A Prison Program Inspires Inmates to Better Parenting

Bars and barbed wire are the symbols of prison life, barriers that separate the inmates from society, fences that ward off contact with the world outside.

But interior barricades exist as well. With the exceptions of rage, anger and a collective sense of bravado, emotions seldom surface in an atmosphere too tense to tolerate wide-scale vulnerability.

“In a place like this, it’s very hard for us to let out our weaknesses,” Miguel Montijo, 24, said during visiting hours at the Taconic Correctional Facility here.

One Recent Saturday

Agreed inmate Samuel Winship, 32, “Nobody comes up, especially in jail, and says, ‘Hey, man, I got this problem with my wife or my son.’ It’s like, an embarrassment.”

Yet there they were one recent Saturday, joining with about 60 other residents of this medium-security prison an hour up the Hudson from New York City to explore their feelings and learn about a subject called fatherhood.

In FamilyWorks, a pilot program launched late this fall by the Osborne Assn., a 60-year-old organization that provides services to offenders and ex-offenders and their families, the men have gathered weekly in the prison chapel to talk about pregnancy and childbirth, stages of child development, discipline, adolescence, step-parenting, incest, child abuse, economic responsibility, education, re-integration with the family upon release and other issues that apply to fathers in general and to fathers in prison in particular.

They have heard lectures from psychologists and a midwife and have used games theory to simulate family dynamics. One week, they saw a film on childbirth: a phenomenon few admitted they had come close to understanding beforehand, and for which all said they had emerged with new respect.

Bared Their Souls

Mostly, however, they have bared their souls about their own often-troubled childhoods and their gut-twisting hope to make things better for their own sons and daughters.

“Straight up,” inmate Louis Murillo said, “the reason I wanted to come was I heard I was going to get a certificate and I thought that would be good for the parole board. But I’ve learned so much. By taking this program, I can’t say I’ll be the best parent, but I know I’ll be a better parent.”

“One of the things this program has done is knocked down a lot of misconceptions about parenting,” said 32-year-old Greg Molterie, a father of six who is serving a term for robbery. “When I was in the street, I thought parenting began biologically and ended economically. But I’ve learned that it’s an ongoing thing, and it takes an awful lot of work.”

Often, FamilyWorks project director Angel Centeno said, “a lot of these guys weren’t very good fathers before they went in. It was some sort of economic function. Just so long as you can give your wife some money, you’re covering your function. There has never been an avenue for them to solidify their thinking, to turn it into action.”

But after observing the success of a handful of programs around the country for imprisoned mothers, and after hearing of a similar project at a coeducational facility in Pleasanton, Calif., Osborne Assn. deputy director Elizabeth Gaynes found herself writing a proposal for the effort that became FamilyWorks. Approval was swift, and soon a $76,000 budget from state and private sources was allocated for an ongoing series of 12-week courses on parenting for fathers incarcerated in this 400-inmate facility. To date, FamilyWorks is believed to be the only program for incarcerated fathers.

“It does seem obvious,” Gaynes said of this new acknowledgement of the needs of fathers in jail. “But this notion that is now a common middle-class idea, that fathers need to be involved with raising their children, is actually historically somewhat new.”

Besides, Gaynes said, broad assumptions about the nature of prison and of men in prison probably hampered even the most enlightened reformers from taking on a topic like fatherhood.

“When you look at how society views people who are in prison, we don’t accord them a lot of respect,” she said. “There is a notion that someone can’t be a good parent who is a bad citizen.”

Further, said Gaynes, upward of 5 million children are thought to have fathers serving time in any given year, and “there is the notion that it is devastating for a child to go into a prison.”

But one Saturday not long ago, 5-year-old Stephanie Ortiz and her brother Rene, 9, were all but gluing themselves to their father, clamoring for crayons as they worked on coloring books in the prison’s family visiting area. A native of the Dominican Republic, Eugenio Ortiz, 39, is serving the final year of a six-to-18-year sentence for kidnaping.

“One of my past life mistakes was that I was ignorant of the relationship between family and understanding,” the senior Ortiz said. “In the beginning of the fathering course, I became more aware of understanding the truthfulness of the relationship between family, father, wife, children.

