When Parents Do Time : Classes and Visitation Programs Help Moms and Dads With the Most Painful Part of Prison--Being Separated From Their Children

It is 12:30 on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Jani Mitchell, 34, and more than a dozen other women stand outside a mirrored glass door at the inmate loading area of Sybil Brand Institute on the Eastside. The women fidget like anxious children-- some tugging at their blue jail uniforms, others trying to fix hair left disheveled by the rain.

Mitchell seems almost oblivious to the rain and her hair, which was curled in the morning but is now listless. Her eyes are fixed on the door, as are those of all the other women. A sheriff’s deputy calls out each woman’s name and, one by one, they walk to the doorway, where their children are passed to them.

“Mitchell,” the deputy calls.

Mitchell, startled and already crying, rushes to the door, arms outstretched, to take her 7-month-old daughter, Stephani. “Oh yes, oh baby, you’re mommy’s girl,” Mitchell says through tears as she clutches the baby close to her chest, then holds her up for other mothers to see.

Every Saturday is the same: The mothers listen for their names and watch to see whether their children will be escorted into the jail. For the next two hours, as part of the County Jail system’s parent-child visitation program, they are able to do the things with their kids that they took for granted before they were incarcerated: hold them, play and laugh with them. Nearly three-quarters of the 2,300 prisoners at Sybil Brand are mothers; another 10% are pregnant.

For inmates who had relatively close relationships with their sons and daughters before being jailed, the effects of incarceration can be devastating--for them, their families and especially their children, experts say.

While being separated from their children is the most painful part for many inmates, it is only one of the problems and challenges they face as jailed parents. They also must deal with the potential for losing the bond they once had with their children, or worse, see their kids end up in a juvenile detention center or lose them to an overburdened foster-care system. Even after their release, they must overcome several hurdles to regain custody.

“We’ve got to figure a way for these people to be better parents and to make people better suited for society,” said Doris Meyer, site administrator for parenting and other educational classes for County Jail inmates run by the Hacienda/La Puente School District.

Parenting classes and visitation programs in jails and prisons are becoming common methods in California of teaching imprisoned parents how to better care for their children. By helping to maintain contact, the classes can make for an easier transition when the parents are released and if they are reunited with their children.

Prisoners, Meyer said, “want the same things as everyone: (for) their kids to be happy, educated and healthy. No one holds a baby in their arms in the hospital and says, ‘I’m going to take you home to screw you up.’ ”

Several parenting classes and reunification programs have been started in the past several years to assist parents in bridging communication gaps and improving parental skills.

The Los Angeles County jail system started its parenting classes in 1982 and has expanded them to include TALK (Teaching and Loving Kids), the jail system’s visitation program. Prison MATCH, a visitation program for parents in state prisons, began in 1989.

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In 1984, the state Department of Corrections started a Prisoner Mother-Infant Program, which allows female prisoners with children under age 6 to serve out their terms in one of five community-based centers in the state. That program, for women convicted of nonviolent offenses, is designed to reduce recidivism and restore mother-child bonds.

“It’s almost like a normal life to take my girls to school, pick them up, talk to them about their day,” Gwen Murphy said of her two daughters, ages 5 and 2.

“It’s a complete joy to be around them, to be able to be their mother again,” said Murphy, 32, who was convicted of selling drugs and is serving the last year of a three-year sentence at the House of Uhuru in South-Central, which houses 10 women as part of the mother-infant program.

Doris Mahlum, head of the program’s Los Angeles region, said: “It might be one of the better things that we do for mothers. While the moms are here they stay pretty straight. And for some of these people it’s often the first opportunity they’ve had for a normal life.”

Hardly any of the parents who participate in parenting and reunification programs are violent criminals, Meyer said. Most come from dysfunctional families and were either abused or neglected as children. About 95% have either a substance abuse problem or have been arrested on drug charges. Some men are serving time on domestic violence charges.

The inmates sign up for the courses for various reasons: a mandate by the court; to help them gain custody; out of guilt that they abandoned their children.

“We’re not talking about cases where children are physically or sexually abused,” said attorney Ellen Barry, director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, based in San Francisco. “We’re talking about cases where women (and men) are not angels, trip up, get caught and may potentially lose their children who they love.”

While the majority of women inmates’ children live with relatives, 14% have children in the foster-care system. The percentage of mothers in state prisons is similar to the 74% in the county jails, said Rose Weilerstein, president of the Berkeley-based Prison MATCH.

But incarcerated fathers also feel the impact of separation from their children. And although men are not the primary care givers in most cases, an increasing number are participating in parenting classes and visitation programs, at least in the County Jail system.

Each of the 12 parenting classes offered to men in the county jails are filled to capacity, with as many as 40 to each class and a long waiting list, said Meyer. Some men are ordered by the court to participate, while others do it for custody reasons or for the same reasons as some female inmates. About 20% are the legal guardians of their children and others are boyfriends who want to better understand how to help their girlfriends raise their children.

Gordon Heiden, 31, of Bellflower, participates in parenting classes and the TALK program to learn how to break the cycle of absentee parents like his own and build a greater trust with his daughter Karissa, 4. Russell Kuiken, 44, of Glendale, wants to better understand how to care for his 3-year-old son, Russell Jr., and be assured of gaining custody of the boy when he is released.

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“Being here really breaks the bond that I had built with my son. I feel like I’m losing him and I’m not sure how to deal with it or him,” said Kuiken, who is serving a yearlong sentence at the county’s Wayside Honor Ranch, a men’s jail in Saugus, for possession of drugs for sale.

“I’ve learned a lot of things that I can’t wait to get out to try,” Kuiken said. “I don’t want him to forget what he means to me.”

