Debt To Society: The Real Price Of Prisons, Part 5 of 8

LEFT BEHIND

Tens Of Thousands Of Children Have A Parent Behind Bars. What Are The
Social Costs Of Their Loss?

On a balmy California afternoon in May of 2000, when most kids his age were
celebrating the end of the school year, Louis Vasquez sat in the
air-conditioned depths of the San Jose juvenile hall. He'd been behind bars
since the summer before, ostensibly because he was involved in a fight. But
the truth is a little more complicated. Louis, then 17, was locked up not
just because of his own transgressions but also because his mother, Diane,
is an ex-offender. Her incarceration cost her custody of Louis and his
younger brother, Joey; left without his mother, Louis soon wound up in a
cell himself.

Across the country, an estimated 1.5 million children have a parent behind
bars -- an increase of more than half a million since 1991, according to
the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. No one knows the exact number,
because in virtually every jurisdiction nationwide, no official body -- not
police, courts, or prisons -- is responsible for even asking if prisoners
have children.

Researchers believe that over 10 million kids have experienced the
incarceration of a parent at some point in their lives. Many, like Louis
Vasquez, continue to feel the repercussions of that loss. Made virtual
orphans by the drug war and other "tough on crime" measures that have sent
the prison population skyrocketing to a record 2 million, many children of
prisoners grow up in foster care, with grandparents or other relatives, or
bouncing among an array of temporary caretakers. According to studies by
the Los Angeles-based Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents, a
research and service organization, as many as 90 percent of children in
long-term foster care have a parent who has been arrested or incarcerated.

The result is what Ida McCray -- a former inmate who runs the San
Francisco-based prisoner support organization Families With a Future --
calls "the largest separation of families since slavery." Minority children
are hit particularly hard: Nearly half the parents behind bars are black;
another 20 percent are Hispanic.

Imprisoning a low-level offender like Diane Vasquez, whose rap sheet
consists mainly of drug offenses, costs the state about $2,100 a month. But
that's only page one of the bill. Warehousing her kids is where it really
gets expensive. Keeping a teenage boy like Louis in juvenile hall costs
about $5,000 a month, and keeping a youngster like Joey in a children's
shelter runs another $5,000 per month.

The social cost of jailing small-time criminals like Vasquez, and of
relegating their children to the juvenile justice and social welfare
bureaucracies, goes well beyond dollars. The children of prisoners are "at
risk" for just about everything a child can be at risk for: truancy, teen
pregnancy, drug use, gang involvement, crime. According to Denise Johnston,
head of the Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents, up to half of all
male children of prisoners will go on to commit crimes themselves,
perpetuating a cycle that will feed the prison boom for generations to come.

Certainly, some kids face grave risks in the hands of drug-addicted or
crime-prone parents. But even for them, the loss of a parent is often
deeply damaging. Researchers who have interviewed offenders' children have
found them likely to experience depression, anger, shame, and self-loathing
in the wake of a parent's incarceration. Ellen Barry, founding director of
San Francisco-based Legal Services for Prisoners With Children, notes that
many young children experience a parent's arrest as simple abandonment.

Cristina Jose-Kampfner studied the children of incarcerated parents while a
graduate student at the University of Michigan in 1985 and found that many
showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress reaction. Seventy-five percent of
the 5- to 16-year-olds she surveyed reported symptoms such as depression,
difficulty sleeping or concentrating, or flashbacks to their parent's
crimes or arrests. Johnston says she has seen children stop eating, or even
become mute, upon losing a parent to prison.

In a review of the research on the impact of parental incarceration,
Johnston discovered a devastating range of repercussions. Young children
whose relationship with a parent was disrupted by that parent's
imprisonment, she found, often experience "survivor guilt" and feel as if
they are to blame for the parent's disappearance. Older children may
express their grief through aggressive behavior, leading to disciplinary
problems at school. When they hit adolescence, their anger may lead them
into delinquency.

According to a recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 67
percent of the parents in federal prison are drug offenders whose sentences
average more than 10 years. For children of nonviolent drug offenders in
particular, the experience can be morally as well as emotionally corrosive:
They may lose respect for a legal system that, in their eyes, has shown
their parents so little in the way of justice.

"I learned that people really don't care who you are and what you did,"
says Phillip Gaines, 16, whose mother was sentenced to 19 years in a
Florida federal penitentiary on drug conspiracy charges. The primary
evidence against her was the testimony of admitted drug dealers who cut a
deal with authorities. "At the time it made me feel like right was just
wrong," says Gaines.

Diane Vasquez was in and out of jail when her children were small. Then, in
1995, she was arrested again and convicted of drug possession. A
10-year-old burglary conviction qualified this as a second strike under
California's "Three Strikes and You're Out" law, and Vasquez wound up
spending the next 32 months in prison. Like most women prisoners -- many of
whom are incarcerated in remote facilities hours from their children's
homes and have no one willing or able to bring the children to visit --
Vasquez did not see her children once during that time.

