Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Kids with parents behind bars share the pain of incarceration.
Mar 29, 2000 | Last Thursday, a sixth-grader in Ohio brought a handgun to school and held his classmates hostage. He didn't shoot anybody. It wasn't his plan. After a teacher intervened and gave him a hug, he revealed his true purpose. He pulled a gun because he wanted to go to jail to be with his mother, who is serving time for a drug-related probation violation. That day, she was scheduled to be transferred from a local jail to the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, 150 miles away from her son.
There are 1.5 million children in this country who have lost a parent to jail or prison. The incarceration fever that caught hold in the 1980s and has yet to break (the United States held a record 2 million people behind bars at last count) has left a generation of children in limbo. Many will spend their childhood in foster homes, with aging grandparents or with other relatives or friends. Often -- very often -- they bounce from one short-term caretaker to another.
One boy, now 16, was 9 years old when the police came to his door. They arrested his mother, who used drugs, but left him and his infant brother behind. (He speculates now that they must have thought there was another adult in the house.) For two weeks, he took care of the baby and stayed inside, waiting for his mother to come back. He didn't really know how to change a diaper, but he thinks he did OK. Once, he remembers, he burned himself cooking. Eventually, a neighbor stopped by and called the authorities and he and his brother went into separate foster homes. He didn't see his mother again until he was a teenager.
Children may not understand the rationale behind mandatory sentencing laws that take their parents away from them for years or decades. They may not understand the "conspiracy" provisions that put their mothers behind bars for picking the wrong boyfriend. They may not understand the "war on drugs" that has swelled the prison population without reducing the availability of drugs in their neighborhoods. They may not understand why their mom is in a prison hours away, where they cannot go visit her. (About half of all incarcerated women never receive visits from their children, often because the women are housed in remote facilities.)
They may not understand these policies, but they live with their impact every day.
No sooner did the news get out that another child had brought a gun to school than Al Gore and George W. Bush weighed in from the campaign trail. Gore stood up for trigger locks. Bush -- an advocate of more prisons and longer sentences -- proposed mentors for the children of prisoners. If Bush were able to pull them out of a hat, 1.5 million mentors would be nice. But mentors are no substitute for mothers.
The war on drugs has had a particularly devastating impact on women, who have become the fastest growing, though least violent, segment of the prison population. The number of female inmates has tripled since mandatory sentencing laws were enacted in the 1980s, and the increase shows no signs of abating.
About 80 percent of female prisoners are mothers, and most of those are single parents -- the primary source of care for the children they leave behind. Before mandatory sentencing, judges could take children's needs into account when they decided where and how a drug-offending mother paid for her crimes. Now, federal statutes not only disallow such flexibility, they actually make it explicit that the responsibilities of mothering are not "ordinarily relevant" to sentencing decisions.
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