High-risk Horizons: Coconino's Children of the Imprisoned.

Glad to see that Coconino County is working creatively with the children of incarcerated parents, and trying to help them keep their family units connected. Here's a good New York Times article giving some background on why it's so important to attend to these kids' needs - and why we must decarcerate our nation as rapidly as possible...

The STARS Mentoring Program in AZ has some excellent resources for caregivers here.

There's also a manual for caregivers of children with incarcerated parents: 

Arizona Family Members Behind Bars

 

 

"Mother's prison"

ASPC-Perryville; Goodyear, AZ 

November 2011

Keeping Kids Connected With Their Jailed Parents

North Country Public Radio

by Gillian Ferris Kohl

Jul 18, 2012 (Morning Edition / Arizona Public Radio) —

With one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, Arizona also has one of the highest percentages of children with a parent in prison. In rural Coconino County, 1 of every 28 minors has an incarcerated parent, and that county is helping families stay in touch without bringing kids inside prison walls.

Arizona has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, and that means it also has one of the highest percentages of children with one or both parents in jail. One rural county there is trying to help families stay connected.

On a recent day, 45-year-old Liz Minor sits in the shade outside a coffeehouse in Flagstaff, enjoying icy drinks with her two sons. She relishes this ordinary moment, considering that just a few years ago, their time together was limited to a prison visiting room, separated by shatterproof glass.

"I wore lipstick because it leaves marks," Minor says. "So when your kids are there and they're telling you it's over ... you see windows just marked up with lips because you want to kiss your babies goodbye and you can't."

Minor's youngest son, A.J., was only 7 years old when his mom began serving a sentence for manslaughter. Now 18, A.J. recalls a very different memory of visits with his mom.

"They always used to make us ... take off our shoes and open up shirts and stuff," A.J. says. "They would pat us down, and our pockets had to be turned out."

During his mom's absence, A.J. was raised by several family members because his father was also in prison, serving a life sentence. It was tough for A.J.

"I did have a lot of suicidal tendencies," he says. "It really sucked to have to go through that when you're 8, 9, 10 years old, and you're thinking about going into your room and killing yourself. It's not a cool deal at all."

Instead of taking his life, however, A.J. took action. At 15, he joined a fledgling task force in Coconino County, Ariz. The group's goal was to keep kids connected with their parents in prison. That's where he met Beth Tucker, one of the group's organizers.

"Our population of children and families is different than the state as a whole in that we have such great distances for our rural areas," Tucker says. "They're traveling hundreds and hundreds of miles to visit a parent."

Tucker says 1 of every 28 children in Coconino County has a parent in prison. Some kids, like A.J., experience the trauma of being present during their parent's arrest. Others, Tucker says, can end up on the street, fearful they'll land in foster care or in the custody of Child Protective Services.

"We know that oftentimes when a parent is arrested, they will not reveal that they have children," she says. "They're afraid they're going to lose that child."

That's why law enforcement officers are now being trained to look for signs of children at the time of a person's arrest: toys, car seats and backpacks, for instance. Another major step is that the county is installing a Skype-like video visitation system. Lt. Matt Figueroa with the Coconino County Sheriff's Office is helping set it up.

"They can do it from a coffeehouse, they can do it from their iPhone or iPad," Figueroa says. "People throw out the word Skype, but it's basically a secure video connection to conduct that visit."

Figueroa says it will also cut down on the trauma that many children experience having to go inside prison to visit a parent. That's heartening to kids like A.J. Minor, who says he would've liked something like this when his mom was in prison.

"A visit like that would actually keep a kid from running away, because they know that they can have a visit with their parent every couple of days. It's so much more nourishing," he says. "So for someone who's going through it right now, just hang on. You will be able to see them."

A.J. himself is trying to hang on, when it comes to seeing his own father. They haven't met face to face in 16 years. 

Copyright 2012 Arizona Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.knau.org/.

Collatoral damage: prisoners, their futures, and their families.

