TV Reviews : ‘They’re Doing My Time’: When Children Suffer

A woman forges a check and goes to jail. She deserves her sentence; she doesn’t deny her guilt. But what happens to her children, particularly if she is a single mother?

“They’re Doing My Time,” airing at 10 tonight on Channels 28 and 15, is about children who pay for their mothers’ crime with the tragic upheaval of their lives.

“I broke the law, but they’re doing all the suffering,” one distraught mother says of her young children.

The confusion and grief are intensified by a prison system that seldom takes child care into account. A mother may see her children only once or twice a year and often is not allowed physical contact with them. Many children are shunted from one foster home to another.

Why should we care? Aren’t most of the children better off somewhere else? Some are, without question. But the women we see taking part in the few existing prison programs that try to strengthen the family unit are those who have not been found to be unfit mothers. They fear for their children, they feel guilty, they grieve; they don’t wear a different skin than the rest of us.

This hourlong program, narrated by Jane Alexander, does not suggest that the punishment meted out to these adult lawbreakers is wrong. But it does argue eloquently that better foster care and progressive prison programs would be not only humanitarian but also a societal boon.