Article notes[1]

This edition of The Scholar & Feminist Online focuses on the many thousands of American children with incarcerated parents. While individual children may have specific caretaking needs, research and therapeutic conclusions consistently hold that parent-child separation due to incarceration can have myriad negative consequences from school performance to emotional health (Bocknek, Sanderson & Britner 2009; Dallaire, 2007; Miller, 2006; Poehlmann, 2005; Vacca, 2008).

I worked for almost six years at the Women's Prison Association (WPA) in New York City. My job involved the collection of data about the clients served at WPA: who they were, what services staff members provided, and how did those services affect women's lives. In collecting this data and talking with the clients, I found that a large number of these women spoke about wanting to be with their children upon reentry into the community, and that women who had been released spoke about wanting to reunify with their children. While a substantial body of research on people leaving incarceration has focused on the effects of employment, education, and substance abuse on subsequent criminal behavior, there has been limited research on the effects of reunification with children on desistance behavior, the stopping of criminal activity. Anecdotally, of course, the women at WPA often spoke of wanting to get jobs, to further their education, to find stable housing, and to achieve sobriety. The importance of relationships with children, however, was a particularly passionate refrain.

Aside from women's individual stories, why do incarcerated and formerly incarcerated mothers matter on a national scale, if the vast majority of the people in prison are male? Although American imprisonment rates in general are leveling out, women make up an increasing percentage of our incarcerated population: the national rate of female incarceration grew by 757% between 1977 and 2004, nearly two times the 388% increase for men (Frost, 2006). In addition, women's incarceration and successful reentry matter for two main reasons: first, women in prison are far more likely than similarly situated men to have been the caretakers of children before their incarceration (Mumola, 2008). This means that the incarceration of women has more widespread effects on families and communities than the incarceration of men. Second, women's reentry is often more difficult because they enter prison facing more challenges than their male counterparts. Specifically, we know from a growing body of literature that women involved in the criminal justice system, compared to their male counterparts, generally have lower educational achievement (Greenfeld & Snell, 1999; Johnson & Waldfogel, 2002), less work experience and fewer job skills (Greenfeld & Snell, 1999; Harlow, 2003); more severe and qualitatively different substance abuse (Belknap, 2003; Johnson & Waldfogel, 2002; Mumola, 1999); more physical (Acoca, 1998; Messina & Grella, 2006), and mental health problems (James & Glaze, 2006); and more extensive histories of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, in both childhood and adulthood (Belknap, 2001; Bloom, Owen & Covington, 2004; Covington, 2002; Johnson & Waldfogel, 2002; Messina & Grella, 2006; O'Brien, 2002; Owen, 1998). Given these myriad challenges, formerly incarcerated women often find it more difficult than their male counterparts to establish themselves in the community after prison. Extensive research in the field of criminology has shown that bonds to pro-social institutions, such as schools, jobs, churches, and families, are protective against criminal behavior. Given women's weaker bonds to some of these types of institutions, their prospects for recidivism in reentry are particularly high.

Parents' experiences of reunification with children after incarceration vary quite a bit. For the most part, when men are incarcerated, children are left in the care of their mothers. The practicalities of reunification for these men are usually limited to interpersonal negotiations, although fathers no longer romantically involved with the mothers of their children often struggle with child support payments upon their release. When a mother is incarcerated, on the other hand, children are most often not in the care of their fathers. If children have nowhere to go when their mother is arrested, they might become a part of the foster care system, where they will live in a group home or in the care of non-kin families. Although the goal of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), reauthorized in 1997, was to reduce the amount of time children languished in foster care, an unfortunate loophole means that incarcerated mothers' legal rights to their children are often terminated. As a result, those children may be available for adoption by others. This happens despite the fact that visits are difficult or impossible due to incarceration, rather than the lack of care assumed by the ASFA guidelines. On the other hand, if children are in the care of a friend or family member, they may still be legally retained by an incarcerated mother, and, depending on the mother's relationship with the caretaker, the children may be returned to her at any time after incarceration, regardless of her income, housing, or health (or lack thereof).