Mitchell is also concerned that her daughter will forget who she is if she does not have enough contact with her, a common problem for babies who don’t see their mothers often, says Weilerstein, the MATCH official.

The weekly contact Mitchell and other prisoners have with their children is what sustains them.

“If it wasn’t for this to look forward to I don’t know if I could handle jail,” said Mitchell, who is serving 120 days at Sybil Brand on drug charges. She is scheduled to be released in January.

“It’s so good to hold them and smell them and tell them you love them and that’s so important to them.”

Olivia Rojos, 25, already feels the separation from her 4-year-old daughter Samantha, who is living with Rojos’ mother in La Puente.

“I did everything with Sam. There was nothing we didn’t talk about together,” said Rojos, who also has an 11-month-old daughter. “Now she doesn’t communicate with me at all.”

During their two-hour visit, Rojos and Samantha made Play-Doh animals, cooked make-believe meals, painted and played with toys and joked with each other. Samantha, who looks like a 3-foot-tall carbon copy of her mother with dark brown hair cut in a pageboy style and light brown eyes, hardly strayed farther than six feet from her mother and beckoned for Rojos to follow her when she did. But there was little talking about important things.

“We can play together OK, but we don’t talk about things like we used to,” Rojos said. “She won’t tell me things like how she feels or if she misses me. I don’t know . . . ,” her voice cracks and then trails off.

Rojos was sentenced to a year in jail for civil contempt because of her refusal to testify against her boyfriend, who was arrested after he allegedly shot someone. She is hoping to be released in January on a work-release program, and then start attending therapy sessions with Samantha.

The trauma of absentee parents is where offenders’ children suffer the most, with problems ranging from withdrawal to aggression, said Denise Johnston, director of the Pasadena-based Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents.

Said Barry of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children: “There’s nothing more significant in a child’s life than being separated from their mother or primary care giver. It’s a devastating effect on children.”

Most often kids feel abandoned, frightened and responsible, much like children of divorced parents. When a parent is arrested and abruptly taken away, initially there is confusion. For many younger children withdrawal follows; they stop eating, learn slower and detach themselves from people, Barry said. Older children often feel angry and embarrassed that their parents are in jail and often become more verbally and physically aggressive.

Without intervention, inmates’ children are more likely than their peers to become delinquent, according to law enforcement officials. The National Council on Crime and Delinquency estimates that half of all youths in juvenile facilities had a parent in jail.

Rojos’ daughter, Samantha, has a number of different problems.

“My brothers and sisters tell me she fights, slams doors and doesn’t care about nothing,” said Rojos. “When my sister hugs her little girl, Sam just sits there and stares at them. Then when she comes here she wants to know why I can’t go home with her.”

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Rojos’ main concern is repairing the communication link with her daughter, she said.

However, for a number of other parents, the first order of business is regaining custody of their children. In many cases, parents who are jailed or imprisoned can leave their children with relatives. But there are those whose children wind up in the foster-care system and getting them back can be difficult.

“Parents are powerless once they’re incarcerated because they’re stripped of their responsibility and authority,” Johnston said.

There is no exact figure on how many incarcerated women regain custody of their children, but a woman who has been in prison for more than a year is unlikely to regain custody of her children from the foster-care system, said Barry. Those who are lucky enough to get their children back have usually faced an uphill battle.

Suzanne, 35, a longtime drug user, lost her two youngest children, a 6-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl, to foster care in 1990 after she was arrested for the 14th time on drugs charges and sentenced to 18 months in state prison.

“I will never forget my son’s face the day I had to give him up to the Department of Children’s Services,” Suzanne said. She used drugs so much for so many years that social workers placed her two eldest sons, now teen-agers, with family members.

In prison, she decided to change her life and enrolled in drug rehabilitation classes. Once out of prison, she continued classes and hired an attorney to help her win back her two youngest children. The battle to regain custody of her daughter took six months of Child Dependency Court hearings and a fight against a foster family desperate to keep the toddler. After proving her sobriety and ability to care for the child, Suzanne won custody in February.

“When I finally got my kids back, I had to re-bond with them, especially my little girl,” she said as she sat in her Eastside apartment while her children played around her. “She was an infant when I last had her, so she had to get to know me.”

Advocates for imprisoned parents say Suzanne’s victory in regaining custody is not the norm, especially since she once had substance abuse problems. Her two oldest children don’t want anything to do with her because her past drug use led her to basically abandon them.

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Saundra Turner-Settle, head of the county’s Family Reunification Services, said it is the policy of the Department of Children’s Services to reunite parent and child within 18 months of the child’s placement in foster care.

“If your incarceration was not related to injury to a person or a child, it’s really not a big, grandiose reason why you shouldn’t get your child back,” Turner-Settle said.

“Our goal is to reunite child and parent if possible,” said Marcus Tucker, the presiding judge in dependency court in Monterey Park. “They must have appropriate housing for the child and we have to monitor their drug or alcohol use.”

Mitchell, who had used drugs so much that she neglected her first child, now 15, said the time has come for a change. The parenting classes taught her that.

“It tears my heart out to have to hand her over to someone and not be able to walk out with her,” Mitchell said as she put Stephani’s sweater on and wrapped her in her small baby blanket.

At the same mirrored glass door where she picked her up, Mitchell hesitantly passes her daughter to the Sheriff’s deputy when her name is called and steps away, crying.

“It’s so important just to touch her, to feel her,” she said, crying and smiling. She held the shoulder of her jail uniform to her nose. “I can still smell her on me.”

On the Cover

Cynthia Martinez, an inmate at Sybil Brand Institute, carries her daughter, Christina, 4, and holds her son Christopher’s hand as they walk through a jail corridor during a weekly two-hour visit.

Jailed parents and their children are often devastated by being separated, and some jails and prisons are responding by establishing parenting classes and visitation programs.