A phone call suddenly cut off before you can say goodbye. Three chances a year to take a half-day bus trip to visit only for a few hours. Being suspected of stealing from the classroom. These are all very real scenarios for children with incarcerated parents.

But many agencies across the country are working with community and government social service partners to change the experiences of these children and decrease the likelihood that they will become involved in the criminal justice system by offering support on multiple levels.

"There is no doubt that having your parent incarcerated is a trauma," said Arlene Lee, Director of the Child Welfare League of America's (CWLA) Federal Resource Center for Children of Prisoners. "It's important to remember that parental incarceration is different than the loss through death and divorce. It is the shame and the stigma. They are told not to tell their teachers where the parent is. They learn very quickly it is something to be ashamed of."

The effects of having an incarcerated parent range from financial, where the loss of a father to prison often means a major cut in family income, to the feeling of abandonment for the loss of a father or a mother, especially as the number of women going to prison has increased.

Research shows that more than 2 million children are a part of this group and that about eight percent of them have mothers who are incarcerated. The children of offenders many times either end up with a grandmother, an aunt or even in foster care, but their specific needs can go unaddressed without special attention being paid to them.

According to Lee, who is working with several programs to help children with incarcerated parents, one of the first steps is not to treat the children as if they were the one who had committed the crime.

"There is the stigma that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree," she said.

Then, agencies and organizations should understand that the most effective way to work with a child is with the participation and cooperation of the parent. So, the incarcerated parent should be involved, as much as possible, in any intervention with these children.

"They will be the parent forever so [people] should support the parent-child relationship where appropriate. Everyone has a way to do it and a role to play, whether it's the school, human service agencies or corrections," she said.

Several agencies across the country are trying to meet the needs of these children through visitation programs and other partnerships in the community. To expand this effort, the CWLA works with agencies to educate them about the issue and the elements that these partnerships should have.

Education and Best Practices

Through a federal grant from the National Institute of Corrections, the CWLA created its resource center to provide technical assistance, training and guidance to member agencies and others about how to best serve the children of offenders.

"Our goal is to get everyone thinking about their role in this," said Lee.

Through the grant funding, the CWLA has worked with several agencies to support research, activities and programming for children with incarcerated parents. One recent effort is the creation of a new curriculum to educate agencies about this population.

According to Lee, the four-module curriculum takes people from the basic information about the risk factors of these children to ways to impact their lives in a positive way.

"We're also developing a curriculum about mentoring children of prisoners and training mentors," said Lee. "It's written so you can work directly with corrections and others."

One of the basic ways that agencies try to strengthen the parent-child bond is through visitation programs designed especially for the children.

Lee said these programs range from simply transporting the child to the facility - when they would otherwise have no way to go there - to enhanced visitation that supports the parent-child experience by providing books for children, reading programs and parenting classes for the offenders.

Community and human service groups help to prepare the children for the visit and transport them there. Lee added that these groups also need to provide education about the importance of regular visitation between parent and child to facilitate the visits.

"A lot of foster parents will say that visitation isn't good because it upsets the child. That's natural. But if we can recognize that the parent and child may need to grieve their separation, we can allow for that [process]," she said. "It's important to be able to pay attention to the visit, not just getting them there, and make sure what happens supports basic child development."

Lee said one prison in Pennsylvania has a special visitation room set up for parent-child visits and inmate earn the right to have two-hour visits with their kids. Other facilities hold summer camps for the children and their parents at the facility to further strengthen their bond.

Visitation programs are, in many cases, the tip of the iceberg as both community and government agencies come together to form multiple partnerships to address the needs of the offender and the offender's children. Their goal is to help keep these families connected and put a stop to the cycle of generational crime.
 
Partnerships Focuses on Family, Children

On a more systemic level, the New York City-based Bodega de la Familia program aims to make reentry a holistic experience from the family point of view. The organization has partnered with the New York State Division of Parole to team parole officers with the families of offenders to change community supervision so it better serves the offender and the family as a whole.

"Our focus is really on the whole family and the kids are a real big part of that. Our work is helping people to think differently and our mission is really broad to break these cycles of crime," said Carol Shapiro, President and Executive Director of Family Justice Inc., the non-profit organization that created La Bodega.

Shapiro said that the program's mission is to change the thinking about how offenders should return to the community so that the family is a major consideration, not a separate entity.

"Parole may care about the parolee and child welfare cares for the kids. We think about things in silos, but families don't live like that. One of our jobs is to get government and community-based agencies to see that they are just one piece," said Shapiro.

