Jack & Jill Politics

The U.S. still has the highest incarceration rate in the world and we’re still responsible for the greatest separation of children from their parents since the end of chattel slavery.

One of the many tragic consequences of mass incarceration in the United States is its impact on innocent children. Nationally, more than 1.7 million children have a parent behind bars on any given day. Most have been separated from their parent for long periods of time. More than 60% of all prisoners have children and among women prisoners that number increases to more than 70%. One rarely hears about the children of the people we see arrested on the news, no one asks what happens to them? What do they experience? What impact does a parent’s arrest and incarceration have on their lives?

Nell Bernstein, noted journalist and author, spent years interviewing and learning about the children of our nation’s prisoners – their stories are varied but share in common the experience of being ignored, forgotten and left out of a process that had tremendous impact on their lives. From Nell Bernstein’s remarkable book All Alone in the World:

Ricky’s mother, like one-third of all incarcerated mothers, was living alone with her children at the time of her arrest. Ricky was nine years old, and his brother was under a year. “The police came and took my mom, and I guess they thought someone else was in the house, I don’t really know,” Ricky said. “But no one else was in the house. I was trying to ask them what happened and they wouldn’t say. Everything went so fast. They just rushed in the house and got her and left.” After that, Ricky did his best. He cooked for himself and his brother, and he changed the baby’s diapers. “Sometimes he’d cry, because he probably would want to see my mother. But he was used to me, too,” Ricky said.

Ricky burned himself trying to make toast and got a blister on his hand, but he felt he was managing. He remembered that each day, his mother would take him and his brother out for a walk. So he kept to the family routine, pushing the baby down the sidewalk in a stroller every day for two weeks, until a neighbor took notice and called Child Protective Services. Social workers came and took Ricky’s brother from him, just as police had his mother. The boys were sent to separate foster homes. Ricky saw his mother only once after that, years later, when he ran into her on the street and she told him she was working on getting him back. A year after that, he received a letter from a stranger with a hospital return address, telling him his mother had died. He never found out how she died, or what had happened to her in the years following her arrest.

CHIP: CHildren Of Incarcerated Parents from candi reeder on Vimeo.

A national study found that almost 70 percent of children who were present at a parent’s arrest watched their parent being handcuffed, and nearly 30 percent were confronted with drawn weapons. When researcher Christina Jose Kampfner interviewed children who had witnessed their mothers’ arrests, she found that many suffered classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome–they couldn’t sleep or concentrate, and they had flashbacks to the moment of arrest. If an arrested parent later returns home on parole or probation, officers often have license to enter the house at will–meaning that children may relive that trauma in their living rooms as well as their imaginations.

Police often plan raids for late-night or early-morning hours, when those they seek are most likely to be home with their families. That ups the odds that police will get their man, but also that children will awaken to see it happen. It should come as no surprise that sleep disorders follow.

Some narcotics officers report that they have children searched before releasing them to a relative or a shelter, in case they have drugs in their clothing or diaper. Washington Post reporter Leon Dash interviewed the son of a longtime drug dealer and prostitute who recalled being forced to strip and spread his buttocks inside his own apartment during police raids. When police deem children in need of child protective services, the majority deliver the children in a police car rather than having a child welfare worker pick them up in a lessintimidating vehicle. About one-fourth of police departments routinely bring children first to the police station rather than to a shelter or other civilian destination. Officers who find themselves responsible for children at the time of an arrest complain that their “babysitting” responsibilities interfere with their ability to do their real job.

“It is unfair to keep young children at the police station,” one officer told the ABA researchers. “This is not a good place to watch children; there is no place to eat; they can’t sleep here; we often don’t have the supplies to take care of them, especially infants.” A child who is picked up by police officers, transported in a police car, and deposited at the police station–where he may be deprived of food and sleep–will almost inevitably experience himself as having been arrested. To all intents and purposes, he has been.