This report is especially for those who think we need to make people pay for the cost of their own incarceration, as if they don't already pay a price. On the contrary, Americans make prisoners and their families pay, and pay, and pay - long past the original terms of the sentence, in so many ways. We might as well cut off some of these prisoners' right hands and brand their foreheads with "CRIMINAL", given the social and economic consequences of having a felony record.


Trust me, Arizona - we punish our more impoverished criminals sufficiently with their imprisonment and other sanctions - the ones with money to pay for their prison stay generally spent that money on lawyers who got them off on probation. We don't need to go after poor kids like we do, though they are often the target of the AZ Department of Corrections, which makes it hard for prisoners to support their families, and is now also imposing a new banking fee on prisoners and a $25 annual fee on each visitor to recoup their background check expenses. No wonder ADC director Chuck Ryan was hand-picked by Governor Jan Brewer to be her Chief Disciplinarian: he seems to think a lot like her and AZ Me Party Senate President Russ Pearce, who both believe that children should be punished for the "crimes" of their parents.


So, from the PEW Charitable Trusts / Economic Mobility Project, here's the executive summary of Collatoral Costs: Incarceration's Effect on Economic Mobility. In short, it's devastating, and amounts to cruel and unusual lifelong punishment for offenders and their families - and has a far more insidious effect on their communities than most people have any idea of. I think the powers that be just keep us all thinking it's a good idea because it assures them that they have a constant supply of slave labor for the state and low wage labor in the community to undercut unions and the working class if we start feeling too entitled to things like a living wage...

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Collatoral Costs: Incarceration's Effect on Economic Mobility

Executive Summary

Currently 2.3 million Americans are behind bars, equaling more than 1 in 100 adults. Up from just 500,000 in 1980, this marks more than a 300 percent increase in the United States’ incarcerated population and represents the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

Over the last four years, The Pew Charitable Trusts has documented the enormous expense of building prisons and housing inmates that is borne by states and the federal government. Indeed, in the face of gaping budget shortfalls, more than half of the states are now seeking alternative sentencing and corrections strategies that cost less than prison, but can protect public safety and hold offenders accountable. A less explored fiscal implication of incarceration is its impact on former inmates’ economic opportunity and mobility.

Economic mobility, the ability of individuals and families to move up the income ladder over their lifetime and across generations, is the epitome of the American Dream. Americans believe that economic success is determined by individual efforts and attributes, like hard work and ambition, and that anyone should be able to improve his or her economic circumstances.

Incarceration affects an inmate’s path to prosperity. Collateral Costs quantifies the size of that effect, not only on offenders but on their families and children. Before being incarcerated more than two-thirds of male inmates were employed and more than half were the primary source of financial support for their children.1 Incarceration carries significant and enduring economic repercussions for the remainder of the person’s working years. This report finds that former inmates work fewer weeks each year, earn less money and have limited upward mobility. These costs are borne by offenders’ families and communities, and they reverberate across generations.

People who break the law need to be held accountable and pay their debt to society. Prisons can enhance public safety, both by keeping dangerous criminals off the streets and by deterring would be offenders. However, virtually all inmates will be released, and when they do, society has a strong interest in helping them fulfill their responsibilities to their victims, their families and their communities.When returning offenders can find and keep legitimate employment, they are more likely to be able to pay restitution to their victims, support their children and avoid crime.

To calculate the impacts of incarceration on economic mobility, The Pew Charitable Trusts commissioned new analysis by two of the leading researchers in the field, Dr. Bruce Western of Harvard University and Dr. Becky Pettit of the University of Washington.


Major findings include the following:

INCARCERATION IS CONCENTRATED AMONG MEN, THE YOUNG, THE UNEDUCATED AND RACIAL AND ETHNIC MINORITIES—ESPECIALLY AFRICAN AMERICANS.

• One in 87 working-aged white men is in prison or jail, compared with 1 in 36 Hispanic men and 1 in 12 African American men.

• More young (20 to 34-year-old) African American men without a high school diploma or GED are currently behind bars (37 percent) than employed (26 percent).

INCARCERATION NEGATIVELY AFFECTS FORMER INMATES’ ECONOMIC PROSPECTS.

• Serving time reduces hourly wages for men by approximately 11 percent, annual employment by 9 weeks and annual earnings by 40 percent.

