Albuquerque, New Mexico is a growing Southwestern city, home to a diversity of cultures in a colorful, vibrant setting. It is also home to a unique non-profit organization, developed over the last 37 years to serve at-risk children and families. While directly serving a specific community, systems and policies have emerged that have resulted in cutting-edge practices for those who frequently have no voice at policy tables.

PB&J Family Services, Inc. (affectionately known as Peanut Butter and Jelly) was founded in 1972 in Albuquerque's rural Southwest valley in response to a scarcity of services for young children. Its first target population was children of mothers being treated at the county mental health center. It then grew to inform child welfare practices more widely in the Albuquerque area.

I write this article as PB&J's co-founder and Executive Director emeritus, having served as its ED for 35 years. PB&J defines its mission to serve at-risk children to grow to their full potential within nurturing families in a supportive community. Over the years, the effort of helping our families to become more nurturing has faced significant challenges. Creating supportive communities and families has meant incorporating the spaces of prisons and jails into family and community life—an effort with countless barriers. The growth of PB&J has been, in every instance, a response to the needs of children and families that have emerged in a changing society.

Although PB&J now provides services for nearly two thousand highly challenged lives, its beginnings were rooted within a handful of mothers in the early 1970s when I was employed at the University of New Mexico's mental health center. With interest, I observed these young women coming in for treatment. They'd sit around a large table doing arts and crafts as a nurse walked around the table injecting each woman with a psychotropic medication. We used Prolixin at the time, which was thought to be an effective chemical combatant for clinical depression. After the group activities, the women were given a vial of Thorazine tablets to offset the side effects of the Prolixin, and we wouldn't see them until their scheduled treatment the following week.

I wondered, who are these women? Are they parents? Who are they going home to? Whose lives do they affect? Who affects theirs? In those days, we didn't have public transportation in Albuquerque's rural valley areas, so I began asking the women if they wanted rides home. One by one they accepted, and, as I left them at their front doors, I realized that every woman was a parent of very young children.

Having been a teacher, I decided to start a small school for these kids in order to get them out of the dark environment in which they lived, and provide some stimulation and learning. With my friend and co-worker, a child development associate named Christine Ruiz, we located donated space in a storage room, cleaned it up, received donated crayons, paper, puzzles, tables, chairs, and snacks, borrowed a bus every morning from the mental health center, and off I'd go around town picking up children to take them to their new school.

The children's response was nothing short of amazing. These quiet, withdrawn children became animated and active. They danced, sang, and played. As time passed, however, unexpected and unintended results occurred. Children began to show signs of significant physical abuse.

In the early 1970s, we didn't talk much about child abuse and there was limited research to guide practice. What was clear, however, was that these children were being hit—we saw belt marks, slap marks, and one child with cigarette burns. What had happened? We grew to understand that we had invaded family systems without their permission. We had changed the family balance without involving the parents. For a parent living in deep depression and isolation, a child jumping off the bus screaming "play with me, sing to me, come outside" was very difficult to handle. For these depressed and isolated moms it was intolerable for children to demand what they could not deliver as parents.

To this day, I feel deeply saddened that my initial decision actually hurt children, even though my intentions were in the right place. I began to understand that the family is a unique system, each with its own complex interrelationships. Two powerful guiding principles emerged that continue to serve as the core of all PB&J's programs: First, we must honor and support families; and second, children must always be viewed within their environmental contexts.

So I dried my tears, grateful for a powerful lesson learned, and I continued to drive the bus each morning, now piled with children and their parents! Together we learned. Slowly the parents gained the critical knowledge that they are the most important people in their children's lives.

That was the beginning. About six months went by, and it became apparent that we were a place without a proper name. One day as I was serving lunch one of the children asked, "What's the name of this place anyway?" I thought a moment then answered, "I don't know—what do you want to name it?" The child answered, "Peanut butter and jelly, because that's all you ever feed us!" The name has "stuck" for nearly four decades.

With the birth of Peanut Butter and Jelly, Albuquerque had its first child abuse prevention and treatment program for children and parents. These families learned together how to establish safe and nurturing homes wrapped in love for one another—the essence of family systems theory. But the need for family services to support the nurturing of families in a supportive community was not confined to the families we were serving through Peanut Butter and Jelly.

In the 1980s, New Mexico closed institutions for the developmentally disabled. The state seemed unaware that people with developmental disabilities had wants and needs that would extend into parenthood and family life. Nor did they believe them capable of responsible parenting. Hence state practice was to remove children from mothers with developmental disabilities at birth. Outraged by the state's response, PB&J worked with hospitals, child protective services, courts, and shelters to develop a novel and innovative program to stimulate appropriate development for these at-risk children and to keep these unique families together.

