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Mothers Rocking the Prison Cradle
Many mothers who experience childbirth are coached through labor in a hospital maternity ward with supportive doctors and nurses. Their husbands may capture the birth with a video camera. After the baby's bawling first breaths, mother and child bond in a joyous embrace.
Childbirth is not so joyous for the growing number of women who give birth behind bars. It is a time of humiliation, sadness and separation. Before, during, and after delivery, prison mothers are commonly shackled. No one is there to take those first baby pictures. And the infant may be whisked away by a social worker to be given to a family member to raise, or if they are less fortunate, the child goes to foster care. The mother returns to an eight foot by 12 foot prison cell to grieve. The bond between mother and child is broken at the moment of delivery.
There are about 1.2 million parents incarcerated in federal or state prisons or local jails in the United States. The number of mothers in prison grew 88 percent from 1991 to 2002. While relatively few women who are incarcerated give birth behind bars, about two-thirds of female inmates are mothers of minor children. Most women are in prison for non-violent offenses, many of them drug related.
Almost 60 percent of mothers in state prisons lived with their children at the time they entered prison. With few procedures or policies that require or facilitate maintaining relationships between mothers and their children, the criminal justice system often breaks families apart. The majority of incarcerated parents reside more than 100 miles from their homes. While in prison, many mothers only rarely see their children and are not involved in decisions about their welfare nor do they get any help with parenting. Some lose track of their children altogether.
Almost 80 percent of the children with a mother in prison live with a grandparent or other relative who generally receives little public support. About 10 percent of children with incarcerated mothers are in foster care, and in some cases they have entered care before the parent was locked up. But foster care can result in a parent losing the rights to their children permanently because federal law requires, with limited exceptions, that a state file a petition to terminate parental rights when a child has been in foster care for 15 out of 22 months. The timetable is especially problematic given that the average time a mother in state prison is expected to serve is 49 months.
Children can be deeply traumatized by the incarceration of their mothers. They may feel abandoned or blame themselves for their parent being taken away. Even young children may feel the stigma and shame of having a parent behind bars. Studies have documented that children of incarcerated parents are prone to emotional and behavioral difficulties, poor academic performance, juvenile delinquency, substance abuse and are more likely to become involved in the criminal justice system themselves. The majority of the 1.5 million children of incarcerated parents are Black or Latino.
The bond between a mother behind bars and her children does not have to be severed. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is in the process of revising its policy on restraining mothers during labor, delivery, and post-delivery. California, Illinois and Vermont are the only states that currently regulate the use of restraints on pregnant women. Other state prisons and jails need to follow suit.
Some states have taken other steps to revamp their approaches to dealing with female offenders. For example, California is moving women from large remote prisons to smaller, community-based centers allowing more frequent mother-child visits. California, Indiana, Nebraska, New York, Ohio and Washington are among the states that have established prison nurseries.
Girl Scouts Beyond Bars is another attempt to keep prison mothers connected to their children and involved in their development. The program, currently operating in 17 states, brings mothers and daughters together weekly to monthly for troop meetings. Other programs provide opportunities for parent-child classes as well as overnight and weekend visits. There are models of virtual visitation through the use of tape recorders, video cameras and computers.
Some state legislatures also are working to get a better grip on the numbers and demographic characteristics of these children and design appropriate recommendations for better meeting their needs. Other states are developing protocols for reunifying children in foster care with their parents and engaging parents in decision-making about their children.
Particularly important are efforts to encourage the diversion of more parents from prison into family- and community-based alternatives to incarceration. Some involve diverting non-violent offenders to treatment programs for mental health or substance abuse problems. Alternative sentences include halfway houses and home detention with ankle bracelet monitors to help mothers remain in their children's lives.
Steps to institute alternatives to incarcerating mothers will go a long way toward staunching the flow of future generations of young people into the pipeline to prison. Each step we take in that direction will not only be beneficial tomorrow, it will begin to change our society for the better today.
Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund and its Action Council whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
Mrs. Edelman will release her new book, The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation, in September 2008. The book will be a look at what's been done and what still needs to be done to make our world safe and fair for all children.
Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender
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This post makes me furious at the politicians who have made the smoke screen of fear and used it so they could prosper at the expense of these less fortunate souls in our society.
We have a very large historic lesson that Americans supposedly learned, although it does not show it, about ruling by fear. The nazis are a textbook example, and with the help of our corporate media, politicians mostly of the right wing have inflicted this fear so they could gain elections, but what they have wrought upon these children and their mothers is absolutely shameful. They will say these people did it to themselves, but accordingly to whose law? Nature? God's? This sick society ruled by politicians run by fear and greed? I know that it is the latter.
