AS INMATE POPULATION GROWS, SO DOES A FOCUS ON CHILDREN

OSINING, N.Y. - Baba Eng had been a prisoner at Sing Sing for 22
years, serving a life sentence for murder, when a new inmate walked
into the shower room one day and stared at his face.

"Dad," the stranger finally exclaimed.

The man was his son, whom Eng had not seen since his arrest, and who
now was in prison himself for armed robbery. "It was the worst moment
of my life," Eng recalled. "Here was my son; he had tried to imitate
my life."

Eng's experience reflects a side of the nation's prison-building boom
that is only now gaining attention: there are 7 million children with
a parent in jail or prison or recently released on probation or
parole. Those numbers alarm experts who say that having a parent
behind bars is the single largest factor in the making of juvenile
delinquents and adult criminals.

Although most jails and prisons do not even ask new inmates if they
have children, a few are taking steps to counter the effect of
parental incarceration, as experts have begun to realize the
seriousness of the problem. Some prisons have created special visiting
areas for children; some offer parenting classes for inmates.

But the experts also warn that the nation's emphasis on imprisonment
to fight crime may be helping to create the next generation of criminals.

"There is no free lunch in this business," said Lawrence Sherman, dean
of the University of Maryland's school of criminology and criminal
justice. "If you increase the number of people arrested and sent to
prison, you may actually be creating another problem. There is a
multiplier effect."

Some 1.96 million children have a parent or other close relative in
jail or prison on any given day, according to the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, a branch of the Justice Department, and 5 million more
have parents who have been incarcerated and are on probation or parole.

The link between the generations is so strong that half of all
juveniles in custody have a father, mother or other close relative who
has been in jail or prison, said Allen J. Beck of the Bureau of
Justice Statistics. About 40 percent of the 1.8 million adults in jail
and prison have a parent, brother or sister behind bars, he said.

There are several reasons why children with a parent in prison are
more likely to get in trouble, experts say. Most of these children
grow up in families troubled by poverty, abuse, neglect and drug use.
And separation from a parent -- for any reason -- is a well-documented
problem for children.

But incarceration adds a special hazard. Children who see a parent
arrested and handcuffed, and who are frisked by guards during a prison
visit, become contemptuous toward law enforcement. More troublesome,
many children with a father behind bars make a hero of him.

"When children are not in contact with their parents, it is a breeding
ground for idealization, and when the parent is a big-time criminal,
they can turn them into legends," said Jaime Inclan, a clinical
psychologist who is director of the Roberto Clemente Center, a mental
health center serving poor families on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Despite the dimensions of the problem, little attention is paid
because the criminal-justice system is set up to deal with offenders,
not their children.

In most cities, when the police make an arrest, when a judge passes
sentence, or when an inmate enters jail and prison, no one asks if the
offender has children -- or if they happen to ask, does anything with
the information. And inmates are often evasive about their children,
out of shame or fear of losing custody or government benefits.

There is so little research on the subject that there is no agreement
even on the seemingly simple issue of whether it is good for children
to visit their father or mother behind bars.

Juliana Perez, a social worker who directs a parenting program in the
county jail in San Antonio, says contact between incarcerated parents
and their children is essential. In addition to helping the children,
she said, "If the system doesn't allow bonding, we destroy whatever
chance we have of changing the offenders' behavior."

But Judge Kathleen Richie of the Juvenile Court in Baton Rouge, La.,
disagrees. "The more these kids are exposed to prison by visiting, the
more they get used to it, and prison loses its stigma," she said.

Judge Richie recently had a case in which a social worker was taking
four children to prison to visit their mother, who had been convicted
of selling crack cocaine and was awaiting trial on charges of
neglecting the children. The judge ordered that the visits take place
in her chambers, with the mother in civilian clothes, so the children
would not become accustomed to prison.

The mother was puzzled why prison visits were a problem. She had taken
her children to visit her friends and relatives in prison for years
before her own arrest. Three of the four children have since been
arrested and sent to juvenile prisons.

"Sadly, these kids have fond memories, and their only memories, of
their mom behind bars," Judge Richie said. "If you have parents in
jail, then it is part of your life, and there is nothing offensive
about it."

THE FATHERS

Staying in Touch With Some Help

(Picture: The Children's Center of the visiting room at Sing Sing is a small
glass-enclosed space with shelves of children's books, boxes of building
blocks and toy cars, a crib full of stuffed animals, and a computer.)

