Party Brings Joy to Children of Jail Inmates : Goodwill: A support group for families with an imprisoned parent sponsors a day of games in a park.

Four-year-old Lee Kentha Williams has never really known her father. The man has never been to any of her birthday parties, Christmases or Thanksgivings. No holidays or celebrations of any sort.

Since the day the girl was born, Ellis Williams has been in jail more often than not, serving time for drugs, robbery, you name it. A career criminal. And it has left a void that is hard to measure.

But on Saturday that vacuum got filled a bit for the pigtailed girl. Along with three of her sisters, Lee Kentha attended a special picnic for Orange County children with a parent serving time in jail or prison.

“For them, it’s something special,” said the girl’s mother, Leveter, who is struggling to raise six children on her own. “They’ve been talking about it for two weeks. It’s something special. They go and brag to their friends: ‘We’re going to the Easter Party!’ ”

Lee Kentha and her siblings were among about 50 children who joined in the annual Easter celebration held by the Orange County chapter of Friends Outside, a crisis intervention and support group that offers help to the families of inmates in prisons and jails scattered around the state.

The children ate hamburgers, had tug-a-rope contests and played “red light, green light” and other games. They frolicked on the swing sets and the green, expansive lawns at W.O. Hart Park in Orange. Some got their faces painted a rainbow of colors; others played with coloring books. A purple-robed Merlin the Wizard handed out tiny sparkling stars to wide-eyed kids. Everyone was on hand when the Easter Bunny showed up to lead a hunt for candy eggs.

And for just a day, just a few hours, life seemed a bit less bleak.

“Having lost someone who’s often very close to them, they have traumatic feelings that any child experiences when they lose a loved one,” said Mary Waggoner, program coordinator for Friends Outside, which is sponsored by the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a Catholic lay ministry for the poor.

“Many of them are ostracized by their classmates,” Waggoner said. “They just feel different. This gives them a nice break, a chance to be around other children going through the same situation as them. And it does the same for their parents.”

Meet 10-year-old Steve Anderson, for instance. He looks like a lot of other Southern California boys. He prizes his Raiders sweat shirt. His hands are grubby from playing in the dirt. He collects football trading cards and likes to watch the Super Bowl and ride his bike in the park.

But his father, Steve Russell Anderson, is in jail for violating parole after serving several years on a drug offense. Steve used to go visit his dad at the California Institution for Men in Chino with his brothers. He remembers mostly that the jail had a playground for kids and a few donated board games in a visiting area.

“No one knows about my dad except my friend Carlos,” the boy noted matter-of-factly. “No one tells no one.”

His mother, Debbie, worries that her sons will be sucked into the maelstrom of criminal life, that they will assume prison isn’t such a bad way to go.

“I tell the kids it’s not OK to go back and forth to jail,” Debbie Anderson said. “It’s a big fear of mine that it won’t matter what I say, that it’ll be a never-ending cycle.”

A large percentage of those in attendance are families having financial difficulties because dad is in jail. The story is all too typical. The father is incarcerated, the mother struggles to make ends meet while trying to keep together a family fragmenting from the inside. And the children suffer.

“These are the innocent bystanders for the most part,” said Marc Labreche, a Cal State Fullerton graduate student and volunteer at Friends Outside. “They turn out to be the victims in a lot of ways.”

Leveter Williams readily admits that life has been tough. But she has been assisted by Friends Outside. When her husband was in Soledad Prison, the group helped her get there for visits and offered moral support. She has attended the Easter party twice now with her children, and they have also hit the group’s annual children’s Christmas party.

She struggles most months to pay the rent, and barely had enough this month for her utilities. The family car recently broke down. But Williams wasn’t about to let her kids miss the Easter Party, so she loaded them on the bus for the ride to Hart Park.

“This brings happiness to my house,” Williams said as she held Lee Kentha, who had run to her mother’s arms after encountering the costumed wizard. “That’s what I like. I get tired of thinking what we can’t have. So it’s nice for them to feel they’ve got something no one else has got. An Easter Party.”