Mentoring Children of Prisoners Programs
Best Practices
A Special
Supplement to the Mentoring Program Design Guide
Nonprofit
Development Institute
2500
(302) 656-1100
Approximately two million children between the ages of 5 to
18 in our country have a parent who is incarcerated. Sadly, most of these
children are very young. Over half of them are younger than age 10, and 20% are
under 5 (
Many of these children face similar challenges to all at-risk children. They are more likely to live with violence, poverty, limited access to quality education, and low self-esteem and hope for the future. However, children of prisoners bear unique burdens in addition to all these other obstacles. Many of these children have experienced the trauma of witnessing their parents being arrested and/or physically taken away from them. Having a parent in jail most often removes the primary adult from their everyday lives.
While their parents are in prison, children might live with a grandparent, aunt, their other parent, or in a foster home or other facility. Some are separated from their siblings. Some are shifted from one living arrangement to another, and they are quite likely to be living in poverty, where their caregivers lack the personal resources necessary to meet the children’s needs.
Those needs can be more complicated than the needs of other
children. Research on the specific challenges faced by children of incarcerated
parents, as detailed below, suggests that they suffer a unique form of grief
and loss that comes from having a parent who is alive but unreachable (Jucovy, 2003). These children
experience a difficult combination of anger, sadness, shame, guilt, and
depression. As a result, they often act out inappropriately and have classroom
behavior difficulties and low academic performance (
Not surprisingly, a high percentage of this group ends up following the path of their parents. According to a U.S. Senate Report, children of prisoners are six times more likely than other children to be incarcerated at some point in their lives. Without effective intervention strategies, as many as 70 percent of these children are predicted to become involved with the criminal justice system (Senate Report, 2000).
The number of children at risk in these ways is certain to grow, as the nation’s prison population is currently increasing by almost six percent a year.
The Impact of
Incarceration on Children
Incarceration is not a single or discrete event but a dynamic process that unfolds over time. To understand the impact of the incarceration process on children it is necessary to consider separately the short-term effects of the arrest and separation of the child from the parent, the impact of the unavailability of the parent to the child during the period of incarceration, and the effects — both positive and negative — of reunion after the incarceration period.
It is also critical to consider whether the child is living with the parent at the time of incarceration, whether a single or two-parent household is involved, and, in the case of a two-parent household, which parent is incarcerated. As we have noted, only a small percentage of children live with their father as the sole caregiver; it is more usual for children to be living with a single mother prior to incarceration. The most recent figures (Mumola, 2000) indicate that 36% of state and 16% of federal inmate mothers were not living with their children at the time of admission. In contrast, 56% of state and 45% of federal inmate fathers were not living with their children at the time of their incarceration. Thus, when a parent is incarcerated, it is more likely that children will experience separation from mother than separation from father.
The Mentoring Children of Prisoners RFP puts it like this:
“Research has found that long term physical absence of a parent has profound effects on child development. Children of incarcerated parents are seven times more likely to become involved in the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. Parental arrest and confinement often lead to stress, trauma, stigmatization, and separation problems which may be compounded by existing poverty, violence, substance abuse, high-crime environments, child abuse and neglect, multiple caregivers, and/or prior separations. These children are more likely to develop attachment disorders and often exhibit broad varieties of behavioral, emotional, health, and educational problems. Many children of incarcerated parents are angry and lash out at others leading to confrontations with law enforcement. Lacking the support of families, schools, and other community institutions, they often do not develop values and social skills leading to the formation of successful relationships.”
This is obviously serious, so let’s take a deeper look at what you must take into account as you develop your program and proposal.
The arrest phase. Unfortunately, only an incomplete picture of the impact of the initial arrest on children is available. According to Johnson (1991), one in five children is present at the time of the arrest and witnesses the mother being taken away by authorities. More than half of the children who witness this traumatic event are under 7 years of age and in the sole care of their mother. Jose-Kampfner (1995) interviewed 30 children who witnessed their mother's arrest and reported that these children suffered nightmares and flashbacks to the arrest incident. Children in middle childhood who are in school at the time of the arrest may return to an empty residence and be unaware of the arrest of their mother (Fishman, 1983). The impact of father's versus mother's arrest is unknown and needs to be assessed in future research.