Jesus Christ himself said it would be better that a millstone be tied around the neck of those who would place a stumbling block upon the children of this world, and thrown into the sea. I absolutely agree with his vitriolic and righteous anger for these worthless scumbags.
I know I'm going to get shouted down for suggesting it, but, should these women not have thought of their children before doing whatever they did to get themselves incarcerated?
I know the criminal justice system isn't perfect, but it's got to be at least 50-50, probably more like 80-20 in terms of accuracy of prosecution?
even allowing that drug offences shouldn't be punished with jail time in most cases, do these women care so little for their offspring they haven't tried to give up the drugs?
I know it's not the children's fault that their mothers are criminals or drug addicts. and yes, it's terrible that so many are forced into less than legal lifestyles in order to try and survive. But they are still autonomous, aren't they? there must be at least some element of choice in their life.
I am part of a prison ministry called ASK; I have been visiting an inmate at the California Institution for Women, Corona, since 2001.
Even now, when I am in the visiting area, I still cry (off to the side) when I see the fortunate women who are temporarily reunited with their children - the absolute _joy_ on their faces when their children are brought to visit. The _pride_ with which a woman shows off her new baby to other inmates and staff.
The little ones are _not_ responsible for the crimes (in many cases, non-violent offenses - check fraud, marijuana use, etc) committed by their mothers, yet they suffer along with her. They have to wait for as much as two hours (try being a 18-month old and waiting), then go through the prison procedures: wanded, etc.
To be fair, the corrections officers are, by and large, gentle and friendly in dealing with the little ones, but it's still an experience for them to go through. CIW, in the past two years, finally put in a playground in the Visiting Area because someone realized that _WOMEN_ have _CHILDREN_!!!!
WOW GUESS THE FATHERS DON'T HAVE CHILDREN DO THEY??????
HOW BIG WAS THE FEDERAL GRANT YOU GOT FOR THIS PROGRAM???
$3 TO $ 5 MILLION???
How much do you guys pay yourselfs in salarys ??????
$200,000 A YEAR??? MORE???
Isn't it time we expect elected officials to spend tax dollars on something other than a continuation of failures that do nothing to improve the lives or circumstances of our children?
Where has poverty dropped in America in any significant and meaningful way in the past 8 years?
Isn't it time taxpayers have the right to expect that accountability would influence HOW our taxpayers money is spent from one election to the next?
Isn't it time that the manner in which taxpayers dollars are spent actually impact the living conditions for our children, and point to the possibility of them being freed from impoverished conditions, freed from criminal influences, freed from the destructive forces of violence so that they might pursue a life filled with happiness and success?
How is it that we have funded BILLIONS of dollars on a war in Iraq, waged on weapons of mass destruction that never existed, while allowing American children to live in SUB-HUMAN conditions for the past 8 years?
How is it that elected officials have blatantly ignored our children, the dire need of so many across America while elected officials have the audacity to waste billons of American lives and dollars on a war founded upon dishonesty, and misrepresentation of intelligence reports - to the American people, while children right here in America go hungy, live impoverished and in sub-human conditions, are homeless, uneducated, failing out of high school, and being robbed of every fundamental right we hold sacred as Americans?
Ms. Wright Edelman, the suggestions you offer are insightful :
"Particularly important are efforts to encourage the diversion of more parents from prison into family- and community-based alternatives to incarceration. Some involve diverting non-violent offenders to treatment programs for mental health or substance abuse problems. Alternative sentences include halfway houses and home detention with ankle bracelet monitors to help mothers remain in their children's lives. "
It would be interesting to have a state by state comparison, of HOW such programs are funded, along with state by state comparisons of the numbers of women in prison, on drug-related charges - with young children growing up without a mother and whether the statistics have improved, or changed for the better over the past 8 years.
It would be interesting to see which states are reporting success not only in drops in drug related offenses, but in murder rates in inner cities, in imprisonment of mothers and children being raised by someone other than their mother due to the mother being incarcerated, and correlations between high school drop out rates, poverty, crime, and other important data that would give us an understanding of where those cities are across America that are achieving fiscally responsible programming to BETTER the lives of our children, and what measures are being utilized to improve the living circumstances in their communities?
I wonder what the outcome would be for the two-thirds of women incarcerated for drug use and what the outcome would be for their children, had the imprisoned women had the privilege and advantage of the Cindy McCain option, (whatever that was as it did not involve serving any prison time) concerning McCain's drug theft and illegal use of drugs a few years ago, concerning a charity that she presided over.
