In one jurisdiction, police supervisors described the following protocol for handling the child of an arrestee when no relative is available to pick him up: first, officers take the child to the hospital for a physical examination. Next, they transport him to the local juvenile detention center to “fill out the necessary forms.” Finally, they deposit him at a foster home.
This jurisdiction was presented as a model by the researchers who visited it. Both police and child welfare workers reported that their protocol was working efficiently and congratulated themselves and each other for their smooth collaboration. But try for a moment to imagine this circuit as a child might experience it (an exercise that is necessary because the researchers did not speak with any actual children). An armed and uniformed stranger handcuffs and takes away your parent, then places you in a police car, where you are separated from your rescuer by a metal grid. From where you sit, you can hear the crackle of the dispatcher on the radio reporting crimes and crises elsewhere in town. You are driven to the hospital, where you are required to take off your clothes and be scrutinized and prodded by another stranger. Then you are taken to a jail—just as your parent has been—where you sit in silence as the adults around you process the paperwork that will determine your immediate future. Finally, you are deposited at the home of yet another stranger, where you are given someone else’s pajamas and sent off to sleep in an unfamiliar bed.
It is quite likely that the various adults this child will encounter along his route will make an effort to treat him kindly. The problem is not the callousness of individuals but the mechanical indifference of multiple bureaucracies, each of which functions according to its own imperatives. These bureaucratic exigencies—rather than children’s experience—become the lens through which policies and protocols are drawn up and assessed. The system is viewed as “working” when it works for the institutions that comprise it—in itself, a legitimate end. But when children’s experience is not also given priority, the effect is to leave children feeling afraid, alone, and unseen.
“I just wish the police would have talked to me like I was a part of it,” said Christopher, who was whisked off to a foster home in the wake of his mother’s arrest—”which I was. But they acted like I wasn’t.”
The trauma children experience when a parent is arrested may set the tone for their subsequent relationship with the criminal justice system. A natural desire to protect oneself and defend one’s family evolves into a hatred of police, and authority generally—a rage that can make it difficult for a child to grow up to respect the law or trust its representatives.
“Adult lives are shaped by childhood experience,” observed San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessy, who said children sometimes call his jail looking for their missing parents in the wake of an arrest. “If children are abused by the criminal justice system, they will have hostility towards law enforcement as adults. If they are treated fairly, and see government as a place to receive assistance as opposed to something that takes away rights, they will be more likely to reach out to and respect government as adults.”
Ana, fifteen, has been watching her mother get arrested for years, for crimes such as forgery and drug possession. Once, she saw an officer snatch the cigarette from her mother’s mouth and throw it to the ground. Another time, she heard her mother crying that the handcuffs were too tight and were hurting her. “I don’t care,” the officer answered.
Ana’s brother, now five, witnessed these gratuitous cruelties throughout his early childhood. “When he sees the cops now, he’ll run, because he’s scared of them,” Ana said. “He’s all, ‘They took my mommy and they hurt her.'”
Seeing one’s parent helpless and restrained at an age when one still wants and needs to see her as omnipotent can be deeply disorienting. Lorraine watched police search her house and arrest her mother for drug offenses throughout her childhood. What left her most embittered, Lorraine said, was the fact that she rarely received an acknowledgment of her presence, much less an explanation.
“I was left thinking, ‘What could my mother possibly have done that they can come in my home and invade my privacy?'” Lorraine said. “I’d watch them handcuff my mother and take her to jail, thinking, ‘Don’t they know that she is beautiful in my eyes, and that I could help her get better? That she has a child at home who yearns for her presence?’ I remember crying to the police, ‘Please don’t take my mother away from me.’ Yet time after time, I would watch them handcuff my mother, place her in the police car, and drive away, leaving me to wonder, ‘Will I see her again?’ I began to hate the police.”
Children who do not manage to hate the authorities are likely to blame themselves. Jennifer was twelve years old when she returned home from science camp one afternoon to find police in her home. They arrested her mother and took Jennifer to a shelter. She felt, she said, “that my life was over. That I would never see my family again. I thought I had done something wrong, because I had to go away, too. But my family says I didn’t.”
Jennifer was twenty-seven years old when she told this story. She still didn’t sound convinced.
A parent’s arrest is the moment when a child’s invisibility is made visible; when it is communicated to him most explicitly how little he will matter within the systems and institutions that lay claim to his family.
With appalling regularity, young people describe being left to fend for themselves in empty apartments for weeks or even months in the wake of a parent’s arrest. In most cases, these children were not present when the parent was arrested; they simply came home from school to find their parent gone and were left to draw their own conclusions—not to mention cook their own dinner. But some told of watching police handcuff and remove a parent—the only adult in the house—and simply leave them behind. These stories bring home like no others the degree to which children are simply not seen, much less considered, within the criminal justice system.
The first time I heard such a story was from Ricky, then sixteen. 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.
I spoke with Ricky again a few years after our first meeting. He was nineteen, and doing well. He had been lucky in foster care; he had landed with a loving caregiver who had made a stable home for him. As a teenager, he had been contacted by his brother’s adoptive parents and had been able to forge a new relationship with him. Now he was attending a suburban junior college, where he had been recruited for his football talents.
As we walked around campus, Ricky seemed calmer than when I had met him three years earlier, confident and happy in his new role as college athlete. It was late summer, and he was registering for classes and getting ready for the upcoming season.
We talked again about the events of his childhood. He offered some new details, but the story he told was identical in its outline to the one he had told me years earlier. I was less surprised now by what I was hearing, but no less confused.
The problem with Ricky’s account is that it makes no sense. Why was his mother arrested? Why didn’t she call from jail, or make some arrangement for her children’s care? Why were they never reunited with her, or even permitted a visit? Why was he separated from his brother? Why did his mother not return for him as she had promised? Why on earth were two small children left alone in an empty apartment?
I pressed Ricky on these questions until he grew frustrated. He did not know, because no one had ever told him. The police were in a hurry, and so were the social workers. “All I know is that they just rushed me in the system and that was that. They didn’t tell me why I can’t go back with my mom.”
The confusion I felt trying to sort out Ricky’s history, with its gaping holes and incomprehensible events, simply reflected his own. Major pieces of his autobiography&mash;that part of it which unfolded in the days and years after his mother’s arrest&mash;were not, and likely never would be, available to him.
When I first met Ricky, I was sure his story was exceptional. But the more I spoke with young people about their parents’ arrest and incarceration, the less so it appeared.
