Landmark Policy Recommendations are Unveiled: Recommendations from The National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated at Family and Corrections Network
The following recommendations, compiled and analyzed by Dee Ann
Newell and Ann Adalist-Estrin of The National Resource Center on
Children and Families of the Incarcerated at Family & Corrections
Network, are excerpts from a longer document found on the Network's
website.
Overview of Recommendations
After convening national experts, the Council of State Governments, a
non-partisan "think" tank, presented a set of recommendations on behalf
of children of the incarcerated. These recommendations were released to
the public, disseminated to congressional staffers and a representative
of Vice President Biden on October 26, 2009.[1]
Having the Council oversee the development of these recommendations and their dissemination
is a significant milestone in the movement to improve responses to
children of incarcerated parents.
The recommendations come from careful and exhaustive review of the
established barriers and sources of harm to these children. Often
barriers were created through lack of consideration of the needs of
these children, especially their need to maintain relationships with
their parents during the incarceration. The need to support the
caregivers of children whose parents are incarcerated so that they can
best care for the children has also been overlooked in policy and
practice.
Other recommendations in the CSG Report address the flaws in our
child support enforcement system while a parent is in prison, which
often leads to a parent reentering society with arrearages that are
impossible to manage. A careful examination of our child welfare system,
as it relates to children of the incarcerated in foster and kinship care
was addressed in the report. Recommendations that can be made at the
federal level were addressed, such as adjustments to the federal 1997
Adoption and Safe Families Act timeline to reduce the escalating number
of parental termination of rights of incarcerated parents brought on by
sentencing length alone.
The recommendations also include:
- Sentencing improvements;
- Locating prisons closer to where their average prisoner comes from,
and placing parents in prisons closer to their families;
- Addressing transportation needs of the families to insure
visitation, through funding and support for transportation programs;
- Improving visitation programs and visiting services that are
child-friendlier;
- Creating multiple kinds of supports for caregivers of the children,
typically kinship caregivers and foster parents, to permit greater
connection between the children and their parents;
- Instituting data collection "with a purpose," meaning not just
identifying numbers but having an established purpose for the use of the
numbers to improve access for the children and services to the families;
- Mechanisms to establish cross-system reviews of policies and
practices; and,
- Greater attention and support for research and the research
questions most urgently in need of answering.
Other recommendations focused on evaluation of programs and
practices, a clear review and revision of barriers for families and
prisoners to receiving public benefits, and arrest protocols and law
enforcement training as they impact children. There was also an emphasis
on promising practices such as mentoring, prison nurseries and enhanced
visitation programs.
Page: 1 |
2 |
3 |
4
Next page
| 
