Daysean Smith misses his grandmother. He’d like to visit
her, but she’s too far away. She’ll be coming home soon, and he can’t wait to
see her again, although he wonders if she’ll be the same.
“I’m not supposed to talk about her,” he says in a soft
voice.
Until a few years ago, Daysean and his younger half-sister,
Azhanae, lived with their grandmother. But then she was convicted of fraud, and
when she went to prison, they went to live with their mother, Mitzi Mason, who
is a diabetic.
Like many 12-year-olds, Daysean likes cartoons and games. He
points to two certificates on the wall he received for excelling in sixth-grade
reading and math. He doesn’t see his father much, she says, “because he hit me
and my mom.” And, he says, Azhanae’s father is also in prison.
Standing in the doorway of their apartment in the northwest section
of the city, Daysean points across the street.
“I saved my mother,” he says. “She fainted, and I ran across
the street to get my mom’s friend. She told me I saved her life. At first, I
wasn’t afraid. I didn’t even think about it. But later I was worried about my
mom, because if something else happened to her I didn’t know what would happen
to me and my little sister.”
Daysean is part of a
growing population of children coping with the effects that incarceration
has on families. When children’s parents go to prison, their lives are thrown
into chaos. Suddenly, someone they have trusted to take care of them is gone.
The statistics are chilling. According to the FederalResourceCenter
for Children of Prisoners, a national child-welfare advocacy group:
• There are more than 2 million people in US jails and
prisons, more than in any other western country.
• The number of women entering prison has risen sharply —
by 400 percent since 1980.
• In 1999, more than 70 percent of the women in New
York’s prisons were there for drug-related,
non-violent crimes.
• More than half of those women left behind children younger
than 10.
Peter Shaw knows these
statistics all too well. An athletic man whoseems more like a coach than a social-service provider. Shaw is
the director of Project COPE — Children of Prisoners Embraced. There are
about a dozen agencies in Rochester
that help men and women after being released from prison. But COPE is one of
the few that works with children of prisoners or ex-prisoners. Shaw and his
small staff train adults to be mentors and then match them to children.
One statistic worries Shaw more than any of the others:
children of an incarcerated parent are 10 times more likely than other children
to become incarcerated themselves.
“These kids are out there in larger numbers than ever before
through no fault of their own,” says Shaw. “When one parent in a household is
gone, there is often an emotional void for that child. And now the single
parent is wearing many hats. If it was the father, he might have been the
breadwinner. Now there is no money coming in. The remaining parent and children
are in an emergency that unfolds very quickly.”
Most of the children Shaw sees are between 4 and 15 years
old, about an equal number of girls and boys. This year Project COPE will match
about 100 MonroeCounty
children with mentors.
“We are trying to bring some stability back into that
child’s life,” says Shaw. “The mentors are there to offer guidance, have some
fun, and just be a friend. They may go to the movies together, a music concert
or a Rhinos game — whatever they can enjoy in common.”
Children respond differently to the turmoil around them,
Shaw says. Some are more resilient than others. But COPE is not designed to
replace an absent parent.
“That would be unrealistic,” says Shaw. “Yes, boys need
someone to show them what it means to be a man. To me that means learning that
you have options when it comes to things like joining a gang, whether you
should have a sexual relationship, how you handle your anger about a situation
at school. And how do you learn that? How do you develop good judgment? One way
is by just seeing how someone else lives, what kind of work they do, how they
treat their children and what they do for fun. These children don’t always get
to experience this.”
Michelle Price has
three children: Ralik Coffie, Takeya Coffie, and her youngest, Barrington
Price Jr. Their father is in prison. All of them have mentors through Project
COPE.
“I thank God for them,” says Price. “My kids, they love
their mentors. I have complete faith and trust in them. I am a single mother,
and I have to be at work a lot. And while they are supportive of me, I can’t
always drop everything for my kids. The mentors are a support system.”
It’s around 7:30
on a Sunday evening, and Barrington
has been outside playing. He runs upstairs and changes his clothes, urging his
older brother to follow. As their mother enters the dining room after a day at
work, Ralik and Takeya hug her and begin unloading things from her arms.
And Ralik talks about what he enjoys doing with Jeff, his
mentor — going out to eat and to movies, for instance.
“Jeff likes music, and I like music too, so we go to
concerts,” Ralik says. “But sometimes we just hang out.”
Takeya opens a scrapbook on the dining room table. In it she
has pasted photos of her friends and family with a short description next to
each one. It’s one of the things she has done with her mentor Kathleen.