Given the combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence pointing toward the importance of mothers' relationships with their children to desistance, I embarked on a study to further solidify this relationship. For my study, Going Straight for her Children? Women's Desistance After Incarceration (2007), I interviewed 100 formerly incarcerated mothers about how their relationships with their children kept them away from criminal behavior. 75% of the respondents had not reunified with their children, and within that group, about 60% were seeking reunification. These women spoke not only about wanting to be with their children, but also about the importance of these children to their own desistance:

Lynn[2]: I want to get [my son] back! I want to be with my kids, I love my kids. Even though I messed up, I'm still, I try to do my best for them, you know, 'cause I'm not messing up today, I'm doing much better than I was. It's just me being in the shelters, making it kind of hard, you know, 'cause I don't have nowhere else for them to go.

What follows is a discussion of the qualitative findings of this study as they relate to the role of children in mothers' desistance, and a set of policy recommendations related to the findings.

Attachment Between Mothers and Their Children

In this issue, contributors pay special attention to the love children have for the parents from whom they have been separated by prison, and also to the challenging circumstances of reentry into the community parents have after incarceration. Although my interviews were only with mothers, my findings about children's love for those mothers were consistent with the rest of the literature. Many of the respondents spoke about their children's expressions of love for them, and in particular about the unconditional nature of their children's love:

Susan: Because he's my little husband! He's like, he, it's like, if I go somewhere, right, if I'm not there to pick him up at the bus, he'll be like, 'mommy, where was you? I miss you. You wasn't there for me.' And sometimes he would, like, have the teachers call me, just to tell me he loves me, and you know, that's why he's so special to me.

Likewise, respondents' love for and pride in their children was one of the most common themes of the interviews: they glowed about their children's college educations, jobs, and marriages, as well as their grandchildren:

Kristina: I see [my daughter] every day. Every day at the school. She's in school, she's doing good, she go to church, you know, she's an A [student], you know, she's a gifted child, you know, as I said, 'cause she's very smart, she plays the organ, you know, so, my aunt and my sister and them try to keep her, you know, busy, you know, when she come home she go to the library, you see, work on computers, you know, do her homework, she's a very smart child and I love her for that.

Specifically, respondents talked about their love in the context of their reunification, or for those who had not yet reunified, they spoke of their hopes for reunification:

Patty: [Reunification] is like, I win the lotto! That's a different feeling. Because the man made me happy, but when I got, when the judge said, Miss [Patty], where the kids at? I said, they're home. He said, ok, go get them. I jumped up, because I have thyroid, I'm overweight, I was bigger than this. I couldn't move, you know, as freely as I want. But when the judge tell me that, I jumped, and put my forearm in the air, you'd think I was insane.

Other respondents spoke about their loss of parental rights. For these respondents, it was clear that the legal imposition of a termination (or imminent termination) only put their love into sharper, more painful relief:

Ada: knowing that I lost two, my other kids, it's just, you know, it was pain, and I was really killing myself little by little, allowing that pain to really put me down, down to the point that I didn't care about life. I was, I didn't care, what you do to me, it didn't bother me to hurt me, nothing, nothing. I felt that nothing or no one could make me feel pain for what I felt when I lost them.

In the initial stages, quantitative analysis, which showed that reunification with children and desistance were unrelated, seemed to be in direct contrast with the results of the qualitative findings, seemingly disproving the chief hypothesis of the study. Further analysis, however, uncovered a statistically significant positive relationship between mothers' desistance behavior and the amount of time that they spent with their children: the more time women spent with their children in an average week, the less criminal behavior they reported.

In further support of this notion of the importance of time, rather than the more specific concept of reunification, a number of themes emerged to indicate that reunification, in fact, was often avoided because of respondents' attachment to their children. In fact, almost a third of respondents said that they thought their children might be better off not living with them. For some respondents, it was a more general concern for relationship stability, as many children had been with their caretakers for many years. Respondents sometimes even thought that the relationship between the child and the caretaker was better than the relationship between the respondent and the child:

Inez: I just don't want to undo all the good my mother has done. That's the basic thing. She's raising her . . . she's a good little girl, and sometimes I sit in that shelter when all the other girls are sleeping, and cry, because I say to myself, would she have turned out to be such a good kid had I had her?

