Article notes1
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:
Lynn2: 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.
