About 43 percent of women prisoners in California state facilities are drug offenders. The majority of these are single mothers, most of whom are expected to resume caring for their children at the end of their sentences. Withholding contact for a year is likely to make that difficult and crucial reunion even more challenging.

Once an incarcerated parent is released, notes Dr. Howard, "if they don't have a good relationship with the child, then their ability to take care of the child and have the child be responsive to them will be much diminished. If there were no bodily contact at all, I would expect no relationship at all with young children."

Alissa went just three months without touching her children, but undoing the damage took much longer. She was in the county jail at the time for credit fraud. The thought of her small boys sitting in plastic chairs shoulder to shoulder with other visitors, gaping at her through the glass, was too much for her -- and, she feared, for them -- to bear, so, like quite a few other mothers in county jail, she chose to forgo visits altogether.

"Every time I want to hug you," 6-year-old Dion told his mother when she called home, "I have to go to your picture."

When Alissa was transferred to a state facility where she could see her children in person, she couldn't wait to hold them. But the reunion was not as she had imagined it. "When they came the first time it was so sad," she recalls. "They just looked, and they smiled, but they were afraid to come touch me. I grabbed them and I held them for a long time, and they were really cheesy. They were stiff, like I was a stranger."

Donna Wilmott's daughter was 4 years old when Wilmott went to prison for two years on conspiracy charges related to her involvement with the Puerto Rican independence movement. Wilmott spent her first weeks behind bars in solitary confinement. During that time she was permitted only window visits. Her husband came twice a week, but Wilmott asked him not to bring their daughter.

"I was desperate to see her," Wilmott says, "but I didn't want to put her through that. If you put a glass barrier between a child and a parent, it's crazy-making for the children. They feel they can't get to the person they love -- there's this wall between them that they don't understand. It's almost like putting the parent in a box. The message children get is 'Your mother is so bad you can't touch her. She's dangerous.'"

Should the new regulations be enacted, says Wilmott, many women prisoners will likely decide to forgo visits altogether. "Most women I've interviewed in the security housing units (high-security prison wings where contact visits are not allowed) said, 'No, I don't want my child to see me in here. I can't do visits like this.' If drug offenders lose contact visits, I can guarantee there will be people who will just defer the visits. It's too painful."

Wilmott was fortunate enough to be transferred to a federal prison that had a special area set up for mother-child visits, with a patio, swings and a carpeted room with books and toys. "A lot of times my daughter would just sit curled up on my lap the whole time," Wilmott recalls. "It was very reassuring to her, and I think it was one of the reasons she did so well while I was incarcerated. The frequency of our visits, the physical contact and the more relaxed setting really made a difference."

The debate over prisoners' rights -- which ones they must relinquish as a means of punishment and which ones they retain -- is a perennial one. But the issue of which rights, if any, children should retain once their parents are sent to prison is rarely discussed with an eye to law or policy. That children will suffer for their parents' crimes is virtually inevitable. The question is whether the system that exists to punish the parent should be modified to reduce -- or exaggerate -- the effect on the child.

"Kids want that motherly touch," says Dorothy Gaines, who spent six years in federal prison on drug conspiracy charges before President Clinton commuted her sentence last year. "They already feel that you're distant from them, and when they can't touch you, it's not good for them mentally."

Like Donna Wilmott, Gaines started out in a facility that did not allow contact visits but was ultimately transferred to one that did. "My son wanted to be selfish," she recalls. "He wanted to get the most hugs, sit on my lap the longest. I remember one visit when my kids set their watches back, thinking that would give them more time to visit."

According to the CDC's Russ Heimerich, the department is now considering public comment on the proposed changes and may make revisions before finalizing new regulations. "We're weighing the benefits of contact with children against the benefits of keeping drug offenders off drugs," he says.

Dr. Howard suggests that the needs of the prisons, their prisoners and the prisoners' children could be managed without the suspension of contact visits between parents and young children. "If you're worried about babies smuggling drugs in, take the diaper off," she proposes. "Hand the baby to the parent naked and provide a diaper on the inside. Get over it."

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