The management of the explanation. There is
controversy surrounding the wisdom of providing children with information
concerning the arrest and the reasons for their parent's incarceration. Some
argue that children ought to be protected from the knowledge that their parents
are incarcerated as a way of minimizing the trauma associated with the
separation (Becker & Margolin, 1967). Others argue that the emotional
distress of children is exacerbated by the unwillingness of family, friends or
caregivers to discuss their parent's incarceration (Snyder-Joy & Carlo,
1998). This failure to disclose has been variously termed the "conspiracy
of silence" (Jose-Kampfner, 1995) or "forced silence" (Johnson,
1995). Mothers are usually the ones who take responsibility for explaining the
situation to the children — regardless of whether or not they are the
incarcerated parent. For example, Sack, Seidler and Thomas (1976) found that in
only 7 of 31 cases did the father or both parents together offer the child an
explanation. Moreover, when explanations were provided, they were often vague
and general; one typical mother told her children that their father "did
wrong and had to be punished." Other explanations were distorted or
deceitful. Deception took a variety of forms, from total lies to strong shading
of the truth, in which prison was referred to as an army camp, a hospital or a
school. Total deception occurred in 4 of the 31 families in the study, and
partial deception occurred in another 6 families. In other words, nearly a
third of the families engaged in some form of deception. Similarly in a much
larger study carried out in
What is the impact of this "conspiracy of silence" or deception on children? In light of the literature on children's coping (Ayers, Sandler, West, & Roosa, 1996; Compas, 1987), which suggests that uncertainty and lack of information undermines children's ability to cope, it is not surprising that children who are uninformed about their parent's incarceration are more anxious and fearful (Johnson, 1995). Although the situation of a parent lost through death is more extreme, some of the insights gained from this literature concerning ways of helping children cope with loss is instructive. As Nolen-Hoeksema and Larson (1999) argue, children need honest, factual information, and they need to have their experience validated. Providing children with reliable, dependable information allows them to begin to make sense of their situation and begin the dual processes of grieving the loss of their parent and coping with their new life circumstances. On the other hand, silence about the parental incarceration often results not from a deliberate attempt to deceive the children but from an effort to avoid other complications. As Johnson (1995, p. 74) notes "There may be a very good reason for such a forced silence; family jobs, welfare payments, child custody, and even housing may be jeopardized when others become aware of the parents' whereabouts. However, children of prisoners are more likely to have negative reactions to the experience when they cannot talk about it."
A variety of long-term effects of parental incarceration on children have been identified. The long-term impact varies with a variety of factors, including the developmental level of the child.
Incarceration and infants. A small number of women (6%, U.S. Department of Justice, 1994) are pregnant at the time of their incarceration, but few prisons in the United States permit mother to keep their infants with them during incarceration (Gabel & Girard, 1995). In most cases, mothers of newborn infants are permitted only a few days of contact before they must relinquish their infant and return to prison. As a result, there is little opportunity for the mother to develop a bond to the baby or for the baby to become familiar with the mother and form an attachment to her — a critical developmental task for both mothers and infants. As Myers et al. (1999) note, after the mother's is released, she comes home to an infant or young child with whom she has not developed an emotional bond and who is not attached to her, with the likely result that the children will have emotional and behavioral problems.
Incarceration and young children. Even if a child-parent attachment bond has already developed, as in the case of infants who have been in their mother's or father's care for the first 9 to 12 months of life, the disruption associated with parental incarceration will likely adversely affect the quality of the child's attachment to their parent (see Thompson, 1998, for a general discussion of the effects of separation on attachment in non-incarcerated samples). Even less drastic changes such as job loss, divorce, or residential re-location have been found to adversely affect the quality of the infant or toddler child-parent attachment quality (Thompson, Lamb, & Estes, 1982; Vaughn et al., 1979). Insecure attachments — a consequence of adverse shifts in life circumstances — in turn, have been linked to a variety of child outcomes, including poorer peer relationships and diminished cognitive abilities (Sroufe, 1988).