The majority of these respondents, however, reasoned that their children should stay with others because of practical concerns, such as unstable housing, disruption in schooling, or respondent's substance abuse or health problems. This often translated into a discussion of why it is important for the respondent to focus on her own needs before working towards reunification:

Margaret: At the time, I had a substance abuse issue and I was going in and out of jail, in and out of jail so I just felt that it was best they stay with my family . . .. I would like for my kids to come back and live with me, but however right now with me like going back and forth with my issues . . .. I was working, then I got another job, I got fired, but then I wound up resigning and then I'm getting used to the idea like that my kids are with my sister, so it's like—I don't know . . .. I have to wait until I successfully get into a great job and I know that it's all year round and that I'm not going to have no issues as far as them pulling me out of work, and I know I feel my kids will have safe surroundings for them so I can be able to take care of them successfully. 'Cause right now I'm struggling to take care of myself.

These concerns spanned many different areas of respondents' lives—for most women who are released into the community after incarceration, their needs are myriad, from housing and livelihood, to family reunification and complying with parole mandates. Housing was a primary concern, which was consistent with national numbers indicating that many incarcerated women (15%) nationally report homelessness in the year before their arrest (Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2000, cited Women's Prison Association, 2003). Many formerly incarcerated people rely on emergency shelters; as much as a quarter of shelter residents in New York City reported incarceration in the past two years (Metraux & Culhane, 2006). Incarceration histories create obstacles to obtaining housing, and homelessness and unstable housing situations, in turn, affect women's ability to get jobs, reunite with their families, and secure benefits. Respondents spoke about the importance of having "a place":

Frances: I still get depressed a lot, because, you know, I don't have my own place, but in time I know it's gonna come. I just have to keep doing the things that I'm doing to make myself better.

In addition to housing issues, homeless people often struggle with substance abuse, among other health-related issues (Skinner, 2005). Some of the women interviewed for this study connected their drug use with their loss of housing, while others talked about lack of income affecting their ability to pay rent:

Lisa: I lost my apartment. Yes, [my children] were going to school and I was working, but then my back went out. I have a deteriorating disc disease, and diabetic neuropathy, so I have nerve damage on my right side, so I couldn't work no more.

In order to maintain housing, one woman spoke about remaining in an undesirable romantic relationship. Another woman, living in a shelter she hated for its conditions and its reminder of past traumatic experiences, talked about her desperation to find housing as potentially leading her to future illegal behavior.

In order to reunify with children within the foster care system, parents must secure housing adequate for all anticipated residents. Some women talked about the ways in which their housing situations barred them from working towards other goals, such as reunification. Permanent housing also seemed to represent a level of independence that was desirable to some of the women interviewed:

Alice: The thought of selling drugs came to my mind because I need fast money, 'cause I want my own place, and that's, and the fast money is in drugs, and I know where to sell it at . . .. I am interested in stopping [criminal behavior], but I'm more interested in my own place, and people stop telling me about my drugs, and the shelter, and tell me where I can get an apartment at, I might come out better, because the drugs, a drug program's not going to be the move . . .. It's not what I want . . .. I look at people who got places, don't even care about it. Look at people who got apartments, and don't even want them (crying heavily), and I want one so bad, I can taste it, and I can't get one. I look around me and people got places, don't even stay there. They don't even care about it. I go, I go to Fort Greene [Brooklyn], all those empty apartments, all them crack apartments, they ain't even care, but they got apartments. (long pause). All I want is my own apartment. (long pause). That's all I want, all I want, I don't want nothing else. (long pause, breathing heavily, sniffling). I'd rather ride the train every day before I stay at the shelter, I want my own apartment.

Housing, however, was not the only practical problem facing the women as they worked to reestablish their lives after incarceration, and potentially reunify with their children. Earning enough money in an expensive city like New York was also a concern:

Karen: One, yeah, [I live in] a one bedroom [apartment], yeah, uh huh, yeah, I pay the utilities too, that's, that's what's killing me, and that's what I was talking to my, uh, worker about, because you know, when I got the apartment they told, I thought the utilities was included, you know, and then when I got there I found out I had to come up with my electricity, you know, and gas and all that stuff, it's like my, it's like, it comes to like almost $500 a month, and, and, and that takes, all, all, all, all my [disability benefit]! Because behind that I have, I have to pay, I have to get my, um, my card, MetroCard [subway fare] for the month, you know, when, when whenever I can afford it, and sometimes I can't afford to get it. I have to get my hair done, I have to get my laundry done, and I love the, you know, the toiletries and other things, you know, you know, it's not, clothes, like I don't even have enough! It's not enough at all! I tell them it's not enough, you know, you know, it's that, what, what am I to do?