“I learned how to knit pretty fast,” says Takeya. “She knows
a lot of crafts and things, and I like art. I love making things.”
Ralik and Takeya are both teenagers, and the teen years
concern their mother most.
“It’s very hard keeping my family together,” she says. “I
have to be everything to them. Programs like this are so important. If my kids
call me at work with a problem, I may not be able to stay on the phone with
them. But they can call their mentors.”
Maria Gonzalez wanted her son, Jonathan Garcia, to have a mentor because she wanted someone to
help her keep him on the right path. A strong and imposing woman, she says she
keeps a tight reign on the 14-year-old.
“My worse fear is he’ll end up drugging and robbing like his
father,” she says. “I want a father figure that shows him right from wrong, someone
he can talk to.”
The father has been released from prison, and Jonathan says
he does spend time with him.
“I love him, but I don’t want to be like him,” he says. “One
time in school they asked: why do you look up to your dad? But I didn’t have
anything to say. He’s been clean now for nine months, but I don’t know. You
never know; he might go back. I hope not, but you don’t know.”
“I’m an old-timer at this,” his mother says. “I tell people
that anyone can change if they want to. It’s not easy, but they can
re-establish a relationship with their children.” But she says she wants her
son to understand that some people don’t change. “That’s why I am as strict as
I am,” she says. “I want him to see there is another way to live besides doing
drugs and robbing people.”
In a conference room on the second floor of Bethel Christian Fellowship on East
Avenue, about a dozen people have gathered to go
through a mentor training program. Most of the volunteers in this group are
white and over 40. Most of the children they will be paired with are
African-American. Coffee, soda, cheese, and fruit are spread out on a table in
the back of the room. Before the meeting starts, the mentors pick at the snacks
and chat among themselves. Some admit to being nervous.
Shaw has coordinated the training session, and he says he
would like to have more African-American volunteers.
“I’m not sure why we don’t have more black mentors,” he
says. “We have some, but I am hoping more come forward. Right now, we have so
many children who need mentors that I am not sure it matters. But I don’t
believe that a white man or woman from a different economic status or a
different part of the city than where most of these kids come from can’t relate
to them. That’s just not true.”
Volunteers have to meet certain criteria to become mentors
for COPE. The most important is a commitment to spend time with the children
over the course of at least a year. That requirement, says Shaw, weeds out a
lot of people. Holding a demanding job, caring for elderly parents, or raising
children make it difficult for some people to be mentors.
“But many people have retired, and they want to try
something new,” Shaw says. “Some have never had children. Some have watched
their kids leave home for college and are lonely for that kind of company. They
miss being around young people. But we have young mentors, too, who see this as
part of their college or career training.”
Ann Adalist-Estrin, a child and family therapist, hands out
training sheets with fill-in-the-blank statements like “The best thing for
children with incarcerated parents is…” and “Children of incarcerated parents
feel like….” The author of two books on children of prisoners, Adalist-Estrin,
has been training mentors around the country for 20 years. The training sheet
is aimed at getting mentors to examine their reasons for wanting to be a
mentor, as well as their attitudes and assumptions. Most of the new recruits
are surprised to discover that they have biases.
“Our views are shaped by our perceptions, and we tend to see
what we want to see,” says Adalist-Estrin. “When we think of these children,
most of us initially think they would be better off without their parents
because they are bad people. But that is not necessarily correct. The majority
of women in prison with children today are there because of substance abuse and
mental-health problems. So if we always assume these people are bad parents,
we’re then in agreement that poverty, homelessness, shuffling children from one
relative to another, and turning 70-year-old grandparents into parents is good
for them.”
All children seem to have one fantasy in common, she tells
the group: They want to believe and they want others to share the belief that
their parents are perfect. They’ll go to great lengths to protect that fantasy,
and it’s devastating for them to learn that it isn’t true.
“There’s an old African proverb that goes something like: If
you want to know the end, you have to start with the beginning,” says
Adalist-Estrin. “All children go through separation anxiety, and most are able
to overcome it. But when these children learn that the trust they had with
their parents has been broken and wheels begin moving them from one situation
to another, they develop chronic abandonment disorder. It becomes extremely
difficult for them to develop healthy relationships with adults. We know from
research involving the Romanian orphans that the brains of these children are
not only impacted emotionally, but PET scans have proven that they are like
trauma victims with serious brain dysfunction.”