In light of the results of this research on separation and attachment, it is not surprising that when their parents are incarcerated, young children (ages 2 - 6 years) have been observed to suffer a variety of adverse outcomes that are consistent with the research on the effects of insecure attachments (Johnson, 1995). In fact, according to one estimate (Baunach, 1985), 70% of young children with incarcerated mothers had emotional or psychological problems. Children exhibit internalizing problems, such as anxiety, withdrawal, hypervigilance, depression, shame and guilt (Bloom & Steinhart, 1993; Dressler et al., 1992). They exhibit somatic problems such as eating disorders. And, perhaps most clearly, young children exhibit externalizing behaviors such as anger, aggression, and hostility toward caregivers and siblings (Fishman, 1983; Gaudin, 1984; Johnston, 1995; Jose-Kampfner, 1995).
Incarceration and school-age children. School-age
children of incarcerated parents exhibit school-related problems and problems
with peer relationships. Sack et al. (1976) reported that over 50% of the
children of incarcerated parents had school problems, such as poor grades or
instances of aggression, albeit many of these problems were temporary. Among
the younger children (6-8 years old) in the Sack et al. (1987) study, 16%
exhibited transient school phobias and were unwilling to go to school for a
4-6week period after their parent's incarceration. In another report,
Effects of incarceration on boys versus girls. Although it would be expected that boys would be more adversely affected by this stressful separation — in light of evidence that boys are more vulnerable to stressful changes than girls are, in general (e.g., Hetherington et al., 1998), the evidence on this issue is unclear. Instead, the most likely scenario is that both boys and girls are adversely affected by parental incarceration, but their modes of expressing their reactions differ. Boys are more likely to exhibit externalizing behavior problems, while girls are more likely to display internalizing problems (Cowan et al., 1994; Cummings, Davies, & Campbell, 2000).
What leads to these problems? The answer to this question is not simple. There are a number of interpretative problems that merit elaboration. First, incarceration is often preceded by a period of familial instability, poverty, child abuse or neglect, marital discord and conflict, or father absence. A combination of these conditions may have already increased the base rates of children's problem behaviors. Consequently, without measures of the child's environment and behavior prior to incarceration, it is difficult to attribute the problem behaviors to incarceration per se. Other events also transpire at the time of incarceration that could account for some of the negative effects on children. Re-location and placement with alternative caregivers are both major disruptions in the children's lives, which past research has shown to be detrimental to children (Rutter, 1987). A similar set of interpretative problems has plagued the literature on the effects of other kinds of stress, such as divorce on children's functioning (Hetherington & Kelley, 2002; Hetherington et al., 1998).
Modifiers of Children's Reactions to
Incarceration
Before the incarceration, during incarceration, and during the reunion phase after incarceration, different factors modify children's reactions.
Pre-incarceration conditions. The most important
predictor of how well the child will adjust to the immediate separation is the
quality of the parent-child relationship. Theoretically, a high quality
parent-child relationship should serve as a protective or buffering factor in
helping the child cope with the temporary loss of a parent (Myers et al., 1999;
Thompson, 1998). Unfortunately, however, many parents who end up in prison are
limited in their parenting abilities, and thus this potential protective factor
is unavailable to their children (
Another predictor or how well the child adjusts to parental incarceration is likely to be the quality of relationships with the extended family and non-family informal social networks This support is especially relevant when the father is incarcerated and leaves the mother to cope as a single parent. There is an extensive literature that suggests that the quality of family ties within the extended family network is related to mothers' more positive parenting attitudes and behavior (Cochran & Brassard, 1979; Cochran, 1995). In addition, Crnic, Greenberg, Ragozin, Robinson, and Basham (1983) reported that mothers with higher levels of informal social support were more responsive and affectionate with their infants. More recently Goldstein, Diener, and Mangelsdorf (1995), similarly, found that women with larger social networks were found to be more sensitive in interactions with their infants. In turn, the children of parents who receive more social, emotional, and physical support are better adjusted than children of parents with limited kin or network support (Thompson, 1995). Moreover, when it is the mother rather than the father who is incarcerated, extended family members such as grandmothers often assume the role of primary caregiver (Mumola, 2000). To the extent that the child has already established close emotional relationships with the extended family, the trauma of transition to grandmother care will be lessened (Bloom & Steinhart, 1993).
Factors during incarceration. The major determinants of child adjustment during the period of parental incarceration are (1) the nature and quality of the alternative caregiving arrangements and (2) the opportunities to maintain contact with the absent parent.