Marcus Nieto of the California Research Bureau surveyed California police and sheriff ‘s departments about their approach to the children of arrested parents. He found what he called a “de facto ‘don’t ask and don’t tell’ policy”– children were generally not considered a police responsibility unless they were perceived to be in grave danger. When Nieto asked law enforcement personnel for their suggestions for improving police response to children of arrestees, the most popular answer was “nothing can be done.” Those respondents who did see room for improvement primarily pointed to agencies other than their own. While there is in general no statutory mandate for police to concern themselves with children at the time of an arrest, courts have occasionally held police liable for injuries to children left alone after a caretaker is arrested. White v. Rochford, the case that established the precedent for such liability, is based on a set of circumstances that tax the imagination. Police left three small children alone on a highway at night after arresting their uncle for a traffic violation. One child was hit by a car while crossing the freeway. The other two were later hospitalized with severe pneumonia.

From a BBC report on the impact of incarceration on children:

It is family day at Jessup Correctional Institution and the gym is full of women dressed in grey prison uniforms. They are sitting at tables nervously awaiting the arrival of their children. Among them is 27-year-old Latasha Shelton, who cannot stay still and keeps looking up at the windows to see any sign of her six-year-old daughter. “I’m so excited,” she says.

Quite Shelton – her first name pronounced “Cutie” – is dressed in a tartan dress and has beads in her hair. She runs the entire length of the gym to reach her mother. Ms Shelton scoops her daughter up and swings her round in the air, while Quite squeals with delight. Once settled on her mother’s lap, Quite sings to her. But Quite has not just come to visit her mother. Her grandmother, Starletta, is also serving time at Jessup, where the two women share a cell.

Ms Shelton and her mother were found guilty of attempted robbery three-and-a-half years ago. Starletta was addicted to crack cocaine at the time and tried to steal an elderly woman’s purse from a shopping cart. Latasha was also in the store at the time. She panicked and drove her mother away. Although neither was armed, they each got nine-year prison sentences.

“My drug addiction played a big part in me being incarcerated,” says Starletta. “A lot of women that’s in here are addicted to drugs – they suffer from depression. I think that they should get help instead of being incarcerated,” she adds.

Think about what it means for a child to grow up seeing their mother and grandmother sharing a cell – how would it make you feel? It’s easy to be punitive when you think about people committing theft to feed their drug addiction, but when you punish the parent you’re also punishing the child. And when you impose disproportionate punishment – 9 years for attempted theft of a purse in a shopping cart – you reinforce the perception that the U.S. criminal justice system is fundamentally unfair – particularly with respect to people charged with drug offenses.

Makeba Lavan discusses how she came to terms with her mother’s incarceration and learned to accept her as a full person.

Her message to the world, “Don’t make the same mistake the justice system makes, don’t forget the [addict] is a full person and people make mistakes.”

When’s the last time you heard of a corporate felon getting and serving a long prison sentence for their crimes? With the notable exception of Bernie Madoff (who became the public face and scapegoat for Wall Street excess) the majority of ‘white collar’ crime (e.g. securities fraud, labor violations, environmental degradation) neither gets the level of attention, nor the severity of punishment upon conviction as crimes involving the sale or possession of drugs. What message are we sending children – especially poor children of color who are much more likely to have a parent incarcerated for a drug offense. In today’s America, 1 in 9 African-American children have a parent behind bars – that’s more than 10%

Clearly one of the things we are saying as a society is that these children don’t count. We’re not concerned about their quality of life. Regardless of whether their parents actually pose a danger to them and/or society, we’re going to take their mothers and/or fathers away, lock them up for a long time and leave them parentless and too often in worse circumstances. As an African-American, I am offended by this, it is not acceptable to me that the lives and futures of large numbers of Black children are being sacrificed to maintain the illusion we’re protecting some children from the evils of drugs. After more than half of century it should be clear by now – we can not win the war on drugs – all we can win is the war on poor people of color being fought in the name of the drug war. But let’s be clear who the casualties of this war are – innocent children……..