I have to look at and wonder about how the McCain children enjoyed the benefit of having their mother with them as they grew up, the advantages they had, and how they ultimately benefitted, as compared to what happened to those children who grew up without their mothers because they are imprisioned for similar criminal offenses around the time that Mrs. McCain was fortunate to avoid serving a prison sentence for having commmited similar and perhaps more serious crimes than those women who ended up in prison.
I have to wonder at how different the lives of those children might be who ultimately paid the price for the failures in how we as a society continue to respond to the suffering that these children endure in being forced to live in poverty day in, day out, every day - all their lives, who grow up without families, without their mothers, and in a continuing pattern of poverty and destruction.
How is it that we can prioritize funding billions to destroy Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that never existed, and continue in this commitment, while children across America are growing up in sub-human conditions?
I hope we will read more of your articles at Huff Post, Ms. Wright Edelman.
I hope you can give us more articles like this that give us insight into the state of OUR CHILDREN in these United States: the state of their health care, the state of their education ( without the numbers of the big suburbs thrown in to deflate the outrageous figure in numbers of children from our inner cities, who are failing to graduate from high school throughout America.)
Help us understand the correlations that exist between WHY failure to insure our children's educational success, contributes to a LIFE-TIME of LIMITED OPTIONS, and a continuation to the cyclical pattern of poverty for our children, from one generation to the next.
Help us understand HOW POVERTY HAS CHANGED - in the past 8 years along with HOW POVERTY is being TRACKED and MONITORED and whether we truly have a truthful understanding of the level of disadvantage and suffering that children are living with - all across America.
Why haven’t we as taxpayers been entitled to fiscal responsibility by our government, expecting success be achieved in HOW we claim to remedy and “treat” inmates serving time in our prisons? Should a CHANGE through drops in prison rates, and drug related offenses not be found with claims that suggest we are remedying these problems across America? And if we are not seeing such a decline, then shouldn’t we be re-examining HOW we are funding programs that claim to be “rehabilitating” those imprisoned?
Should we not see a lessening in murders, in drug use, in prison terms in our poverty stricken cities – if our system is “working” to remedy these problems?
Why have we accepted what is in essence a failure to invest in bringing about true changes, that not only end the cyclic pattern of violence, that the taxpayers pay for – believing that the “system” is rehabilitating offenders – when in fact, studies might show otherwise, but should our tax payers dollars not be linked to models of treatment that we know WORK – not only on bettering the lives of these women, but of their children, and thus – of society?
Why have we not remedied the failure to address circumstances that contribute to and lead to the cyclic pattern of poverty and self-destruction that imprisons the lives of countless women and their children, no less destroys communities, the lives of children and their families?
Thank you for a thoughtful depiction of how the process meant to rehabilitate mothers - in fact, ends up contributing to further detrimental and cyclical problems for their children and families.
"...two-thirds of female inmates are mothers of minor children. Most women are in prison for non-violent offenses, many of them drug related..."
When one considers a vast number of these children end up living in poverty without their mothers, in circumstances that fracture homes, hearts and young lives, it’s staggering to consider that as a country we have failed to remedy the patterns of destruction in our inner cities, that leave children struggling in poverty stricken neighborhoods, trying to survive through violence, amidst the loss of their family - and mothers.
Why have we not solved those circumstances that lead to and support the destruction of human life in communities across America, where the cycle of poverty, drugs and violence go hand in hand with the very drug-related offenses that perpetuate and continue mothers in being separated from their children, and end up in continuing the pattern of dehumanizing circumstances that feed the cycle of poverty, criminal choices and violence that subsequently - only continue to destroy our children, to destroy families, to destroy communities across America?
Ms. Wright Edelman, thank you, thank you, thank you for writing on this issue. A good friend of mine (male) has spent the last two years in a state prison and stands to spend another thirteen incarcerated due to a combination of stupidity on his part and outright malice on the part of the state. I have directly seen the effect this has had on his family (his wife, increasingly isolated from the world around her, lives with us and waits daily for his letters and phone calls; his parents are hiring lawyers to try to appeal his sentence, while resigned that neither of them will be able to see him before they die, due to personal illness).
I cannot fathom how this would impact men and women with children.
I would like to take this opportunity to advocate rehabilitation programs that foster the relationship between mother and child, rather than keep with the state's approach of keeping mother and child apart. A local non-profit in Greensboro, NC is Mary's House, and is dedicated to taking former prisoners and helping them become acclimated to their community through work and education. They work with single mothers, and both mothers and children live together there in the halfway house while they work towards building and restarting their lives.
For those of you who are touched by this story, please know that there are programs like this around the country that are crying out for your help, your time, your donations.
Isn't the Taxpayers Money from Federal Grants you get enough ?
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