationships with their parents, during and following incarceration.
The most persu
asive counterargument to the view that children are better off when kept away from their incarcerated parents has come from the children themselves. While few, including the courts, seem to respect the right of parents in prison to have a relationship with their children, the children have asserted that the right is their own.20 “Viewed through the lens of a child’s experience, it threatens a right so central as to be not merely civil but human: the right to family.”21 And these children (plus those who care for them and about them) claim that along with their status come some basic human rights.
In 2005, young people in San Francisco, with help from the San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents Partnership (SFCIPP), created a bill of rights for children of incarcerated parents. From its inception, this groundbreaking document, entitled “Children of Incarcerated Parents: A Bill of Rights,” resonated powerfully with children and youth across the country, and it also provided a road map for much of the policy advocacy that has been most relevant and most successful.
Children of Incarcerated Parents
A Bill of Rights
1.I have the right to be kept safe and informed at the time of my parent’s arrest.
2.I have the right to be heard when decisions are made about me.
3.I have the right to be considered when decisions are made about my parent.
4.I have the right to be well cared for in my parent’s absence.
5.I have the right to speak with, see, and touch my parent.
6.I have the right to support as I struggle with my parent’s incarceration.
7.I have the right not to be judged, blamed, or labeled because of my parent’s incarceration.
8.I have the right to a lifelong relationship with my parent.
There are many examples across the country of children and youth speaking up to claim their right to have a relationship with their incarcerated parent. Perhaps one of the first young people to speak out about her experience as a child of an incarcerated parent was Emani Davis, who—more than two decades ago, while still a teenager—was asked to speak during a federal videoconference called “Children of Prisoners, Children at Risk” about having a father in prison.22 She agreed to speak—if the conference organizers reframed and renamed “children at risk” as “children of promise,” shifting the narrative about children with incarcerated parents from a negative one imposed upon them to a positive one they claimed for themselves. The name was changed, demonstrating the power of young voices to generate solutions. Another example, Project WHAT, a program for and by youth leaders and advocates in San Francisco with incarcerated parents, exemplifies this; the program title stands for “We’re Here and Talking.”
Echoes of Incarceration, a group of young filmmakers in New York City who have direct experience with parental incarceration, are claiming rights for themselves and other children through their powerful films.23 Their work addresses the Bill of Rights for children of incarcerated parents and provides a forum for young people to share not only the nuances and details of their diverse experiences but also their recommendations for policy change. In partnership with Sesame Street and Upworthy, they made a film solely about the importance of visiting an incarcerated parent, addressing the issue from children’s perspectives. Daniel Beaty, a talented actor, writer, and director whose father was incarcerated for most of his childhood, also broke ground close to ten years ago with his spoken-word piece “Knock Knock.”24 In three short minutes, Beaty describes loving memories of his father, then a confusing visit through glass, followed by years of the painful absence of his father. At the end he proclaims, “We are our fathers’ sons and daughters, but we are not their choices.”
Not only film and theater but books have come from directly affected children of those in our prisons. Tony Lewis Jr. recently published Slugg: A Boy’s Life in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2015), in which he shares his experiences and his insights about how his father’s long-term incarceration has changed his life in profound and multifaceted ways.
Recently Ebony Underwood, a Soros Justice Fellow and daughter of a father who has been incarcerated for almost thirty years in federal prison, is creating a national online platform for youth to communicate with each other, for professionals working with children of incarcerated parents to find one another and share resources, and for caregivers to locate resources and support. Like most of the others who have stepped forward, she has gone beyond arguing for policies to end mass incarceration, acknowledging the role of peers in her journey: #WeGotUsNow.
These and other powerful and brave actions by young people about what they experience, need, have a right to, and deserve provide the solutions that are urgently needed. We need only to consult the Bill of Rights to see their inventory of what needs to change. The next section delves more deeply into policy changes that are needed and under way.
Six Ways to Improve the Lives of Children with Incarcerated Parents
Aligned with the Bill of Rights for children of incarcerated parents are thoughtful policy recommendations and concrete reforms (several of which are discussed below) that manifest the principles embedded in them. Many of these proposals have been adapted and adopted to varying degrees in one or more jurisdictions. They have also demonstrated their potential to support the well-being and future prospects of children whose parents are incarcerated. These policies span the entire continuum of the criminal justice spectrum, including a parent’s arrest, detention, incarceration, community supervision, parole, and reintegration.
Child-Sensitive Arrest Policies
Whether a child is physically present at the time a parent is taken into police custody, comes home to find a missing parent, or learns of the arrest later, children experience the arrest of a parent to whom they have an attachment as a traumatic and potentially life-changing event. To actually see a parent arrested—frisked, handcuffed, placed in a patrol car, and taken away—is akin to witnessing a parent assaulted. Exposure to violence, as the arrest may be experienced, contributes an additional adverse childhood experience, and the cumulative effect is even more powerful. When the arrested parent is also the custodial or primary caregiving parent, the arrest may create a downward spiral regarding where and how the children will survive. A study in California published in 2007 found that
in the absence of [police] protocols or planning, 70 percent of children who are present at a parent’s arrest watch that parent being handcuffed. Nearly 30 percent are confronted with drawn weapons. Many go on to demonstrate the symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Smaller children may respond by becoming unable to eat or to sleep, losing the ability to speak, or even reverting from walking to crawling.25
Most police departments have few guidelines or regulations—and virtually no training—regarding the arrest of a parent or person responsible for children. And yet, when presented with information about the trauma of a parent’s arrest for children, several police departments expressed interest in adopting policies and protocols that would reduce the trauma. Police officers also expressed an interest in addressing the secondary trauma for themselves of witnessing the pain experienced by the children present, and they worried about how the children would fare when their parent was taken away in handcuffs. As protests are erupting about police shootings, and police and community relations seem to be at a very low point, several law enforcement agencies have realized the opportunity to build trust with community members if children and families are well cared for when a loved one is arrested.
While several jurisdictions, such as San Francisco and New Mexico, have already begun developing guidelines for arresting parents in a child-sensitive manner, advocates for children of incarcerated parents raised the issue to a broader level.26 In June 2013, the White House honored twelve Champions of Change for Children of Incarcerated Parents, and deputy U.S. attorney general James M. Cole delivered remarks announcing that the “International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) with funding support from the Department of Justice (DOJ), is developing a m
odel protocol and training on protecting the physical and emotional well-being of children when their parents are arrested.”27 In August 2014, IACP and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) released its model protocol, which is an important read for anyone concerned with minimizing the impact of a parent’s justice involvement on children.28 At the same time, as law enforcement leaders recognized the benefits to children of the model protocol, they also were mindful of the benefits to police. As the model policy suggests, minimizing the trauma of children “is directly linked to community perception of law enforcement, which translates into an officer safety issue . . . and a clear component of principles of community policing, problem solving and conflict resolution.”29
One year later, the Albany Police Department (in New York) implemented its slightly adapted Children of Arrested Parents protocol.30 This included training and a detailed examination of practice, as well as data collection. Implementing this protocol fit with the department’s own strategic plan, which included improving community relations and “winning over a generation” (building improved relationships with young people). Implementing the protocol also led to a more detailed approach to the execution of warrants, one that attempts to ensure that children will not be home when a warrant is executed.31 The New York State Association of Chiefs of Police is now recommending including information on whether there are children in the home in the planning for executing a warrant.32 In October 2015, IACP and BJA released a roll call training video to prepare officers on how to respond when arresting a child’s caregiver when children are either present or away.33