It may not look much different than a day care center. But in one of
the nation's oldest and most forbidding prisons, it is a revolution,
an attempt to create a haven where convicts can meet quietly with
their children in an effort to preserve, or rebuild, the family bonds
that prison often breaks.

One day Hector Millan, a 38-year-old from Spanish Harlem serving a
20-year to life sentence for murder, was seated at a low table with
his young grandson, Hector III. His wife, Maritza, stood nearby.
Millan has three sons and two daughters, and is one of the lucky
inmates who is still married and visited by his family.

Nationwide, less than a quarter of male inmates are married, and fewer
than a third are visited by their families. But two-thirds of them
have children.

"Prison destroys families," Millan said matter of factly. "I can't
tuck my children in bed at night. I can't be there to comfort them
when they scrape their knees. I can't help them when they have
problems at school. The damage done is irreparable."

Millan is enrolled in an unusual 16-week program at Sing Sing that
tries to teach convicts how to overcome the obstacles to parenting
behind bars. The program is part classroom reading -- with selections
from the great child psychologists Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson and Bruno
Bettelheim -- and part family therapy with counselors to help bridge
the gaps during visits or in writing letters home.

The program, and the special section of the visiting room, are the
brainchild of Elizabeth Gaynes, executive director of the Osborne
Association, a group based in New York that sponsors programs to aid
prisoners and their families.

"We tell them prison walls certainly make it harder, but you can still
be a parent," Ms. Gaynes said. "We say prison can be an excuse for not
taking your children to the library, but it is not an excuse for not
teaching your children the value of reading."

Among the lessons the program tries to impart, she said, are that
prisoners should stay in touch with their children, that they should
not make false promises about when they will be released, and that
they should acknowledge the pain they have caused their children, who
are also victims of their crimes.

The good news for the inmates, Ms. Gaynes said, is that while society
"will forever remember them for what they did on the worst day of
their life, their children will not judge them for just this."

In the past few years, as the number of inmates has exploded, a
handful of other programs have been started to help incarcerated
parents, but most have been for mothers.

Ms. Gaynes acknowledges that the impact on a child may be greater when
the mother is locked up, because the mother is often a single parent
and the child may be sent to a grandmother or foster home. But in
sheer numbers, fathers pose a more serious problem. Because most
inmates are men, in 93 percent of the cases in which a parent is
behind bars, that parent is the father, the Justice Department said.

"People forget most of these men are someday going to be released,"
said Creasie Finney Hairston, dean of the Jane Addams College of
Social Work at the University of Illinois in Chicago. "There is a
growing body of research that shows maintaining family ties while in
prison leads to lower rates of re-arrest for the fathers and makes a
difference in the lives of their kids."

Prisons, however, are in the business of punishment, and security is
their primary concern. Helping inmates preserve family ties is at the
bottom of the list.

Visits by wives and children are often viewed as a security threat by
prison officials, or at least a nuisance, because they can be an
opportunity to smuggle drugs or weapons and they consume guards' time.

For the families, visiting prisons, which often are in rural areas,
can be time-consuming and costly, and when they finally arrive, they
can be kept outside in the cold or rain for hours and then subjected
to humiliating searches.

"A visit to a prison is a very emotionally difficult experience," Dean
Hairston said. "There isn't time or space for normal family arguments,
and the kids tend to act out afterward and the wives or girlfriends
can be resentful."

Juan Hernandez, an inmate at Sing Sing, said his 14-year-old son is
angry at him for abandoning him, and his 16-year-old daughter is
embarrassed and lies to her friends about where he is. Neither will
write or visit.

"I don't know how to deal with it," said Hernandez, who had just begun
the parenting class. "It's impossible to be a good father from prison."

One of the inmates' greatest fears, which they realize too late, is
that their children may consciously or unconsciously imitate them.

Gregory Frederick, a 52-year-old from Harlem who has been at Sing Sing
for 10 years for murder, finds that his grandson "thinks I'm some sort
of countercultural hero."

"When he comes to visit," Frederick said, "he sees these guys walking
around with big muscles, and then when he goes back home, he tells his
friends, 'My grandfather is in prison,' and he's proud of it. In some
communities, prison just has no stigma any more. It's a very distorted
rite of passage."

Children often imitate the behavior of those they are close to, said
Angela Browne, a psychologist who is an expert on prisoners and their
children. "Unfortunately," she said, "children imitate strong
behavior, like anger and drug abuse, more than subtle behavior."

THE CHILDREN

Following Father, Right Into Prison

(Picture: The impact on children can fall most heavily on blacks in poor
city neighborhoods, where a disproportionate number of people go to prison,
contributing to a concentration of fatherless families. But research has
found the dynamic of children being influenced by parents in prison in all
populations.)