• By age 48, the typical former inmate will have earned $179,000 less than if he had never been incarcerated.

• Incarceration depresses the total earnings of white males by 2 percent, of Hispanic males by 6 percent, and of black males by 9 percent.

FORMER INMATES EXPERIENCE LESS UPWARD ECONOMIC MOBILITY THAN THOSE WHO ARE NEVER INCARCERATED.

• Of the former inmates who were in the lowest fifth of the male earnings distribution in 1986, two-thirds remained on the bottom rung in 2006, twice the number of those who were not incarcerated.

• Only 2 percent of previously incarcerated men who started in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution made it to the top fifth 20 years later, compared to 15 percent of men who started at the bottom but were never incarcerated.

THE IMPACTS OF INCARCERATION REACH FAR BEYOND FORMER INMATES TO THEIR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES.

• 54 percent of inmates are parents with minor children (ages 0-17), including more than 120,000 mothers and 1.1 million fathers.

• 2.7 million children have a parent behind bars—1 in every 28 children (3.6 percent) has a parent incarcerated, up from 1 in 125 just 25 years ago. Two-thirds of these children’s parents were incarcerated for non-violent offenses.

• One in 9 African American children (11.4 percent), 1 in 28 Hispanic children (3.5 percent) and 1 in 57 white children (1.8 percent) have an incarcerated parent.

A CHILD’S PROSPECT OF UPWARD ECONOMIC MOBILITY IS NEGATIVELY AFFECTED BY THE INCARCERATION OF A PARENT.

• Previous research has shown that having a parent incarcerated hurts children, both educationally and financially.

• Children with fathers who have been incarcerated are significantly more likely than other children to be expelled or suspended from school (23 percent compared with 4 percent).2

• Family income averaged over the years a father is incarcerated is 22 percent lower than family income was the year before a father is incarcerated. Even in the year after the father is released, family income remains 15 percent lower than it was the year before incarceration.3

• Both education and parental income are strong indicators of children’s future economic mobility.4

With millions of prison and jail inmates a year returning to their communities, it is important to identify policies that address the impact of incarceration on the economic mobility of former inmates and their children. Based on information previously put forward by The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Public Safety Performance Project and Pew’s Economic Mobility Project, this report outlines ways to reduce the productivity losses associated with serving time in jail or prison.

These recommendations include the following:

• Proactively reconnect former inmates to the labor market through education and training, job search and placement support and follow-up services to help former inmates stay employed.

• Enhance former inmates’ economic condition and make work pay by capping the percent of an offenders’ income subject to deductions for unpaid debts (such as court-ordered fines and fees), and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit to include non-custodial, low-income parents.

• Screen and sort people convicted of crimes by the risks they pose to society, diverting lower-risk offenders into high-quality, community-based mandatory supervision programs.

• Use earned-time credits, a proven model that offers selected inmates a shortened prison stay if they complete educational, vocational or rehabilitation programs that boost their chances of successful reentry into the community and the labor market.

• Provide funding incentives to corrections agencies and programs that succeed in reducing crime and increasing employment.

• Use swift and certain sanctions other than prison, such as short but immediate weekend jail stays, to punish probation and parole violations, holding offenders accountable while allowing them to keep their jobs.


1 Western, 2006; Glaze and Maruschak, 2008.
2 Johnson, 2009.
3 Ibid.
4 Isaacs, Sawhill and Haskins, 2008.

Criminalized Victims: Feeding Mothers to the Machine...

Via Lois Ahrens at the Real Cost of Prisons Blog. Very troubling article, though nothing new. I don't understand how we can just rip people out of their families and lives and imprison them for years - some until they die - to what good end? I don't think judges often realize how important some of these "criminals" are to their families. Some community-based support for the whole family to remain together, for moms to make amends by finally being there, seems more in order - and you have to make more effort to keep "repeat offenders" in the community - it takes more than one try for most people to kick a habit.

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Mothers among the fastest growing prison population
by Cat Mayin Koo
March 11, 2010

She squared her posture and with a piercing, straight-ahead look, the 49-year-old grandmother of six said, “Crack. I was ad­dicted to crack for over 20 years.”