Some women talked about their dissatisfaction with public assistance or disability earnings. For those without jobs, finding a job was perceived as difficult, and others spoke about jobs that do not pay a living wage, particularly for women with children to support:

Pamela: I'm finding it so hard now, man. I'm finding it very hard, and, I'm, I gotta, I'm living for living wages from New York, right? I'm running a rally for one of those things, right, so I can't take no fucking McDonald's job with four kids, is you fucking crazy?! I be working just to go to fucking work. That's, that's, that's backwards thinking. Living wages for New York right now in the year 2006 should be $15 . . . If you making that type of money, you working $15,000 twice, two different types of job to pay a $30,000 salary, and actually, you're not making the $30,000 salary, because you have to pay taxes, that you busting your ass for two different types of jobs!

Beyond the core issues of housing and employment, women also expressed frustration with re-acclimating to a public transportation system, embarrassment by one's criminal record emerging in unexpected places, such as the DMV, coping with domestic violence, and maintaining sobriety. The widespread frustration with the difficulties of successfully reestablishing oneself upon reentry indicates that reunification might often be contraindicated for women in troubled housing, economic, and interpersonal situations. Women in these difficult situations therefore might not seek to reunify because of their love for their children, but will still take time to be with them.

Of the women who reported that they do not see their children in an average week, many said that they had lost track of their children over time. Some of these women reported that they were just too emotional about having contact with children for whom they had lost custody or parental rights. Despite the fact that visits were both their only contact with their children and were also a concrete way to work towards reunification, these respondents said that the pain of contact was too much for them:

Ruth: Oh, ok, yeah, so I'm trying to find housing and, um, I'm hoping and I'm praying that, you know, that the system will release the children to me.

Interviewer: Where are they now?

Ruth: They're, well, actually, I don't know where they're at, you know, cause I had stopped the visits because it was hurting me too much, so I, I can't even go visit them, so, um . . ..

While women were not specifically asked about the ways in which child welfare (known as the Administration for Children's Services [ACS] in New York City) became involved in the lives of their children, a number of women reported that they had invited ACS or other caretakers into their lives because they realized that their substance abuse and criminal behavior were interfering with their abilities to mother.

Children and Reunification Are Difficult

Beyond the love between respondents and their children, and the other practical concerns of reentry, the women interviewed for this study also spoke about the difficulties inherent in keeping and maintaining relationships with their children. Most of the women said that one of the hardest parts of their incarceration was the fact that they had to be away from their children. Almost a quarter of the women spoke specifically about regret for what they lost due to their priorities while they were engaged in criminal activity or incarcerated:

Sandra: Yeah, because, you know, when I was away, it was like the most, I can't even describe the feeling of being away from them. And I would never want to go through it again in my life.

As they re-entered the community, some of the women were interested in making up for the lost time and the ill-effects their incarceration and street-life had upon their children. As a part of the interviews, many respondents spoke about their desire to be role models to their children, a mentality that often led to desistance, as respondents were worried that their children would mimic their "bad" behavior:

Mara: I want him to look at me as a role model, as his mother also, as a good mother, you know, not everybody can be a mother. You can be a parent, but you can't always be a mother, you know, big difference. So that's what made me really change, too. Even though I had him after I came out of jail, but it's still, it motivates me to do good and stay outside, you know, cause of my son, and because of me.

Beyond being role models, many respondents spoke about simply wanting to build relationships with their children. Some of these respondents expected to have difficulties because their relationships before incarceration were difficult or nonexistent:

Kristina: I go to see her, you know, I go to her assemblies, or whatever she has in class, you know, parenting class and whatnot there, you know, I go there with her, you know, I try to build that bond back between me and her. I know it's gonna take time, but, yeah, it's working.

Troubled relationships with their children or not, many respondents spoke about how parenting is difficult, particularly after periods of separation. Specifically, some women spoke about the ways in which reunification required one to get to know one's children again: