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.
- Around this time, the Council of State Governments also introduced the Second Chance Act recommendations that spurred federal legislation around re-entry services.[↑]