Darlene Horton, now an advocate at Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers, paid the price for her addiction. The Peoria native went to prison twice, the first for most of a year in 1997 and the second for two and a half years less than a decade later.

Both were nonviolent offenses that left her four children without a parent.

Horton’s tale is emblematic of one of the fastest growing prison populations in the state and county: mothers.

Between 1990 and 2005, the number of women in Illinois prisons quadrupled, according to the state Department of Corrections.

At both the state and county level, about 80 percent of women are convicted of nonviolent crimes and around 80 percent of them are single mothers, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections and the Cook County Sheriff's office.

A main reason for this dramatic upswing is most of these crimes – up to 80 percent - are drug related, said Gail Smith, executive director of the advocacy group.

"Sentencing has gotten much, much harsher on drugs since the ‘war on drugs’ began in the 1980s," Smith said.

Changed laws impacted more women, poor and African-Americans, said Patricia O’Brien, a social work researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies incarcerated mothers.

Penalties for crack cocaine, found more often in poor black neighborhoods, are 10 times more severe than penalties for powder cocaine, which is more expensive and found more in affluent white communities.

“It did next to nothing to the drug king pins, but it destroyed many, many lives,” Smith said.

Stacking trauma

Back in the downtown office, Horton unravelled her personal history of abuse, incest and rape.

Horton began using drugs to “start looking for love and the feeling of not feeling,” she said.

In Cook County, eight of 10 female offenders have been physically or sexually abused and more than three-quarters of them are addicted to drugs.

O’Brien found the link between abuse and addiction common in her research.

“Women tend to internalize their pain and that’s where the drug use and the alcohol come to play – self-medication,” O’Brien said.

Smith described imprisonment as adding to this pain.

“Most women who come out of prison have been abused, so you’re putting trauma on trauma,” Smith said

O’Brien’s research shows that trauma is one of the pathways that lead women to crime. Others include early exposure to crime and the absence of a parent.

Missing moms

Horton’s children never came to visit her when she was in prison. They were hours away and didn’t have the money or means to get to the Decatur Correctional Center.

Phone calls were a rare luxury. The only contact with her children Horton had was when her oldest daughter, Nicole, who was 17 at the time of Horton’s first incarceration, would write.

One letter stuck out to Horton.

“I wasn’t allowed an emergency phone call when my son got shot in the head,” Horton said.

Horton found out about the incident in a letter and was threatened with more severe punishment when she kept asking for the call.

Her incarceration devastated her children and the effects still linger, Horton said. Jeffrey and Randy, her sons were both imprisoned as young men.

“My oldest daughter, she stressed to me on many occasions that she hated me,” Horton said. Rebuilding that relationship was a slow process, Horton said.

Smith agreed that incarceration tears a family apart.

“Any time you’ve had a separation,” Smith said, “the mom and kids need to overcome the trauma of the separation and the mistrust and anger and everything that ensued from that arrest.”

Treatment

In Illinois, imprisoned mothers get little or no contact visits with their children, O’Brien said.

Yes, there are programs geared specifically for mothers, such as the 15-bed MOM’s program offered to pregnant or postpartum offenders through the county’s Women’s Justice Services.The off-site program rewards good behavior for non-violent offenders and allows women to serve a portion of their sentences with their children.

But these programs are available to a scanty few of the women who need them. Most women who give birth in prison usually have less than two days with their child, O’Brien said.

“As the population increased, money for programs decreased,” O’Brien said.

Drug treatment is another area that lacks adequate resources.

Roughly 80 percent of women in state prisons need substance abuse treatment, but only 16 percent will ever receive it, according to data from the Illinois Department of Corrections.

“People don’t understand that addiction keeps going even though you’re locked up,” Horton said, “and the next time you decide to get high, it takes off full speed, like you never quit.”

Within a year, 39 percent of released women will re-offend and within three years, 58 percent of women will re-offend, according to a study by the National Institute of Justice.

Part of the reason why incarceration is ineffective at preventing second offenses is because of the way women are put through the system, Smith said.

