Arrest
"Arrest" is the first chapter of All Alone in
the World: Children of the Incarcerated, reprinted with permission from
The New Press.
Anthony was a slight and restless boy of ten with pale skin and huge
brown eyes. In a nearly bare office adjacent to the room where his
grandmother was attending a support group, he was in and out of his
chair, squirming and wriggling, his eyes wandering the room.
"I lived with my mother and her boyfriend and then they made drugs
and sold them in the shed and I was in the house and they weren't even
watching me," he said in one breath.
While his mother cooked methamphetamine, Anthony watched television.
That is what he was doing the day the police came. Anthony was five years
old. The police broke down the door, then smashed through the floorboards
looking for drugs. Anthony remembers a lot of things shattered or
crushed after that, things that had belonged to his grandfather. He
remembers an officer putting him in the back of a police car. He was
frightened, and didn't know where he was being taken.
"It's kiddie jail," he said of the children's shelter in which he
found himself. "A jail for kids. Actually, it's not punishment.
Actually, they punished me, though. Someone stole my watch. And they
gave me clothes too small for me. They keep you in cells—little rooms
that you sleep in, and you have nothing except for a bed, blankets, and
sheets. You couldn't even go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
They wouldn't let you out."
At the shelter, Anthony cried for his mother and his grandmother.
His grandmother came right away when she learned what had happened, but
it was two and a half weeks—and three family court hearings—before
Anthony was released from the shelter and permitted to go home with her.
She lived in another county, and child welfare authorities insisted that
she secure local housing before they would release Anthony to her
care.
"He was in so much pain," she said of the boy who met her at the
shelter. "He jumped in my arms from across the room and said, 'Granny,
get me out of here.'"
Anthony remembers the day he left the shelter. "I had a Wolverine and
an Incredible Hulk in a plastic baggie in one hand and the other hand
was holding my grandma and we ran down the street as fast as we can,
away from the shelter."
Anthony's mother is out of jail now, trying to stay clean. Anthony
knows if she slips up, the police will take her away again. He fears it
will happen to him, too. Because of the way he was taken there, and how
little was explained to him, the shelter has come to haunt Anthony.
"The third time you go in the children's shelter, you can never go
out until you're eighteen. My uncle told me, and it's true, too."
Anthony drew from his mother's arrest a few simple lessons: his
mother was bad. He was bad. Authority was destructive. It is difficult
to imagine a scenario in which a parent's arrest would not be wrenching
for a child. But Anthony's fear and sorrow might have been eased by
steps as simple as having someone take him into another room while his
home was searched and talk to him about what was going on, or asking his
mother if there were someone she might call to care for him.
These things happen, sometimes, when an individual officer thinks of
them, or a chief mandates them. But the majority of police departments
have no written protocol delineating officers' responsibility to the
children of arrested parents, and those protocols that do exist vary
widely in their wording and their implementation. A national survey by
the American Bar Association (ABA) Center on Children and the Law found
that only one-third of patrol officers will handle a situation
differently if children are present. Of that third, only one in five
will treat a suspect differently if children are present. One in ten
will take special care to protect the children.
The result is that an event that is by its nature traumatic—the
forcible removal by armed strangers of the person to whom children
naturally look for protection—happens in ways that are virtually
guaranteed to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, that trauma.
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 re-porter 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 less-intimidating 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.
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