Inmate Doesn’t Let Bars Keep Him From Learning to be a Better Parent : Prison: Serving a life sentence, Arthur Hamilton Jr. is more involved with his kids than ever before. He wants to teach others the same skills.

Arthur Hamilton Jr. is haunted by the harsh memories of his youth: beatings by his alcoholic father, fighting with rats for food in his infested home, the murder of his drug-addicted brother.

He is determined to give his own children a better life.

It is an enormous challenge. He is separated from his children by a barbed-wire fence and a 37- to 65-year prison sentence.

“In my cell one night, I began thinking of all the negative things I’d done and how I wanted to pay society back. But even more than that, how I wanted to make it up to my children,” Hamilton said at the Lakeland Correctional Facility, where he is in the 12th year of his sentence for armed robbery and manslaughter.

So, 2 1/2 years ago, Hamilton began writing. Late last year, his book, “Father Behind Bars,” was published. It is a searing look at life in prison and how Hamilton wound up there.

But its ultimate message is one of hope. It stems from Hamilton’s determination to turn his life around, educate himself and help his two troubled children escape a life he feared would lead them down the same self-destructive path he took as a youth in Detroit’s ghettos.

And he has turned the book’s message into a prison program for fathers, teaching them how they can overcome the obvious barriers and become better parents.

He hopes Fathers Behind Bars Inc., a support group he began in 1992, will someday be a fixture at every prison in the country.

“I came up in an environment where I saw entire families wiped out, mothers whose five sons are dead through guns and dope,” said Hamilton, 36, a large man with a shy smile.

“The African-American community is committing self-genocide; we have to wake up and put the family unit back together.”

Hamilton’s book, co-written by William Banks and with a foreword by actor Danny Glover, has sold 10,000 copies and is in its second printing, said publisher W. R. Spence.

The little money Hamilton will earn will be put into trusts for his children. If he makes more than a few thousand dollars, the state Department of Corrections likely will go after it to help pay his room and board.

Hamilton says he has received hundreds of letters from inmates and prison officials nationwide in response to his book and his work on behalf of incarcerated fathers. He beams with pride as he speaks of how his children and stepchildren have brought their father’s book to school to show their friends.

Hamilton says he felt like a failure from the moment he became a father. His first child was born in 1978 when he was 20; he was serving his first of three prison terms, a two-year sentence for attempted unarmed robbery, the only crime for which Hamilton insists he was wrongly convicted.

When he got out, he married his daughter’s mother. He tried to find work but was repeatedly laid off. Finally, he resorted to robbing a fast-food restaurant with a gun he says was unloaded. He was sent back to prison for another two years.

When he was released in 1981, Hamilton and his wife had a baby boy and he tried again to find work. Too proud to go on welfare, he gave up and robbed another fast-food restaurant, again with what he says was an unloaded gun.

He was again convicted of armed robbery but escaped while being transferred. He fled Detroit and, while working at a video arcade, fatally shot an alleged drug dealer Hamilton says had threatened him. He was convicted of manslaughter and began serving what in the prison system is considered a life sentence.

That’s when he began turning his life around.

During his current stretch, Hamilton has earned an associate’s degree and become an award-winning prison newspaper editor.

He and his wife divorced in 1992. He fell in love with a fellow inmate’s sister and began forging a relationship with her three children. She bought him a typewriter and encouraged him to write his book; they married later that year.

And from behind bars, he fought his ex-wife in court when he heard that drugs were being used in her home and that their two children were being abused.

“The possibility that one of my own children could join me in prison was too much to stand,” he writes.

Hamilton’s ex-wife was charged with neglect and their daughter, now 15, was placed in the custody of the state Department of Social Services. Hamilton and his new wife, Marilyn, have temporary custody of his 13-year-old son.

Hamilton says he speaks with his children and stepchildren by phone almost daily and they are excelling in school.

“He’s been great,” said Hamilton’s stepson, Michael Brown, 17 and a senior at Niles High School. “He’s always there to listen to our problems and he’s been helping me set goals for the future.” Michael plans to attend Central Michigan University this fall and eventually medical school.

Harriet E. Harris, the Wayne County Juvenile Court referee who handled the neglect cases of Hamilton’s children, said it is unusual for a father in prison to take such an active role with his children.

“A lot of parents don’t even choose to come (to court hearings) if they’re incarcerated. They figure there’s not much they can do anyway,” Harris said. “That’s what makes his case, his deep involvement in his children’s future, so unusual.”

Lakeland Deputy Warden Bob Collins figures Hamilton has served as a role model for more than 100 inmates at the medium-security prison since he arrived eight months ago.

“I believe he’s sincere,” said Collins, who has read the book.

Spence, who heads WRS Publishing in Waco, Tex., has been writing and calling prison officials trying to win Hamilton’s early release. He has even offered Hamilton a job on the lecture circuit. Hamilton says he would like nothing better than to take his message about the importance of family, of nurturing children, to cities across America.

For more information about Fathers Behind Bars Inc., write to 525 Superior St., Niles, Mich., 49120.

‘Father Behind Bars’

Excerpts from Arthur Hamilton Jr.’s book:

“Was the beginning (of Hamilton’s road to prison) when my brother Greg and I put phony money in the collection plate at church so that we would have money to buy candy? Was it when I pulled my first armed robbery? Was it when I killed the man who sold little children drugs? No, by those times, and at the stages of crime, I had already fallen by the proverbial wayside and was already headed toward this hell. The beginning for me was when my father finally mentally pounded out of me any sense of self-worth or sense of caring for other people.”

“I walked into a McDonald’s, introduced myself politely as a bandit who wanted to be taken seriously, and demanded money. I got it and before I left I couldn’t help but say to the manager whose hands were high in the air: ‘This is for my kids.’ . . . It was nowhere near Christmas but I was playing Santa Claus. Toys, gifts and most of all food, food that my son, who was not even a year old, had never eaten--food to make him grow. I also got them clothes and took them out a few places. I don’t think I spent a dime on myself.”

“Guys from broken homes have always found their way to prison, but the guys I saw coming through in the ‘80s were a different breed. They were getting meaner. . . . More of them came not just from second- and third-generation welfare homes, but from second-, third- and fourth-generation criminal homes--i.e., homes where parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents had been incarcerated for serious crimes. . . . What worried me most was that my kids were becoming part of the same trend.”

Source: Associated Press