As we have noted, the gender of the incarcerated parent is a major determinant of the type of alternative care arrangement. When fathers are incarcerated, the mother is generally the caregiver who continues to be responsible for child care; when mothers are incarcerated, grandmothers assume their responsibility (Bloom & Steinhart, 1993; Mumalo, 2000). The latter arrangement provides greater continuity for the child relative to foster care because the child is with a familiar caregiver. Moreover, kinship placements tend to be more stable and avoid transethnic discontinuities that are likely to occur in the foster care system. It is assumed that children make better adjustments in kinship homes, but comparative studies of kinship versus foster care placements are not available. Moreover, there are problems with kinship arrangements as well.
Young and Smith (2000) cite a range of challenges faced by grandparents raising grandchildren, including emotional, physical, and financial difficulties, which, in turn, may undermine their effectiveness as substitute caregivers. As in the case of grandmothers raising infants for their teenage daughters (Brooks-Gunn & Chase-Lansdale, 1995), the relationship between the grandmother and the incarcerated mother is often strained and characterized by a range of negative feelings such as resentment, anger, guilt, or disappointment (Bloom & Steinhart, 1993; Young & Smith, 2000). In turn, this complicates decision-making on behalf of the child, which requires cooperation across generations if the child's best interests are to be served. Parallel problems are evident in joint custody arrangements after divorce (Hetherington & Kelley, 2001; Maccoby & Mnookin, 1993). Grandmothers serve as gatekeepers in terms of their children's access to the parents just as divorced mothers regulate fathers' access to their children (Braver, 2000). In spite of this potential barrier to maintaining contact, 94% of caregivers surveyed by the National Counsel on Crime and Delinquency endorsed the idea that contact between mother and child is important and 97% helped promote contact during incarceration (Bloom & Steinhart, 1993).
The second important determinant of children's adjustment to
their parent being in prison is regular contact with the incarcerated parent.
Institutional, attitudinal, and practical barriers make this contact difficult
to maintain, however. As Young and Smith (2000) note, correctional policies
regarding visitation and phone use make it difficult for mothers to stay in
touch with their children. Facilities are typically located in remote areas,
often long distances from where children and caregivers live, making visitation
extremely difficult for families with limited resources, and visitation hours
are scheduled for set times each week rather than depending on would-be
visitors' schedules (Kaplan & Sasser, 1996). In addition, rules about who
is eligible to visit, the number of visitors allowed at one time, appropriate
behavior during the visit, lack of privacy, harsh treatment of visitors by
correctional staff, and the physical layout of the visiting room often deter
family members and caregivers from coming. Other problems include child-unfriendly
visiting rooms, lack of privacy, and increased anxiety on the part of the
visiting child (Bloom & Steinhart, 1993; Simon & Landes, 1991). These
conditions, in part, flow from cultural and institutional beliefs that
incarcerated individuals, including parents, do not deserve privileges such as
family visitation. As
However,
A transactional model of the predictors
of children's adjustment following parental incarceration and reunion
Image removed.
This goals section has been
removed. In the full document it
describes the kind of language you should put in your proposal for your program
goals/objectives. Some goals are mandated
by the federal government; other goals are typical for programs that get funded
in this area and that work.
The program strategies section
has been removed. In the full document
it briefly describes the kinds of mentoring children of prisoners strategies
that research says will work and that federal agencies funding abstinence like
to see. You can use these strategies to
help you design your own program.
Because this is a supplement to the Mentoring Program Design Guide, you
will need the Mentoring guide to have a full picture of what your mentoring
children of prisoners program should entail.
See the Mentoring Program Design Guide for details on program evaluation in general and evaluating mentoring programs in particular.
The key to customizing that discussion for your mentoring children of prisoners
program is to clearly identify the outcomes to be evaluated from the goals you identified earlier. A logic model will help you here, leading
from your goals to your resources and activities to your outcomes.
Section
removed.
What
to Do Next: Three Options
Are
you thinking about developing and getting funding for a mentoring children of prisoners program? As you can see, this program design guide is
pretty comprehensive, and will give you all the essentials of designing a
program. If you don’t cover these
essentials in your proposal, it will not be funded, guaranteed (you’ll notice
that mentoring children of prisoners RFPs
ask you to discuss these elements, and they are looking for very specific
things to reassure them that you know what you are doing—and with our Guide,
you will!).
After
you cover these essentials, you can then utilize your own creativity and the
goals of your nonprofit or faith-based organization to go beyond the essentials
to include additional elements.
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