By the 1990s our country was immersed in the war on drugs. Instead of treating drug abuse as a public health issue, it was criminalized. Many states began the practice of arresting pregnant, drug-using women and detaining them in jail until after the birth of their babies. PB&J pushed back, going to the District Attorney to make sure New Mexico wouldn't adopt that practice. We formed a strong collaboration to begin a specialized clinic at the University of New Mexico, offering prenatal care for drug-using pregnant women, and home visitation and family residential treatment upon the birth of a drug-affected baby. Those programs have grown and continue today. PB&J has developed a large home-based program, with many referrals coming from hospitals.

This clinic was a beacon of light, but the drug war continued and grew stronger. With mandatory sentencing came a huge increase in prison population, with inadequate or unavailable drug treatment in communities. Too often children were left without parents. Although drug abuse, without intervention, destroys families and takes lives, parental incarceration hurts children in insidious and far-reaching ways.

Through parental incarceration, PB&J learned another painful lesson. A beautiful young mother graduated with her two little girls from PB&J's therapeutic pre-school. She was off welfare and off drugs, raising her daughters and facing an optimistic future when her husband was released from prison. His first night out, her husband wanted to party. Stating she had work in the morning, the young mom resisted. Frustrated and angry, he left home to party and drink. When he returned, he drunkenly demanded his "old wife" back, the one who partied and was dependent on him. He woke her, and when she again refused him, he went after the kids—a common occurrence in domestic violence. She used all her strength to stop him, threatening to call the police. Again he left. Terrified, she put her children to bed and went to sleep, but her husband came home, this time drunker and with a gun. Joe killed his wife that night and ran, tragically leaving two children without parents.

Again PB&J was devastated, and again it became clear that invading a family system had consequences. We had never addressed the issue of a parent in prison. And so, into unknown territory I went—this time to prison. I soon walked into the warden's office and asked him for permission to initiate a parenting program. "Parenting program?," he said, incredulously, "These guys don't even know who their children are!" I was astounded, but I insisted that he had nothing to lose. I explained that we were there as volunteers, and our intention was to prevent harm to children threatened by the release of a parent who might feel disenfranchised, disengaged, and isolated. In 1980, New Mexico had a horrifying prison riot resulting in unspeakable carnage, and the corrections department was under court order to improve conditions in prisons. Family connection was something prisons were required to foster. The warden realized that letting us come in would help fulfill that requirement. He agreed to let us start the program. "Okay," he said, "You can start. Bring no weapons, bring no drugs, and don't make trouble."

And so we established Project ImPACT (Importance of Parents and Children Together), a parenting education and family reunification program designed to teach parents and support them in their parenting role from prison.

Today, the Child Welfare League of America estimates that one in forty children is a child of an incarcerated parent. Many suffer terribly in their parents' absence. The U.S., with 5% of the world's population, holds 25% incarcerated people.[1] We are by far the world's most aggressive jailer and an estimated two-thirds of those in prisons and jails are parents.[2] Yet our systems give little or no thought to these children and how they are affected.

Jails are a thriving industry. Each day in the United States, hundreds of people will be arrested. Parents will be handcuffed, some in front of their children, and taken away. They will be questioned, searched, questioned again, but it is unlikely that questions will be asked like, "Who is expecting you home tonight?," and, "How can we help?"

In New Mexico, that is changing. Through executive order, Governor Bill Richardson established the Blue Ribbon Commission on the Welfare of Arrested and Incarcerated Parents. Child-sensitive arrest practices, including identifying children upon parental arrest, are now law. The current focus of the Commission is to establish safety for children of arrested parents. These children are often abandoned, frightened, worried and unsure of their parents' whereabouts. In New Mexico, we continue our work to create child-sensitive jail visitation practices, and to link children and caregivers to systems of support already established throughout our state. Yet so much remains to be done.

Another major cause of children's instability is the huge population growth of women in prison, most of them mothers. Nationally, the number of women serving sentences of more than a year grew by 757% between 1977 and 2004. The vast majority are non-violent drug offenders. In New Mexico, 94% of women in prison are mothers, and a staggering 88% are single mothers of dependent children.

