Children
Separation from children is another major issue for women inmates. In 1998,
more than a quarter million children under the age of eighteen had a mother
behind bars.1 When a 1990 American Correctional Association survey asked women
prisoners to name "the most important person[s] in your life," fifty-two
percent identified their children.2 These numbers should warrant that all
women's prisons have family and parenting programs available. However, such is
not the case. Inmate mothers, many of whom were single heads of household
prior to incarceration, are left on their own to navigate the rocky path of
maintaining contact and custody of their children. Faith argues that this lack
is due to the idea that "no woman who has used drugs, worked as a prostitute or
otherwise shown 'deviant' or criminal tendencies can be a 'good' mother."3
Women prisoners are viewed as incapable of being good mothers and thus do not
automatically deserve the same respect and treatment accorded to mothers on the
outside. While this may be the case in some instances, such as drug-addicted
mothers, such a sweeping generalization ignores the fact that many inmate
mothers were single heads of household, the sole provider for their children
and may have been forced to rely on illegal means to support their family. The
view of the inmate mother as somehow unfit and unworthy has been used to
legitimate prison and social services policies regarding the children of
imprisoned parents. A 1978 directive of the Department of Social Services
specified that it can refuse imprisoned parents visits with their children
placed in foster care if it believes that visits will hurt the children.4 In
1997, the Federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (AFSA) was enacted, reducing
the time in which children may remain in foster care before parental rights are
terminated. Under this act, if an incarcerated parent does not have contact
with his or her child for six months, he or she can be charged with
"abandonment" and lose parental rights. If the child is in foster care for
fifteen of the last twenty-two months, the state can terminate parental rights.
Once these rights are terminated, parents have no legal relationship with their
children and are not permitted to have any contact with them.5
Maintaining family ties, however, is not an issue addressed by many of the male
prisoner activists. In this way, prison and its inmates reflect the outside
world and its expectations: women are expected to be the keepers of hearth and
home and, when a mother is incarcerated, the burden to maintain ties to her
children falls upon her. In 1998, over two-thirds of all women prisoners had
children under the age of eighteen, and, among them, only twenty-five percent
said that their children were living with the father. In contrast, ninety
percent of male prisoners with children under the age of eighteen said that
their children were living with their mothers.6 Ten percent of inmate mothers
in contrast to two percent of inmate fathers stated that their children were
living in a foster home, an agency or an institution.7 Thus, mothers in prison
are forced to navigate the legal maze of family law more often in order to
maintain contact with and retain legal custody of their children.
A 1993 survey of women prisoners in eight states and Washington, DC, found that
fifty-four percent of the inmate mothers interviewed were never visited by
their children.8 One major factor in this lack of visitation is distance:
More than sixty percent of inmate mothers were incarcerated more than one
hundred miles from their child's home. Less than nine percent were within
twenty miles of their child.9 However, the courts have reflected the opinion
that inmate mothers have forfeited their rights to see their children. In
1987, Pitts v. Meese determined that prisoners have no right to be in any
particular facility and may be transferred both within and out of state
according to the institution's needs.10 Such a decision gives prison
authorities the power to effectively sever a woman's ability to see her child.
Not only the distance, but the travel time and expenses make frequent visits
less likely. For instance, while Barrilee Bannister is imprisoned in
Pendleton, Oregon, her eight-year-old daughter lives with Bannister's relatives
in Gloversville, New York.11 "I'm lucky to see them every six or eight
months," writes Bannister.12 In almost every letter, she expresses her longing
for her daughter: "When I was arrested, she was four months shy of becoming
three years old. Ive missed the best years of her life. Shell be thirteen
and a half when I get out."13 However, Bannister still retains full custody
of her daughter, a rarity among inmate mothers.14 Distancing women from their
families is often used, effectively weakening, if not severing, a woman's ties
from her loved ones. Maintaining parental ties has not been won through
prisoner boycotts, work stoppages or hunger strikes, tools traditionally used
by male inmates to challenge their conditions.15 Rather, those women who want
family maintenance programs must work with their prison administrations, a far
less glamorous path for researchers and activist academics.
One example of such a program is the Childrens Center at the Bedford Hills
Correctional Facility in New York. The Center houses a nursery where inmates
and their babies are allowed to live together for the childs first year as
well as a program helping the new inmate parents "learn to be mothers."
Although it is staffed by inmates, the Center is administered by the Brooklyn
Diocese of Catholic Charities and funded by the state's Department of
Correctional Services.16 However, under the Center's auspices, inmates,
realizing the need for supportive programs for mothers, organized two parenting
courses for Bedford's inmates--one on infancy for new mothers and pregnant
prisoners and the other a ten-week course called "Parenting Through Films,"
with each week devoted to a new subject on growth and care for children.17
These were the prison's first courses both organized and taught exclusively by
inmates. Out of the Children's Center also came more far-reaching change.