Lee said this is especially important when you talk about the children involved.

"Quite often a reentry plan focuses on the offender and the notion of kids or family is not included, so we set people up for failure. If we tell them to interview for jobs, but don't provide for childcare, or a parent-child conference at school [conflicts with a job], then they have to make a choice," she said.

What Bodega promotes is the creation of multiple supports for all aspects of the family. Other programs, however, focus directly on the child and parent relationship.

Families in Crisis, Inc. (FCI) of Hartford, Connecticut was founded in 1977 by a woman who, after volunteering in the courts realized that there were few if any supports for the families of the offenders.

According to current Executive Director Susan Quinlan, key stakeholders in the community came together to begin working with the offenders while they were incarcerated and that expanded to working with the offenders' families in the community.

Today, Families in Crisis, provides an array of services to the children of prisoners and their primary parent who is incarcerated, including counseling programs for the families in the community, after school programs, and parenting programs for the offender.

"One thing you see anecdotally is it's not unlikely to see children following in the steps of their parents. If you know who these children are and you know they are at risk, then it makes sense to intervene," said Quinlan.

In the after school program, for example, the program staff work closely with the children on a social and academic level to make sure these children do not repeat their parent's mistakes.

"One of the indicators you need to look at is children who fail academically are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system," said Quinlan.

And for the incarcerated parent, the program communicates with them to make sure they are on the same page with the services their children are receiving.

"These children don't live in a vacuum. We have to involve everyone in their family," she said.

In addition, Families in Crisis staff work with the parent in prison on how their behavior has impacted their children and how they can parent from behind bars.

These connections, Quinlan said, help the parents feel like they are more involved.

"When you are in prison if you are worried about your family, there's [usually] no one in the correctional system to help," she added.

Other programs throughout the country also provide similar services to the children of prisoners.

Friends Outside is a nationally based program that works with the children of prisoners. In San Luis Obispo County, Calif., the California Department of Corrections has partnered with the organization to work with these children during visits with their incarcerated parents.

According to Esther McIlwain, Community Resource Manager for California Men's Colony facility, Friends Outside provides daycare services for these children that include arts and crafts, play time and a lunch.

The children, who range in age from five to 12, will spend a few hours with their father or grandfather and then participate in the program and eat lunch before they go home, said McIlwain.

In addition, interns and students from local colleges volunteer their time to help lead the programs and interact with the children.

McIlwain said last year members of a college football team volunteered for the program as well as psychology and sociology students and early childhood education interns.

"We try to get a lot of males to volunteer because the children do not have good male role models," said McIlwain.

Community churches also are involved in programming for the children as well, especially around the holiday season in December. McIlwain said that a local church group has begun volunteering regularly to bring gifts to the children during a holiday party and spend time with them.

The activities seem to benefit both the children and the volunteers.

"They get to see how a simple gift brightens them [the children] up. We've had some of the teens say Christmas means more to them now that they have become involved," McIlwain said.

Other agencies are in the planning stages of creating programs to help this group of children.

The Let's Start/Mothers and Children Together program in St. Louis received a planning grant through the CWLA in 2001 to look at the needs of children with incarcerated parents.

According to Sister Jackie Toben, Executive Director of the program, the grant helped the organization identify the gaps in service to these children and offer recommendations to community stakeholders for establishing a way to fill those spaces.

Among the recommendations in the organization's report were five initiatives for change. They include:
* Identification of the children and assessment of interventions needed
* The creation of inter-agency collaborations
* Helping families stay connected despite incarceration
* Building public and institutional support and,
* Establishing a capable agency network to provide case management, evaluation of services and coordination of policies and procedures.

Areas of the community that the program has been able to bring to the table include the state Department of Corrections, Division of Social Services and Division of Foster Care, legal representation, representatives from not-for-profit organizations and the Girl Scouts.

According to Toben, the program hopes to be able to access additional grant money to get some of these initiatives off the ground. For those who are promoting these kinds of support programs for children and families of offenders, assessing the needs of this population is an important first step.

"There are opportunities of intervention all along the way. The question is how do you tap the strengths of the family and use their connections in the community and underscore that families are the experts of their own life," said Shapiro.

Resources:

Child Welfare League of America - www.cwla.org
202-638-2952

Family Justice Inc. - www.familyjusticeinc.org

Families in Crisis - http://www.familiesincrisis.org/

Let's Start/Mothers and Children Together 314-241-2324