Softening the Blow for Children of Prisoners

Champagne Saltes was 6 when her mother went to prison. “I’m still angry at her for leaving me for 10 years,” she says.

At a time when America’s prison population is booming, Champagne is far from alone.

Most of the 14 million people jailed each year are parents who leave kids behind, social workers say. The situation has become more critical in the last decade because of a 300% increase in imprisoned women, mostly for drug crimes.

Now, the needs of prisoners’ children are straining the abilities of private and government agencies.

“We are talking about millions and millions and millions of children whose lives are affected by the imprisonment, or the correctional supervision, of a parent,” said Creasie Finney Hairston, dean of the University of Illinois-Chicago’s College of Social Work.

The problems of these kids were the subject of a recent program for social workers sponsored by the Child Welfare League of America.

Most women in jail have two or more children and often are single parents, said John Mattingly of the Annie Casey Foundation, a Baltimore philanthropy group that works to improve conditions for disadvantaged children and families.

Some children, such as Champagne, maintain a relationship with the parent.

“She was very caring,” Champagne said of her mother. “She was very involved. . . . If I did something wrong, she would correct me.”

Now that Champagne’s mother is out of prison, the two have a good relationship. But Champagne said she still can’t get over anger at her mother’s long absence “as much as I try to.” And they can’t live together, said Champagne, now 17, who explained she grew up without a parent and can’t become a child again.

The teenager, who has lived in a convent for years, will graduate from a Catholic girls’ school this spring and go to college.

Others aren’t so lucky.

“There is a myth that imprisonment is so common in some neighborhoods that there is no stigma attached to it,” says Hairston. “But you would have to see and hear some of the things kids say to one another on the playground. It may not be, ‘Your mother is a prostitute.’ It doesn’t come out that nicely.”

It’s not like losing a parent through divorce, said Emani Davis, 17, of White Plains, N.Y., whose father went to prison when she was 6. Her father won’t be at her high school graduation like the divorced fathers of her friends.

“I can’t call him,” she said. “He has to call me, and if there is a lock-down, I won’t hear from him.” Despite the separation, they are close, “but I worry a lot,” she says. “I worry that he’ll get in a fight in prison and he’ll get hurt. . . . I worry that he won’t come home.”

Children want to be with their parents so much that they sometimes run away to see them, said Elaine Lord, superintendent at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, New York state’s maximum security prison for women.

A mother’s imprisonment can be the final blow to a family that’s already weak. And mothers can lose their incentive to rebuild their lives, said Mattingly of the Casey Foundation.

Whenever possible, mothers who commit crimes should be sentenced to community correction and drug treatment, Mattingly argues.

Arresting authorities should help parents make plans for their children, and prison officials should keep contact alive, he also recommends.

Prison superintendent Lord used to send children away when they showed up unexpectedly. Now they are recognized as a vital part of rehabilitation and are encouraged to visit, staying with nearby families when not at the prison.

“Children don’t give up on their mothers,” she said.

Lord tells of a winter not long ago when she looked out her office window to the prison yard below.

“There was a big snowman looking up at me,” she said. “It was the first snowman the woman [in prison] had ever made with her son. We can’t take that away from children.”