Children in this situation are a bit like a modern-day
Oliver Twist. They are forced to learn how to survive by their wits. They face
great stigma and shame. They conspire with adult caretakers, because they don’t
want to cause harm to the parent who is in prison and they don’t want to bring
more shame to themselves and the family. They learn the code of silence and how
to behave around teachers, social workers, and police. And as they listen to
stories about their parents, they face horrendous loyalty conflicts. One moment
they want the parent to come home and rescue the family. The next, they are
glad the parent is gone. As one mentor described their situation: “It’s like
the new divorce.”
“Trust is a quiet presence,” Adalist-Estrin says
reassuringly. “Some of you are afraid you are going to fail, that you won’t
connect with your child; that you’re not going to be a positive influence. You
bring to the task what you bring. Trust can be built in a moment or it can take
years.”
Of the roughly 1.5 million children who have a parent in
prison, about 60 percent are living with the other parent. Another 20 percent
are living with a relative, usually a grandparent. Many of the mentors whom
Adalist-Estrin trains will work with children in these extended families.
Usually a mother, aunt, or grandmother has called the agency for help.
But the remaining 20 percent get caught up in the
child-welfare system because there is nowhere else for them to go. Most experts
in child psychology agree that this is a child’s worse fear. In a 2002 study,
researchers Elizabeth Inez Johnson of the University of Michigan
and Jane Waldfogel at Columbia
examined the impact of where children are placed when parents are in prison.
They wanted to know whether children whose parents are imprisoned adjust better
when they are placed with a grandparent, for example, rather than in foster
care.
Johnson and Waldfogel concluded that children who are placed
in foster care are at a particularly high risk of developing psychiatric
disorders. Given what the children have already been exposed to in their
developing years — domestic violence, substance and alcohol abuse, poverty,
overcrowded households, parents with low education and occupational skills —
children of prisoners who are sent to live with total strangers are almost
destined to fail later in life. The risk is even greater when the parent is on
death row or dies in prison.
Victor Caswell was 16 when he found himself on the verge of homelessness. He would have preferred to
have a relative to turn to when his mother was sent to prison, he says, but he
didn’t. Instead of going into a foster home, Caswell, who is 26 now, quit
school and went to work for McDonald’s. He thought a full-time job would pay
him enough to survive on his own.
“I found a small apartment,” he says, “but then I had all of
the other expenses that came with it. It was kind of a frightening shock to
think I was working so hard and didn’t have enough money. I was so young I
really didn’t know how much was needed to survive. I got another job, but those
first few months were so hard.”
Caswell’s entire family had broken apart. His younger sister
went to live with a friend’s family, and he lost contact with an older brother.
“I did see my sister now and then,” he says. “But there was
a five-year period where we just weren’t a family anymore. It was pretty
difficult.”
Caswell learned how to install and restore flooring, and he
has built a family of his own. And his mother has come back into his life. She
was recently released from prison and is trying to put her life back together
again.
“I don’t blame her or hate her or anything like that,” he
says. “I love her. Sure, I wish things didn’t happen the way they did, but I
can’t hold on to that stuff. And I would say it’s important to keep an open
mind. She’s paid a price, and everyone deserves a second chance.”
On the wall of Judy
Simser’s office at Jennifer’s House-Spiritus Christi, a halfway house for
women, are calendar pages. Each resident has her days of the week completely
filled, scheduled right down to the half hour. A glance at the wall can tell
Simser, who is the program director, where each woman is supposed to be.
More than 50 percent come to her after being released from
jail and are in need of transitional housing. And most have children — some
of them born at Jennifer’s House.
“Most of the women here are in recovery,” says Simser.
“These are women who have been living with violence and sexual assault.”
They have also committed crimes. “But they are not here to
be judged,” says Simser. “They have to get past that part of their lives if
they ever hope to recover.”
Jennifer’s House is like any other home in its Culver
Road neighborhood. There are flowers in front. The
lawn is mowed. Inside, the rooms are clean and neat. Furniture is arranged with
care, and there are little touches of hominess — a silk flower arrangement on
a table, pictures on the wall, a throw draped over one of the chairs. On the
television set in the living room, Oprah has started her show with a segment on
career women who are having children later in life. Several women are watching;
one of them is feeding a small baby.
“I can’t tell you how or why some women end up here,” says
Simser. “But a lot of these women have been physically and sexually abused as
children. Add poverty, and it’s not a pretty picture. Add their
self-medication, the drugs and alcohol, and the criminal activity is a
predictable part of that sequence.”
The biggest hurdle for the women trying to recover from
addiction and re-enter society, says Simser, is overcoming their guilt.
