Inmates’ Families Find They Have a Few ‘Friends Outside’ : Prison: An Easter egg hunt is one way this volunteer group helps those left behind--especially children--cope with the pain and difficulties of having a loved one behind bars.

Four-year-old Dusty Hollar scampered around the green grass and trees of W.O. Hart Park Saturday, nearly stepping on the pastel Easter eggs in clumps of grass he was supposed to be finding. Both of his parents stood nearby shouting directions while other kids vied for the hidden eggs.

It had been four years since Dusty saw his father outside of prison. The youngster was 7 months old when his dad was locked up in state prison. His father was released three days ago.

Dusty was unique among the 100 children who came to a barbecue staged for the families of imprisoned criminals.

For most of the other kids, dad was still in jail.

The Orange County chapter of Friends Outside threw the party Saturday as one of its several activities to help ease the loneliness and ostracism felt by immediate relatives of prison inmates, who often suffer repercussions from a crime they didn’t commit.

“Families of incarcerated people are people who are forgotten,” said Mary Waggoner, program coordinator for the Orange County chapter of Friends Outside. “They go through a lot of suffering. When someone is incarcerated, it’s very devastating emotionally” for the family.

Many are wives. Their husbands’ imprisonment comes with a shock. Never mind the crime. Jobs have to be found. Bills have to be paid. Housing has to be found. Parental responsibilities double. And they have to learn how to live without the person they love.

Financial troubles are common. Working on their own to provide for the family, these women don’t have much opportunity to spend time with their children--much less take them on a weekend outing.

Saturday provided them the opportunity. In addition to the egg hunt, children ate candy, pulled strenuously on a rope in a tug-of-war, frolicked with someone in an Easter bunny suit and lobbed water-filled balloons in a tossing contest that quickly escalated to an all-out water war.

The Easter event was designed so that the children “can still experience joy,” said Waggoner.

“At least they’re coming together with people in the same situation they are. It’s not like they’re singled out anymore.”

Added Debbie Anderson, 29: “These types of things make it a little bit easier to handle a parent’s incarceration. . . . It gives the kids something to look forward to--a special event.”

Dusty’s dad, 37-year-old Tony Hollar, agreed. He said kids enjoy Friends Outside activities because they do not have to worry about being teased or embarrassed by playground friends who ask questions about an imprisoned parent.

The organization is especially concerned about the children, Waggoner said, because “beginning with them, we can break the perpetual flow of incarceration. It’s proven that youths of incarcerated people are the most likely to become incarcerated themselves.”

Friends Outside also holds a celebration around Christmas.

“Holidays are rough,” said Inez Fox, 35, whose husband has been in and out of prison since 1983, leaving her alone to raise their three children. She said the loneliness intensifies during tradition-filled days such as Christmas and Easter because other families come together.

In addition to throwing yearly barbecues, Friends Outside helps locate housing and offers discount bus tickets for prison visits, vouchers for thrift shop clothes, job referrals, summer “camperships” for children, holiday programs and support groups for women to share their common problems.

Fox remembered the help she received from Friends Outside. The group referred her to a woman who drove her to prison twice weekly in 1983 so she could visit her husband. The woman provided a ride even on Christmas Day, dropping off a Christmas tree for Fox’s family.

Friends Outside has headquarters in San Jose and 16 chapters in California.

A nondenominational organization, Friends Outside was first founded as “Rock Pile Widows” in 1954 by a Santa Clara Quaker, Rosemary Goodenough.

Goodenough, an advocate for the poor, who died in 1973, was known for her pithy aphorisms such as “The people who get into jail have less experience with human kindness than anybody else.” And “We deal in friendship built on mutual admiration, and that doesn’t exist when one emotion is pity and the other is envy.”

In 1978, Newport Beach residents Bernice Ranford and Mary Dennigan organized a local chapter of volunteers and won financial support from the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a Catholic lay ministry for the poor.

The organization has 30 volunteers, and one jail visitor.

From 1988 to 1989, the group helped 350 family members, 400 inmates and 700 ex-offenders. More volunteers, both men and women, are needed, coordinator Waggoner said.

When her husband was jailed by the Air Force on drug charges, Waggoner was left alone with a year-old daughter and no job skills. “It was like a death,” she recalled. “But worse.”

She knew she had to start over financially and emotionally. But she also had to prepare for his eventual release from the Kansas prison where he had been sent. And because of appeals and retrials, nothing was certain.

She found comfort, and eventually the only paid position, with the Orange County chapter of Friends Outside.

Waggoner’s husband was released last June after five years in prison. Although they telephoned and wrote letters regularly, she could afford to visit only once a year.

“It was shaky at first” between the two of them, she said. “We had to get used to each other.”

But with her 6-year-old daughter, she said, “It was really strange. It was as if he had never left.”