Love under lock and key

We can't really talk about this issue without looking at the fact that minority children are disproportionately affected by the criminal justice system; something like half of all parents in prison are black and another quarter are Hispanic. There is one passage in the book where you make a comparison between the current dissolution of families through incarceration and the dismantling of families during slavery.

Well, it is an idea that is complicated and controversial. There is a whole set of activists who describe prison as the new slavery and I think it's a complex analysis. But when you look at it from a child's perspective, the parallels really jump out at you.

I used that passage that you are referring to, from Peggy Cooper Davis, because I thought it was important to note that the Abolitionist movement didn't just talk about slavery as a violation of personal autonomy but also as a denial of family bonds. And in fact, that was one of the most convincing arguments that the Abolitionists made and that ultimately led to the end of slavery. In the book, I quote one Abolitionist who wrote, "Pro-slavery men and women! For one moment only, in imagination, stand surrounded by your loved ones, and behold them, one by one torn from your grasp, or you rudely and forcibly carried from them -- how think you would you bear it?"

Because when I read that, I felt like I could have, except for some of the archaic language, been listening to the description of the experience of a kid who'd seen his mom arrested over and over. To him, the fact that she did something to make it happen is not the central fact.

But aren't there always going to be prisons, and always going to be some people who really do deserve to be in them, even if they might be parents?

Well that's really the big issue. And we can look at it from two parallel tracks. At the very least, we need to not leave kids alone in empty apartments. We need to not break down doors if we don't have to if there are kids present. It would be nice to ask a mom to step outside before we handcuff her, so her kids don't have to see that. There are a whole range of things that could be done to make things better for kids when a parent is arrested. We need to have a more humane visiting environment, more supports for poor elderly grandparents.

But I think the danger is that we will stop with that. And I think the conversation so far -- to the degree that it's being had at all -- has ended there. How can we make things better when a parent is incarcerated, with the assumption that that's inevitable? But I'd like to see us start to look at sentencing through the kids' eyes. So that would mean every time we remove somebody from her family, we stop to look at what the problem is we're trying to correct. Is this the only option? Or is there another option that would keep us "safe" -- because public safety is always the counterweight -- perhaps by solving her addiction or tendency to write bad checks, and still allow her children to have a parent. I think that if we look at sentencing through that lens, my guess is that the prison population would drop by half.

Because so many people are incarcerated for nonviolent, drug-related crimes?

Well, there is that. But it's also because prison is meant to rehabilitate -- and there are people who commit violent acts but could be rehabilitated and won't do it anymore. There are people in prison who have been there 20, 30, 40 years and are never going to get out and are going to need hundreds of thousand of dollars in geriatric care. So, I want to be careful -- I don't think we need to leave the people who have committed violent crime out.

Well, it seems like that's where you may lose a lot of support. Because there is a big gap in most people's minds between drug addicts and murderers and rapists.

Yes. But one thing that one of the women I write about in the book, Elizabeth Gaines, really has helped me understand is that if you're a kid, your needs and what you deserve don't vary based upon whether your parent is a nonviolent or violent offender.

You know, I think even I was overly invested in that distinction to begin with. I think that when there is a public safety reason for intervening, we need to make sure that intervention makes the person less violent rather than more. That's again, the terrible irony of prison -- some people don't get out, but many people commit violent acts, go to prison, are immersed in a violent culture, given no help and no treatment, and come out more violent. So we're still not safer.

You resist the idea of an intergenerational "cycle of crime." But still you recognize that an incredible number of children who have parents in prison eventually wind up in prison themselves. How do you explain that conflict?

Well, I used to cite a number that you'd see everywhere -- it's even been in Senate testimony -- which was that a kid whose parent has been incarcerated was six times more likely than other children to wind up behind bars himself. And finally Denise Johnston, who runs the Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents in Pasadena, Calif., sat me down and explained to me that if that number were accurate, there would be more people incarcerated than our population. The math just didn't work.

But that number is still everywhere, and it became the central argument for helping the kids -- like "help these kids now or in 10 years they'll hit you over the head and steal your purse" -- when often that just contributes to the stigma and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and is ultimately not fair because although many kids go on to get in trouble, many, many don't. On the other hand, if you go into juvenile hall and ask a group of young men or women how many of them have experienced the incarceration of a parent, most of the hands will go up.

There is just no denying that reality. I think, though, that the assumption is that that is because their parents are criminals and teach them criminality, which may be part of it -- but again, I think that we have to look at whether the trauma of our intervention might be making it more or less likely that that cycle is going to be perpetuated.

One young man that I spoke with had a mother who was in and out of prison his whole life, and then eventually so was he. And I remember him saying, "The system, her, they made me who I am." Like in his head, his mother's addiction and criminality and the system's response to it were the same thing. They were both pressures that lead him to being addicted and locked up himself.

As a culture we have already done battle over women's rights and gays' rights and minorities' rights -- why do you think the concept of "children's rights" has been so difficult to get our heads around?

You know, I think we're almost radically unable to see things through kids' eyes. Even you and I are having that problem -- we keep drifting back to the adults, and the question of what the adults deserve. I did a radio talk show the other day, and the host asked, "But aren't there some people who just don't deserve to be parents?" And my immediate thought was maybe, but there aren't any kids who don't deserve to have parents.

And it's just very hard for institutions, whether it's criminal justice or child welfare, to see things through kids' eyes. And one of our central fallacies, which I'm becoming more aware of now that I have my own kids, is that if we don't tell kids, they won't know. Like if we don't talk to kids about what is happening, it won't affect them, or we shouldn't take them to visit parents because prison is a scary place.

You asked me at the beginning why these children were invisible, but really, in some ways, aren't all kids? I think we live in this kind of crazy culture where we talk about them all the time but mostly they're a rhetorical device. That's probably just a natural extension of being an adult, but that's why in the book, while I didn't talk to little kids for obvious reasons, I did talk to a lot of people who had been little kids when this happened to them -- and it was just so illuminating for me to see it through their eyes and to see how very much they saw.

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