A destabilizing factor for families with incarcerated parents is a federal law that was passed in 1997, the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). This act mandates the termination of parental rights for children who remain in foster care for fifteen of any twenty-two-month period. Most incarcerated mothers serve prison sentences significantly longer than fifteen months. Realizing this, many mothers going to jail do not identify their minor children, fearing that foster care placements will result in the termination of their parental rights. Consequently, for parents without sufficient family support, their children may be left without planned supervision, left to fend for themselves or in the care of older (but still minor) siblings. The following is a poem written by a mother in prison to her child upon the termination of her parental rights:

It is a penalty worse than death
Imposed Lightly, In Stages, like the sanctions of the secutar
But with the same intent
To remove the bad from the part worth saving
It is true there was a time we went our separate ways
You seeking warmth and nurturance
While I sought their bitter substitutes
But long before that we grew together
Our veins intertwined
Now it is written in law that we will grow separately
Together, yet forever apart
I want you to know I wanted you
I want you to know I tried
But I could not hold on

—Maria de Los Angeles

I firmly believe that policy development and advocacy is necessary in serving children and families. Through our efforts, New Mexico has incorporated language into its children's code making parental incarceration a compelling reason to extend the AFSA timeline if it is in a child's best interest. We've also placed into statute that parental incarceration alone cannot justify the termination of parental rights.

To keep families connected and to promote stability, PB&J's Project ImPACT staff, in addition to providing parenting education and reunification services in prisons, bring children to visit with their incarcerated parents, provide therapeutic community support for children, and follow families after a parent's release from prison.

We have also developed bonding and attachment centers for juvenile parents in confinement, often staying with young moms after birth and assisting with family placements. We provide bonding and attachment services for fathers in the adult and juvenile correctional systems as well. PB&J brings their children into prisons and nurtures these vulnerable families. We've worked to get funds legislatively appropriated into department budgets for transportation costs so that families can be reimbursed for their travel.

At the women's prison, PB&J has developed overnight visitation programs. With strong support of the legislature and the Governor, a home-like environment has been built on the prison grounds. PB&J brings children to be with their mothers, who cook for them, care for them, and quiet their nightmares. PB&J always stays connected to the children after the visit, supporting them as they struggle in their own complex lives as they "do time on the outside." This connection continues after the mother's release.

PB&J has taken a further step by identifying children in the public schools who have an incarcerated parent and offering support to them. These are children who often experience shame and guilt, anger and isolation. They are suffering but invisible, and at risk of school failure, delinquency, and involvement in gangs. Children left without stable and nurturing support systems often look for family in all the wrong places. PB&J offers socialization, connection, understanding, and treatment. It is often a lifeline to these children.

My dream was to take this even further by using video technology in the schools and prison system to easily connect children to their parents, and the parents to the schools. The vision was for parents to participate in parent-teacher conferences, for children to do homework with their parents, and for parents to support their children's achievements in school. We initiated a pilot project, working with the corrections department to build the technological "firewalls" so that their data system would not be contaminated. Although the program is only operational in one school and two prisons, the technology has been developed to expand throughout the state. I hope to see a day when the breakdown of attitudinal barriers restricting children's access to their incarcerated parents outpaces technology, and programs like this flourish.

Children of incarcerated parents are remarkable young people. I've found them to be extraordinarily talented and independent. PB&J has supported them to participate in public speaking engagements at conferences, in prisons, and in other venues. A group of children of incarcerated parents recently created a panel at the University of New Mexico law school to raise public awareness. They performed a touching rap song they wrote and recorded, portraying their lives while their parents are incarcerated. In the audience were a compassionate community of lawmakers, law students, teachers, parents recently released from the prison system, and other members of the public. New Mexico's public broadcasting system partnered with some of PB&J's enrolled children of incarcerated parents to produce a documentary entitled Invisible Children which originally aired in November 2009, and is now offered for national distribution.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that our collective life purpose is shared. We're here to love one another, and we're here to leave this world better than we found it. I believe that we do that through children—those we birth, those we love, those we know, and those we don't. And our practices must follow our beliefs.

I am now retired as PB&J's Executive Director, but I continue to use my experiences with clients to promote family-focused policies in New Mexico. Our recent advocacy has resulted in the passage of a new statute, implemented in July 2009, prohibiting the shackling of women in childbirth or post-partum care. And we have formed a new legislatively mandated task force to develop protocols for pregnant substance-using women to have access to prenatal care and substance abuse treatment, without fear of prosecution. Our most recent accomplishment was winning the Governor's approval for a pilot project for women, releasing them early so they can resume their parenting role and reenter their communities.

I beam as I reflect on the growth of PB&J Family Services from a volunteer service in a storage room to a multi-site, multi-county, innovative, exciting, vital, interactive family program that literally saves lives, and gives hope and voice to thousands.

But looking back over the past nearly four decades, I realize that my work has not been work at all. It has been my life's purpose. It's been a heart journey, and it was never about me. The journey has been about the thousands of families who PB&J has served. They're the ones who really have done the hard work—changing their lives not for themselves, but to give their children a fighting chance.

Endnotes

1. "US has the most prisoners in the world" by James Vicini, Saturday, Dec 9, 2006. Reuters. www.commondreams.org. [Return to text]

2. US Department of Justice press release, August 26, 2008: www.ojp.usdoj.gov. [Return to text]