Motherless children

But Jundid is not convinced that severing his legal tie to his mother in the name of "permanency" would have healed these wounds. Visits with his mother, he says, anchored him throughout his childhood. "We made the most of each visit that we had. And my mom was very special about trying to give time to each child. Like for my sister, she would sit there and braid her hair while she had her little private time to talk to her. I remember she used to teach me karate. I'd show her my muscles, even though I didn't have any. But just me being relaxed and having fun with my mother is what I remember most.

"I couldn't even begin to express to you in words," he continues solemnly, "how fulfilling that was to my soul to give my mother a hug. For her to give me a kiss. For me to sit on her lap. And for me to not do that because of what someone else thinks -- I would have felt very empty then, as a child, and maybe as well now."

When his mother returned to his daily life after 10 years, Jundid says, the adjustment was difficult but also exhilarating. He recalls asking her to walk him to school, despite the fact that he was a teenager, to make up for an experience he had missed as a child.

"A lot of kids are ashamed that their moms are walking them to school," he says. "But I was so happy for her to be in my presence, and for the first time in my life to even come to my school, that I couldn't care less what people thought."

Through his ongoing contact with his mother throughout her 10-year incarceration, Jundid says, he learned something crucial about families: "When it's hard times, you stick together. And that was just a hard time."

Ellen Barry, founding director of San Francisco's Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, believes the kind of access Jundid had to his imprisoned mother is something all children deserve. "Kids own the right to have a relationship with their parents," Barry says, "even if they're not the best parents. The child has a right to be angry, to ask the parent to explain her behavior. That's his choice, not the society's choice. Society does have an obligation to keep children safe, but that's very different from terminating parental rights."

In fact, Barry points out, termination of parental rights is a concept most children can't begin to grasp. "It makes no sense to them that the court could come in and, with a wave of the hand, decide that the mother who gave birth to them is no longer their mother. Whether she's able to take care of them at this moment is a separate question."

Elizabeth Harris often wonders how Anthony understands her disappearance from his life. "He'd just turned four when all this happened," Harris says, "and what he understood as far as why he wasn't in mother's care was, 'Mom had a drug problem and she had no place for you to live.'

"So he always thought if Mom got a house and went to this (rehab) program, that he'd come back home. Now he's 7, and Mom did all these things, and he's still not home. You've got to wonder where his little mind takes him. He's still my child, and there's always gonna be that question in his mind: 'How come I'm not with Mama?'"

It's a question that has gone unasked and unanswered this election season, despite the hundreds of references to "family" sprinkled throughout the campaigns. Most prisoners and many convicted felons aren't allowed to vote, so they are, by definition, no one's constituency. Their children are equally disenfranchised, and even more rarely heard from. At a political level, these two groups are simply not needed, so the fact that they may need each other is easy enough to ignore.

But despite the silence at the federal level, elsewhere in the country a conversation is opening up on the staggering costs -- societal as well as economic -- of the drug war, and voters are, incrementally, being given the opportunity to consider alternatives. California voters, along with choosing a president this November, will also consider an initiative that would send nonviolent drug possession offenders and parole violators into treatment rather than jail or prison; a poll found support for the initiative at 55 percent. Arizona has already shifted to a treatment-based model, saving taxpayers an estimated two dollars for every dollar spent.

The war on drugs costs millions, fills prisons, and appears to do very little to stop people from using drugs. Compounded by severe social and child welfare policies, it is also decimating families across the country.

Children have long been used as a rhetorical weapon in this war, as in "We need to lock these people up before they get our kids hooked on crack." But "our kids" include prisoners' kids in ever-increasing numbers. What might it mean to them to have mom in treatment instead of behind bars; to know that she might ultimately recover from her addiction and be restored to them? The 10 million children who have seen a parent arrested and imprisoned offer the most compelling reason there is to open up the debate on treatment vs. incarceration and whether it is fair to punish parents (and children) by splitting them up -- permanently.

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