“Their relationships have been put on hold,” she says. “They
are in a lot of pain over what they have done to their children. Some will not
be able to rekindle that relationship. Their children do not want to go through
it again with them. It’s hard to beg those you love for their forgiveness and
hear them say no.”
Simser, who lost a son to drug addiction, says recovery is
about the hardest thing she can think of for anyone to go through.
“Life is not a level playing field,” she says. “Addiction
causes so much suffering. It’s a disease. If someone had leukemia, we would
want to treat that disease. Everyone knows you’ll die if you don’t. But we treat
people with addiction very differently. Instead of making help available, we
condemn them for needing it even though we know they are slowly killing
themselves and others around them. To me, these are the bravest women I’ve ever
met. I’ve seen such courage working here.”
Re-entry is likely to
put parents on a confrontation course with Social Services, Family Court,
or child-protective services. If they want to seek visitation rights or full
custody, the stress may be the real test of their sobriety. Anxiety attacks
them from every direction.
“I try to encourage mothers not to bring their children back
into their life too quickly,” says Donna Eckert, executive director of Bethany
House, another emergency residence for women.
“A lot of these kids are so angry with their parents that
facing that moment of truth is hard,” she says. “It is probably not going to go
well at first. That’s almost for certain. Many of these women have lost their
children to the Family Court system, to another relative who is standing in the
way or an irate husband.”
Some women choose to keep their children at a distance
“because they didn’t ever want them seeing the inside of a prison,” says
Eckert. “But sometimes they have no choice other than to face it head on. We
had one woman not long ago who was released from a state facility, and her
brother came from Chicago early in
the morning the very next day. He just dropped her son off and said, ‘Here he
is,’ and drove away.”
Eckert blames the women’s situation on three decades of conservative
politicians demonizing government and social programs. “This is what you get
when you do away with mental hospitals and replace them with prisons,” she
says. “This is what you get when you have unskilled mothers with children who
want to work and want to go to school, but we cut assistance and raise
tuitions. We have gutted so many of these programs that helped to prevent these
problems. To give you an idea of how bad it is, they send them out the front
door [of the jail] and many of them are sick. I’ve picked them up in front of
the jail with no medications, nothing for high blood pressure, diabetes —
even HIV. About 20 percent of them are HIV positive and have no medications.”
Mark, who has served time, says he has watched his children suffer the consequences of his
time in prison. And he asks that his last name not be used for this article
because “I don’t want to hurt my daughters.”
“They’ve been through enough because of me,” he says.
He sits down at the dining room table at Cephas Attica
House, a re-entry residence program for men. Unlike the women’s halfway houses,
it is rudimentary at best. It looks like a home where someone is moving out
rather than moving in. Mark pulls out his wallet, takes out a small piece of
paper, and unfolds it. The paper is a copy of a newspaper article about his
arrest. It has been unfolded and refolded so many times it seems to do it on
its own.
Following a cocaine and alcohol binge that left him
suicidal, Mark was arrested. He had no intention of hurting his former wife or
his children, he says, but when he violated a restraining order and broke into
their home with a gun, threatening to kill himself, his former wife called 911.
He was sentenced to five years in a state prison. His
daughters were 3 and 7 years old, and his sentencing was especially hard on his
oldest girl. The news media had picked up the story, and the daughter had to
face her classmates the following day.
After serving more than four years in the Elmira
and Groveland facilities, Mark was released about three months ago.
“I didn’t see my children at all for the first year,” says
Mark. “They wrote me and I wrote them, but I basically cried myself to sleep
every night. The worst part was that I was the main money maker. They had to
move out of our very nice house above Ellison Park and into some awful apartment.
My youngest didn’t quite understand what happened, but for my oldest it was
really hard, because we did everything together.”
Mark says he has no bitter feelings toward his wife, and he
is thankful that his daughters have done so well despite the upheavals in their
lives.
“My youngest only knows me through prison visits,” he says.
“My wife brought them to see me a lot. I think I had 90 visits altogether, and
I am so grateful, because many guys don’t see their families at all.” His
ex-wife, he says, “has done a beautiful job raising them.”
“Our relationship isn’t that strong,” he says. “I have
unrestricted visits, but you know it’s been five years out of their lives that
I can never regain. That wound will always be there”
He pulls back the long blonde hair that hangs below his
shoulders. He’s a good-looking man, thin with a nice build and a youthful face.
He went to RIT to study civil engineering, and he says he came from a good family.
