AS INMATE POPULATION GROWS, SO DOES A FOCUS ON CHILDREN

OSSINING, 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 he 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 he 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."