In the 1940s, two pioneering researchers at Harvard Law School,
Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, found that among boys sent to a
reformatory from the Boston area, two-thirds had a father who had been
incarcerated, and half had a grandfather who had been locked up.

Race was not an issue. All these boys were white.

Similar findings, that about half of incarcerated juveniles have a
parent who has been locked up, have been reported wherever the issue
has been studied: in London, Minneapolis, or Sacramento, Calif.

The most recent research, conducted last year in California among
1,000 girls in detention in Los Angeles, San Diego, Alameda, and Marin
counties, revealed that 54 percent of their mothers and 46 percent of
their fathers had been locked up. Leslie Accoca, a senior researcher
with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, who directed the
study, said that the real number of fathers who had served time was
undoubtedly higher, but the girls knew less about them.

"Incarceration today is a family matter," Ms. Accoca said. "There is
an entire kinship system that is now moving through jail, prison,
probation and parole."

Corrections officials are sometimes stunned to find whole families
locked up. At the Laurel Highlands state prison in Pennsylvania, a
father and son, convicted of separate arsons, share the same cell. At
the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, a father, mother, and their
four sons and two daughters were all incarcerated for different bank
robberies. In California, a daughter, her mother, and her grandmother
were in one women's prison for separate crimes.

THE VISIT

A Child's Treat, a Parent's Reward

Sareena Bain, all of 4 years old and dressed in a turquoise jumper,
was waiting by the slam gate entrance to the Bexar County Detention
Center, the San Antonio jail, for a new treat, a Saturday contact
visit with her father, Bobby Bain, a convicted burgler.

A guard gently ordered Sareena to take off her shoes so they could be
searched for drugs, then passed her through a metal detector. Nearby,
civilian volunteers took off the diapers of a group of babies to check
for contraband, replacing them with fresh, jail-issued diapers.

Inspection finished, the children were ushered into a special visitors
room, the walls painted jungle green and emblazoned with a mural from
the "Lion King." Sarena scanned the large, unfamiliar men in orange
jump suits in the room and then let out a whoop. "Daddy," she said,
and jumped into Bain's arms.

Bain and the other men had earned the right to a one-hour visit with
their children by volunteering for an innovative program, Papas and
their Children, in which 70 of the 3,200 inmates in the San Antonio
jail live in the same pod and attend an hour of parenting classes five
days a week.

Other inmates can talk to their visitors only by telephone through a
glass wall.

The San Antonio program, and an equivalent one for mothers in the
jail, are the best of their kind in the country, said Anna Laszlo, a
criminologist in Washington, D.C., who conducted a nationwide survey
of programs for children of incarcerated parents for the Department of
Health and Human Services.

In the visitors room, Derrick Hunt, a bear of a man convicted of drug
possession, was bottle-feeding his month-old son, DiAnthony, in his
arms. Unfortunately, the baby had picked this moment to take a nap.
But Hunt was able to quiz his 5-year-old son, Derrick Jr., on his ABCs.

"I never really had a relationship with my children until I came to
jail and took the classes," Hunt said. "But I've learned how to
control my anger and how to put my kids in timeout rather than shout
at them."

In the visitors room of the women's section of the jail, Mary Anne
Garza was lying on the gray carpet with her three children tight
around her: Edward, 7, Anna, 4, and Briana, 9 months. Tears rolled
down her cheeks. Ms. Garza's brother is in prison for murder, her
husband is in jail, and she had now been convicted of auto theft.

Anna could not stop hugging her mother. "She wants to come to jail
with me," Ms. Garza said. "She is so worried about what is happening
to me, and she is scared of the police and the guards."

Not long before, there was an automobile accident near her mother's
house, where the children are staying. When the police came, Anna
said, "Don't go outside. The police will take you away and there won't
be any more moms."

Ms. Perez, the social worker who created the San Antonio, program for
the sheriff's department said, "From a management point of view, it
has been a success because it has been so popular it has changed jail
culture."

The inmates who take part in it have never tried to smuggle in drugs,
they openly express their emotions and there are no racial cliques or
fights in the pods where they live.

"They are just parents, not brown, black or white," Ms. Perez
said.

The inmates may actually be better parents in jail than before they
were locked up, Ms. Perez said. "Most of them are addicted, and when
they are out there, the drug is the number one thing to them. But once
in here, they have to be clean, they are able to think clearly and
they learn now important parents are to their children."