Reuniting Inmate Mothers, Children

The year 1996 was a rough one for Adriana Cruz. That’s when California decided the 6-year-old could no longer kiss her mother good night.

Before then, Adriana and her three siblings were entitled to occasional overnight stays with their mom, a prisoner serving a sentence of seven years to life. But lawmakers, supported by then-Gov. Pete Wilson, ended the visits as part of a broader rollback of inmate rights.

“It was terrible,” recalled Adriana’s grandmother and guardian, Theresa Azhocar. “They thought they were punishing the prisoners, but they punished the children too.”

Now the Legislature wants to restore such visits for inmates like Theresa Cruz. A bill by state Sen. Betty Karnette (D-Long Beach) would allow female prisoners without scheduled parole dates to periodically spend two days and nights with their kids.

Supporters said such visits, in small apartments on prison grounds, are vital to help inmates and their children nourish bonds that become badly strained by incarceration. Critics see them as a security risk and argue that inmates forfeited the privilege of spending time with their families when they committed the crimes that put them behind bars.

About 80% of California’s 10,228 female inmates are mothers, and most were the primary caretakers of their children before they were locked up. Because the large majority will be paroled or released someday, “it makes sense for them to stay connected and try to hold their family together,” Karnette said.

“There’s also evidence that children of parents in prison are likely to follow the same path,” she said. “We’re trying to prevent that.”

Though backed by numerous women’s and religious groups, Karnette’s bill, SB 700, faced some stiff opposition in the Legislature, where its margin of passage was slim. Republicans, in particular, objected on grounds that such visits would pose security risks and “force” children to spend time with their incarcerated mothers.

The bill now awaits action by Gov. Gray Davis. He has not expressed a position, but state corrections officials have given him several reasons to veto it.

Among them is the argument that extending the overnight visits to female inmates would be unfair to fathers behind bars, said Stephen Green, assistant secretary of the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency.

“We’re concerned that this violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment,” Green said. “If this was enacted, we feel we’d immediately get a lawsuit from male prisoners.”

The correctional officers union agrees, and also asserts that the bill would create “a breach in our security,” lobbyist Jeff Thompson said.

“California is already stretched out to the liberal edge when it comes to our visitation policy,” Thompson argued. “We don’t think this sort of unsupervised visit for this type of inmate is a good idea.”

Since 1971, inmates who meet certain criteria--those with clean records while in prison and whose offenses did not include sex crimes or domestic violence--have been entitled to occasional family or conjugal visits under a policy initiated by Gov. Ronald Reagan. At the time, such visits were seen as a useful motivational tool and a way to help rehabilitate inmates--a primary goal of the penal system back then.

With the rise of the tough-on-crime movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, pressure mounted to roll back such inmate privileges, which also included access to weightlifting equipment and pornography. Victims’ groups saw such rights as part of a coddling prison environment, and many legislators backed their cause.

“It was the era of three strikes, longer sentences and a whole new attitude about prisoners,” said Department of Corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton. “A lot of people felt that prisoners were victimizing others and then enjoying privileges while incarcerated.”

In 1996, Wilson signed a law barring overnight visits for inmates who had not yet won a release date from the parole board.

Behavioral Problems

The Karnette bill would restore the privilege for women inmates without parole dates--and would permit visits only with children, not spouses. Those on death row or serving terms without the possibility of parole would still be denied the visits, as would those with domestic violence or sex-crime convictions. Visits also would be limited to prisoners with records of good behavior in custody.

Thornton said she could not estimate how many women might become eligible if the bill becomes law.

Groups who work with families of prisoners believe the policy change could help children cast adrift when their mothers abruptly exit their lives. The few studies conducted on the offspring of inmates suggest that children suffer greatly from the unnatural separation, displaying a range of behavior problems and becoming at greater risk for incarceration themselves.

“Family disruption due to the incarceration of the mother, often the sole caregiver, is very traumatic for children and has short- and long-term negative consequences,” the California Research Bureau reported in March. Among them are developmental regression, aggressive acting out and other antisocial behavior.

Sister Suzanne Jabro runs the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese’s ministry for prisoners and their families. She also organizes annual bus trips that take children to visit their imprisoned mothers. For many kids, the trips provide their only contact with Mom, partly because of the remote locations of most prisons and partly because their guardians are often elderly grandparents who lack transportation, Jabro said.

Though those visits are special, they are exhausting--back and forth in one emotional day--and not nearly enough, Jabro said. Teenagers, she said, are in particularly dire need of more contact, because many feel so abandoned, resentful and angry when their mothers are locked up.

“This is not a debate about longer sentences or punishment for prisoners,” Jabro said. “This [legislation] is about children whose primary relationship--with their mother--gets destroyed, and what we as a society need to do about that.”

Theresa Azhocar said her grandchildren, whom she has raised, are living proof of the benefits of the overnight visits. For the first five years of her daughter’s imprisonment for conspiring to murder her abusive boyfriend, Azhocar took her four grandchildren for regular two-night visits.

Under the watchful eye of guards who checked on them every four hours, the family baked cookies, enjoyed Thanksgiving, barbecued in a small fenced yard, played games, and essentially felt like a normal family for 72 hours.

“Theresa would help Carlitos with his homework, comb the older girls’ hair, play hide-and-seek,” recalled Azhocar, who lives in Chula Vista. “Usually, all four kids would end up in bed with her at night.”

Then came 1996, and the news that such visits would no longer be permitted. Adriana, a first-grader at the time, didn’t understand, and would pack her pajamas each time the family embarked on what became one-day trips to the California Institution for Women, near Chino.

Cruz’s older daughters, Andrea, 16 at the time, and Antoinette, 15 that year, seemed to take it even harder.

“They started giving me more trouble then,” Azhocar said. “Those long visits with their mother, they were so healing, like counseling sessions. And suddenly they were gone.”

Difficult Communication

Azhocar said that although the family still visits Cruz at least twice a month, the drive--five hours round-trip--is grueling given the brief time they have together. In addition, the conditions in the prison visiting area are noisy and so crowded that visitors are nearly shoulder-to-shoulder as they talk, making quality communication between mother and child difficult.

Corrections officials said the current policy makes sense because it permits the overnight visits for inmates who have parole dates--and, thus, may be rejoining society soon.

But advocates for inmates said that for many of them, waiting until they are assigned a parole date may be too late. Such dates are parceled out very sparingly, and only come near the very end of what can be a term of 20 years or more.

“If someone has waited 10 or 15 years, is her family still going to be around?” wondered Cassie Pierson of the nonprofit group Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. “Will there be any bond left to try to strengthen?”