Punishment for the Whole Family

By Nell Bernstein, Salon. Posted May 8, 2002.

Marie (not her real name) remembers the look on her 2-year-old daughter's face as the child pressed herself against the inch-thick window that separated the two. The toddler pounded on the glass partition with tiny fists, calling out and crying. "Come on, Mom! Come out of there!"

Marie could only watch and reach out in a futile response. A prisoner in county jail, she was forbidden to have contact with her child. It was another four months before finally, upon her release, Marie was able to touch her daughter.

"It was awful," she says. "I've always had her with me, ever since she was born, and then all of a sudden she was snatched away from me. I know I felt bad, so she must have felt even worse, because she didn't understand. She must have thought I didn't want her anymore."

If sweeping changes in prison visitation rules proposed by the California Department of Corrections (CDC) become law, Marie's experience is likely to be repeated in state prisons across the state, where prisoners with drug-related convictions will be barred for the first year of their terms from contact visits with anyone, including their children. Often a rule of incarceration in county jails, a ban on contact visits in state prisons, where inmates serve much longer sentences, is rare. And, according to research, it is potentially harmful to inmates and their children.

Decades of research, including at least one study commissioned by the CDC, have concluded that prison inmates do better when they get visits with the ones they love. In terms of both rehabilitation and development, incarcerated parents and their children benefit from time together: The adults are less likely to return to prison; the children do better with emotional adjustment, behavior, even with I.Q. scores.

And the younger the child, the more crucial the contact. "Touch is basic to the nurturing process," says Dr. Barbara Howard, associate professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and co-director of the Center for Promotion of Child Development Through Primary Care, in Annapolis, Md. "A baby looking through a plate of glass at his incarcerated mother would really be looking at his reflection in the window, not making a connection with the parent at all."

But a baby looking at himself in a glass partition cannot smuggle drugs to his parents, say California prison officials, who maintain that visitation is a point of transfer for drugs from outside. Under this rationale bonding, regardless of its therapeutic qualities, is an indulgence that prisons can ill afford. In fact, additional changes proposed by the CDC include a rule that would limit kisses between inmates and visitors to five seconds or less, and another that would prohibit fathers in prison from holding children older than 7 on their lap at any time, a step that officials say is aimed at preventing potential molestation.

The new revisions explicitly define visitation as a privilege, not a right, a change that some inmate relatives and advocates claim is meant to unfairly punish inmates rather than strike a blow against drug smuggling. In the process, they say, children may suffer the most.

"It's beyond insulting," said Chris Jackson at a March hearing on the proposed changes. She testified that her husband is serving a life sentence at Folsom State Prison on a third-strike burglary conviction. "It's inhumane. It just punishes the families."

Adds Donna Wilmott, family advocacy coordinator at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children in San Francisco and herself a former prisoner: "These new regulations criminalize family members, saying that if you care about somebody in prison, you're suspect. Communication and association are human rights, not privileges.

"The right to a mother's touch," she adds, "is beyond fundamental -- it's primal."

Even President George W. Bush stood up recently for the rights of the children of prisoners, rallying his "armies of compassion" to "help to heal broken families once prisoners are released," and mentor a group he called, in an address to the NAACP, "the forgotten children [who] should not be punished for the sins of their fathers." His 2003 budget, he told the audience, includes $25 million for the Mentoring Children of Prisoners Initiative.

The California crackdown on contact visits comes at a time when state prisoners are being held mainly in remote rural areas, and visitation already has dropped off dramatically nationwide due to the inability of inmate relatives to get to their loved ones behind bars. According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, 60 percent of parents in state prison nationwide report being held over 100 miles from home.

In 1978, according to a study by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, only 8 percent of women prisoners had not received a visit from their children. By 1999, when the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducted its own major survey, 54 percent of mothers in state prisons -- nearly all of which allow contact visits, reported never having had a visit from their children. About 200,000 children currently have a parent in a California state prison. It is difficult to determine how old these children are and where they are living; police, courts and prisons are not required to ask those they arrest, sentence and detain about the status of their children. But nationwide, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 58 percent of the 1.5 million children of incarcerated parents are younger than 10 years old. A survey of visitors to three California state facilities found that 55 percent of visiting children were 6 or younger, and 34 percent were 3 or younger.

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