After her release from prison, Vasquez got an electronics manufacturing job
but soon lost it after she took too many afternoons off to see her "doctor"
- -- actually her parole officer, something she didn't want her boss to know
about. She moved on to a warehouse job at Cisco Systems but was recently
laid off. A federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families grant -- a
standard assist to unemployed women with children -- would allow Vasquez to
care for her kids at a cost to taxpayers of just $520 a month. But under
California's rules for administering TANF grants, as a convicted drug
offender Vasquez is ineligible for cash assistance. With no income and no
permanent address, her prospects of getting her boys back are dim.

So on that early May afternoon, Joey remained in the children's shelter and
Louis sat in juvenile hall. Louis was visibly depressed -- he had tried to
slit his wrists with a jagged piece of plastic -- and his aspirations were
profoundly limited. He was going to school inside juvenile hall but didn't
expect to earn a high school diploma. "I'm not working towards that," he
explained flatly. He aimed to get "whatever" kind of job once released. A
year later, Louis, now 18, is still in the custody of juvenile authorities.

The net result, then, of imprisoning Diane Vasquez hardly seems like an
outcome anyone involved would have hoped for: one scattered family, at
least one boy likely headed for his own troubles with the law, and a huge
bill to taxpayers.

There are, however, other ways the state could have dealt with Vasquez's
crimes -- alternative responses that might well have worked out better for
her family and the taxpayers. For evidence, look no further than Daisy
Fitzgibbon. If any drug-addicted parent ever looked irredeemable, it was
Fitzgibbon. She started smoking pot at age nine and moved on from there to
crack and crystal meth. She didn't stop using when she became pregnant with
her first child, a girl she named Michelle. Soon after she delivered,
social workers visited her at the hospital and told her Michelle had tested
positive for drugs. Michelle was taken away from her for good.

Losing her daughter sent Fitzgibbon into a tailspin. "I gave up on myself,"
she says. "I felt like I didn't have a chance in the world fighting against
the system, because they were right no matter what." When her probation
officer told her one more dirty urine test would land her back in jail,
Fitzgibbon left her home in Hawaii and took off to San Francisco. There,
she quickly acquired a job as a prostitute, a heroin habit, and a lengthy
rap sheet.

Fitzgibbon was last arrested in February of 1999 for drug possession; but
instead of prison, she landed in the San Francisco County Jail, where she
was accepted for the SISTER (Sisters in Sober Treatment, Empowered in
Recovery) Project, a drug-treatment and counseling program serving 60
women. From SISTER, Fitzgibbon went to an inpatient rehab program. She
became pregnant again while there. Fitzgibbon trembled when a social worker
showed up at her hospital bed after she delivered, but the tests came back
clean -- she hadn't so much as smoked a cigarette during her pregnancy this
time around.

Next, Fitzgibbon went to Cameo House, a transitional program for female
ex-offenders trying to reunite, or stay united, with their children. At
Cameo House, Fitzgibbon had a roof over head and support in her efforts to
find work and permanent housing for herself and her new baby, Kayla. After
successfully completing the program there, she's now living on her own with
Kayla and has a job in a grocery store.

Treatment behind bars, more inpatient treatment post-release, then a
transitional program -- that's a lot of resources poured into one addict.
The total bill comes to somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 over the last
two years. But it will be a bargain if it helps Fitzgibbon stay clean. That
would mean no more pricey jail time for her, and no expensive foster care
for her daughter. It also means Kayla will have her mother, an asset the
value of which is hard to overestimate.

If this still seems expensive, consider the overall cost of not treating
drug addiction. According to a three-year study by the National Center on
Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, states spent $81.3
billion dealing with drug abuse in 1998 alone. But of each dollar spent,
only four cents went to prevention and treatment. This imbalance had a
particularly powerful impact on the young -- the states spent $5.3 billion
addressing cases of child abuse and neglect, 69 percent of which could be
traced to parental drug or alcohol abuse.

Johnston, of the Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents, recognizes
that the public has little compassion for offenders, or even for their
children. "One of the basic motivations of this society is retribution,"
she says. "We need to make ourselves feel better by hurting people who have
done something wrong." But in the long run, she points out, the urge for
retribution "ends up costing us."

The heaviest cost is being carried by the generation of children growing up
in the shadow of the prison. "I am just ten year old," Phillip Gaines wrote
in a 1995 letter begging President Clinton to free his mother. "I need my
mom very much. Please get her out I need her."

Clinton apparently had second thoughts about how the war on drugs is
hurting children like Phillip. On his last day in office, in an
extraordinary gesture to ordinary prisoners, Clinton pardoned Phillip's
mother and several other low-level drug offenders. The Gaines family is now
reunited. Many thousands of others, however, are not so lucky - and the
public continues to foot the bill.

Next Article: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1269/a01.html