After 25 years of addiction, he’s now been sober for five years.
He will never understand, he says, why he became an
alcoholic and a drug user. He smiles faintly and says it ruined his life, but
being sent to prison may have been what saved him.
“You will meet some of the best people in prison and most of
the worst,” says Mark. “We all had one thing in common: we missed our families.
Prison is living that is slowed down. It leaves plenty of time for
introspection, and if you’re lucky you might be able to retrace some of the
footsteps that got you there. Prison is punishment. There is no such thing as
rehabilitation in prison. As bad as people might think it is, it’s a whole lot
worse. It’s really a living hell. The things you see and hear, the smells, the
fights — and all you can think of is I want to go home to my family.”
Mark pulls a lock of his hair down with two fingers and
assesses the length.
“A little bit longer,” he says. “My oldest one and I are both
growing our hair out so it can be cut and made into a wig for cancer patients.
It’s something we’re doing together.”
While Carlene
Covington was inprison, she
took part in a workshop called “Let Your Life Shine.” Women were asked to place
descriptive words next to pictures of body parts — heart, head, arms. For
many of the women, she says, the word “heart” conjured up words like
“unlovable” and “worthless.” Arms could cause them to think of bruises or
heroin. For Covington, the words
made her think of pain.
After five years of being in a physically and
psychologically abusive relationship, Covington
— who was addicted to drugs and alcohol — stabbed her boyfriend. The
boyfriend lived, but she was convicted on assault charges and was sent to a downstate
prison. After a year, she was transferred to Albion.
Covington had
three children, two daughters and a son, who were living with her at the time
of her arrest. They went to live with her mother, but she couldn’t take care of
them and turned them over to foster care.
Covington was
pregnant when she was sent to prison.
“There are a lot of mothers in prison,” she says. “There’s
even a nursery there, but I just couldn’t go through with it. I just couldn’t
handle it any more. So I had an abortion while I was there. I was trying to
adjust to this whole different society. Every day, I cried to see my kids. When
my mother finally brought them down to see me, she said she would never do it
again.”
Even though her placement in Albion
put her closer to her children, Covington
says, she saw them only three times while she was there.
“All three were living in separate homes,” she says. “Not
only did they lose contact with me, they began to lose contact with each other.
When they came to see me, I felt like I didn’t know them. It was like we were
all becoming strangers. When social services sent me a paper diagnosing my one
child with severe adjustment disorders, I signed it and wrote back, ‘What do
you expect?'”
Out of prison and sober, Covington
works at Step by Step, an agency that counsels women recently released from
prison. She also gained custody of her children and is struggling to repair the
damage done to their relationships. By the time she got them all back under one
roof, they were teenagers.
“My children lost any sense of faith in me,” she says. “I
wanted to say I’m back and I’m working so hard, so cut me a little slack here.
But just because we were all together and at home again, that didn’t make
things right. My daughter says to me: ‘You think you can come home after four
years and just start telling me what to do? You don’t even know me.’ That’s
when I really felt their anger. It was like years of this building up inside
until it just exploded.”
Covington took
advantage of every self-help and parenting class she could find. But she admits
that some problems haven’t been resolved. Her oldest daughter moved out when
she turned 18. And Covington went
to court to have a PINS (Person in Need of Support) order filed on her
16-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son.
“When my kid tells me that you sound like a social worker or
you’re sounding white, and they don’t want to live by the rules, they are out
of my reach,” she says, her eyes welling up. “I just don’t want them to make
the same mistakes that I made. I’m very worried about my son. I know what can
happen to him if he makes the wrong decisions.”
While she was in Albion, Covington
was able to create a workshop of her own called SHOW (Sisters Healing Old
Wounds). It was a support group that started with a handful of women talking
about their experiences with domestic violence and abuse. The program has
become so popular that it continues to this day, with 100 women waiting to take
it. It was also the experience that helped Covington
identify what she wanted to do with her life. She’s going to school to get her
degree in social work.
“It’s taken me a long time to answer one question: Who am
I?” she says. “But I can finally say I am sober and I am a success story. My
children still worry about me going back. My daughter will come up sometimes
and sniff my drink when she thinks I am not looking.”
“I understand,” she says “but I am not going back. Even the guards, when I was leaving, one of them
said to me, ‘Oh, we’ll see you again.’ I said, Oh no you won’t — not wearing
the greens [women’s prison uniforms], anyway. If I come back through those
doors again, it will be to help someone else. That’s the only way you’ll see me
again.”
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2006.