“Usually, before, when I was in the street, I was for some reason or another not devoting too much time to my family. I thought we were the only ones with our problems, the men. Well, children have their problems, too. Sometimes love is not all. You have to understand your children as well.”

Better Ways to Discipline

The FamilyWorks program opened his eyes to aspects of parenting he had barely considered, Ortiz said. “Like discipline,” he said. “Beating your children is not the right way. There are other ways to deal with them: by punishment, like taking away the TV, or using a psychological approach.”

Prison studies show that as many as 80% of all incarcerated people may have been abused as children, Centeno said. Ortiz, for example, insisted he had not been “abused” as a child, but then calmly described childhood discipline that included being beaten with a stick and kneeling for hours on a cheese grater.

“In a discussion where these guys described how they were disciplined,” Gaynes said, “every one of them described what I would call torture. They didn’t describe it judgmentally; they were just talking about how it was. They themselves see no connection between being treated violently and the fact that many of them have resorted to violence to solve their problems. They don’t get the connection.”

Initially, Centeno said, many of the inmates at Taconic voiced skepticism about a parenting program in prison. “They came in thinking they were going to figure it out in 10 minutes. But then they came back, and the next session led to the next session.

“We were expecting 10 or 15 people,” Centeno said. “Twenty at the most. We’ve got about 60.”

Program ‘Enlightening’

Joseph Jacobs, for example, said he signed on “because I had seen other guys who I had respect for in the facility who had signed up.” With three children ranging in age from 6 to 23, Jacobs said he had found the program “enlightening,” particularly in terms of what he had learned about pregnancy and childbirth. “I doubt I could have learned that stuff on the outside,” he said. “I seriously doubt it.”

“This program gave me a better understanding about what manhood is about,” David Massey agreed. “It heightened my understanding of what the mother-child relationship is all about. I didn’t expect anything this intensive.”

Many of the FamilyWorks participants give much of the credit for the program’s success to Centeno himself. “I don’t believe the way he gets these guys to open up,” Miguel Montijo said. Tall and muscular, with an easy laugh and an avuncular manner, the barrel-chested Centeno was born in Puerto Rico 39 years ago, but he grew up in the projects of Brooklyn’s rough Bedford-Stuyvesant district. “It was a real ‘West Side Story’ childhood,” said Centeno, a veteran of 20 years of community service projects. “Seventy percent of my friends are dead.”

If his colleague Elizabeth Gaynes stresses that “there is no protocol” for whether any strides or small steps made in FamilyWorks will endure after the participants are released, Centeno, too, concedes that the program’s long-term success is impossible to project. “All I can say is that it’s a tremendous start,” he said.

Support Groups Planned

Support groups for wives of FamilyWorks participants are planned, Gaynes said, as are follow-up efforts for post-release alumni. The promise of that kind of continuity was comforting to one expert in prison behavior, Dr. Christopher Keyes, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“When you get back into the street, what happens to you?” Keyes wondered. “It makes a great difference whether there are supports to continue the new behavior and the new attitude. You get beaten down a few times on the outside, and those good new directions could be abandoned.”

Still, Keyes said, “It’s neat to see a program like this showing up in a setting like this.”

Finishing up a three-year term for robbery, Miguel Montijo, for one, said he was “looking forward to putting into practice what I’ve learned in this program” when he is released and can spend time with his 6-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son. But Montijo did add a caveat: “This is prison,” he said. “A lot of guys use these things as a way to get out.”

Maybe so, but virtually all of those enrolled in this first FamilyWorks project have signed up for the sequel Centeno and Gaynes did not know initially they were going to offer--a kind of “Fathering II,” Centeno explained.

As if he had been drafted by Madison Avenue to come up with a slogan for the program, inmate Greg Molterie offered this assessment of why he is eager for more on the subject. “This program puts the ‘f’ back into the family,” Molterie said, “and I’m talking about ‘fatherhood.’

“Whatever you came in here for, you got more than you bargained for,” Molterie said. “Ain’t no losers in this program.”