“Corrections tend to be based on a male model,” Smith said. “The assumption is that you are dealing with someone who is incarcerated for a violent offense.”

Better options might be what Smith calls gender-specific, trauma-informed treatment that would take into account abuse and drug dependency.

The Women’s Treatment Center offers such treatment, allowing women convicted of nonviolent drug offenses to receive dependency treatment and complete their sentences with their children.

Out of the 45 participants who completed the program over the last three years, none have been reincarcerated. State recidivism rates for women hover above 45 percent.

“Until we understand that this is more a public health problem than a criminal issue, we’re going to continue to have people recidivate,” Smith said.

“We know we’re hurting families and we’re failing to address something that prevents futures crimes and in the next generation,” she said.

Side Bar: and URLs for Graphs on Women and Incarceration: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=161609

'War on drugs'

The modern “war on drugs” that began in the 1980s marked a metamorphosis in the way America policed and punished.

A slew of drug laws were altered to have heavier penalties.

One of the effects of this is drug offenders in the nation’s prisons skyrocketed by almost 1,100 percent from around 41,000 in 1980 to 490,000 in 2003, while national violent crime rates plummeted, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In Chicago, drug arrests in 1980 made up only 5 percent of total arrests. By 2003 they made up 28 percent of all arrests, according to a report by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice nonprofit.

Girls and justice

Girls make up the fastest growing population of juvenile delinquents, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

National trends show that crime is dropping, but in Illinois in 2006, there were 26 percent more female juveniles incarcerated than in 1996, according to the state Department of Corrections.

“Changes in enforcement mean that girls are being put away more,” said Meda Chesney-Lind, a researcher at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who studies girls in gangs.

Even if crimes that girls commit tend to be less violent than those of boys, sentencing has gotten more severe, Chesney-Lind said.

“If a girl runs away and she comes back home, her family could call her in on burglary,” she said.

Most girls that get in trouble have a history of trauma or abuse, according to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Experts like Chesney-Lind say that girls in juvenile facilities need trauma-informed treatment that consider histories of abuse.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=161609

Children of Prisoners.

Upcoming Events

December 15: 5th Special Legislative Session convenes. Be There.

December 17: International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (Tucson Memorial).

December 18: Sex Workers Outreach Project Protest at the AZ DOC in Phoenix.

Came across this blog entry tonight just digging around the net. It's from the Journey to Manhood blog, which is "about men, boys, male culture, mentoring, rites of passage, and men helping boys on their journey to manhood." I was impressed with the post and infer that the author has done a lot of work with or about children of prisoners - including those in AZ.

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Mentoring the Children of Prisoners

I was recently invited to speak at a conference about Mentoring the Children of Prisoners. It is being sponsored by MANY, the Mid-Atlantic Network of Youth & Family Services in Pittsburgh, PA. This conference comes out of the sad story about the challenges facing the children who have an incarcerated parent. With more than 5.6 million Americans in prison or who have served time, the U.S has the highest incarceration rate in the world (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003). Right now, one in forty children in the U.S. have a parent in prison. In relationship to this huge need for mentoring and support, there are relatively few agencies or programs to help these children. The result is that children of prisoners are among the most at-risk population of children in our country.

Research from the Arizona Children of Prisoners Bill of Rights Project (2007) showed that just in my winter home state of Arizona, there were 175,000 children with parent/s in jail, prison, or on probation. The discussions and focus groups they conducted indicated that these children often lacked food, shelter, clothing, parental guidance, good role models, love, societal acceptance, a basic sense of security, and stability in their lives. The absence of these basic nutrients almost invites a child into a life of crime for survival. Research indicates these children are six times more likely than other children to become incarcerated at some point in their lives.

To learn more about opportunities for man-making with this very needy population contact the Resource Center. They are a provider for the federal Corporation for National and Community Service. The Resource Center's site offers lots of background information, links to related topics, and suggested volunteer opportunities.

You can also just do a Google search on Mentoring the Children of Prisoners in your state and see what comes up. If you want to be on the front lines of man-making, this could be a very good place to begin.