Until 1983, children of prisoners placed in the New York State foster care
system did not have the legal right to visit their parents in prison. Inmates
at Bedford Hills who had been unable to have their children visit them because
of this formed the Foster Care Committee which, with the help of outside
advocates, led to new legislation not only giving prisoners with children in
foster care the same rights and responsibilities as parents who are not
incarcerated but also the right to monthly visits provided that the prison was
not too far away.18 In addition, inmates involved in the Children's Center
published a foster care handbook for women prisoners whose children had been
placed in the foster care system.19
The success of the Children's Center did not go unnoticed by the more
reform-oriented penal authorities: Modeled on the Children's Center, a similar
nursery at the Taconic Correctional Facility opened in 1990 with twenty-three
inmate mothers.20
That prisoners strive to maintain contact with their children and other family
members can also be a reason not to do anything that would label them as
"troublemakers" or "rabblerousers." "They [the prison staff and administration]
would attack people [advocating for reform] through their emotions," stated one
inmate at Bedford Hills. "Like the family would come in to visit somebody and
they wouldn't find the inmate's chart and tell the family they weren't there
and turn the family away at the gate."21 Another inmate claimed that prisoners
who publicly criticize the Bedford Hills personnel were often denied entry into
the facility's Family Reunion Program.22 Women inmates impregnated by prison
staff may also be denied participation in the nursery program solely because of
the father's status. Human Rights Watch found that two of the women they
interviewed who had been sexually assaulted and impregnated by prison staff
were denied entry.23 Thus, an inmate's desire to spend (more) time with her
child(ren) can also be used to dissuade her from organizing for change.
Women who give birth while incarcerated not only face the trauma of
immediate separation from their newborns but also administrative and social
service pressure to relinquish their new child. The case of Kebby Warner, a
pregnant woman imprisoned for a bad check, illustrates the institutional belief
that inmates cannot and should not retain custody, or even contact, with their
children.
Warner, after having been misdiagnosed as having a stomach flu during her
first month in prison, was informed that she was pregnant. Luckily, Warner's
parents agreed to take care of the baby while she was incarcerated. After the
birth of Helen, Warner refused to passively accept the prison requirement that
separates mother and newborn after only one day: she refused to eat and thus
won two more days in the hospital with her child. When the guards finally
managed to separate them and bring her back to prison, she was told that if she
had wanted to have children, she should have stayed out of prison. This one
remark sums up the prevailing view of inmate mothers.
Although her parents had custody of her daughter, the pain and stress of
separation still weighed upon her mind, leading to anger and fights with other
inmates, disciplinary tickets and "the reputation of defiance," which resulted
in a denial of parole. With the death of her father, however, came another
loss: her mother, unwilling to care for a half-black baby alone, gave Helen to
the foster care system.
The law allows for the termination of parental rights after two years. In
Warner's case, this was certainly true. When her daughter was two years old, a
judge terminated Warner's parental rights on the grounds that she "neglected
and abused my child due to the length of my incarceration." When she started
to appeal this decision, her caseworker and the Family Independence Agency
threatened to place Helen with a new foster family who would adopt her
immediately, thus permanently sealing her file and preventing Warner from ever
being able to find her. Under this pressure, Warner finally signed an
affidavit relinquishing her rights as a parent.
However, this loss inspired Warner to action against the prison-industrial
complex's policy of breaking up families: she is currently forming a support
organization for incarcerated parents. The organization she envisions "will
stand at the courthouse and protest the kidnapping of a child that deserves to
know who her mother/father is."24 Thus, although the prison-industrial complex
negatively impacts families and severs family ties in an attempt to break the
individual inmate, women both collectively and individually resist such
efforts.
CONTINUE
NOTES:
Children
1 Greenfeld and Snell, 8.
2 Owen.120. Cites American Correctional Association's "The Female Offender:
What Does the Future Hold?" Washington, DC: St. Mary's Press, 1990.
3 Faith. 204. Cites Serapio R. Zalba's Women Prisoners and Their Families.
Sacramento: Department of Social Welfare and Corrections, 1964.
4 Henriques, Zelma Weston. Imprisoned Mothers and Their Children: A
Descriptive And Analytical Study. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
1982. 132.
5 Women in Prison Project of the Correctional Association of New York. "The
Effects of Imprisonment on Families." 3.
6 Morash et al. 1.
7 Snell, Tracy L. "Women in Prison : Survey of State Prison Inmates, 1991."
U.S. Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 6.
8 Human Rights Watch. 18. Cites Barbara Bloom and David Steinhart's Why
Punish the Children? A Reappraisal of the Children of Incarcerated Mothers in
America. San Francisco, CA: National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 1993.
Table 2-9.
9 Ibid. Cites Bloom and Steinhart. Table 2-10.
10 Pollock-Byrne. 173. Cites Pitts v. Meese, 684F. Supp. 303 (D.D.C. 1987).
11 Letter from Barrilee Bannister. Postmarked 26 January 2001.
12 Letter from Barrilee Bannister. Dated 2 March 2001.
13 Letter from Barrilee Bannister. Dated 8 March 2002.
14 Letter from Barrilee Bannister. Dated 2 March 2001.
15 This is not to say that women prisoners do not employ tactics of
disruption. In 1971, women at Alderson Prison staged a four-day work stoppage
in solidarity with the uprising at Attica. The1975 demonstration at the North
Carolina Correctional Center for Women protested not only "oppressive working
atmospheres," but also "inaccessible and inadequate medical facilities and
treatment, and many other conditions." (Kurshan, Nancy. "Women and
Imprisonment in the United States: History and Current Reality." Monkeywrench
Press, 25)
16 Morash et al. 8.
17 Harris, Jean. Stranger in Two Worlds. NY: MacMillan Publishing Company,
1986. 286.
18 Boudin, Kathy. "The Children's Center Programs of Bedford Hills
Correctional Facility" in Maternal Ties: A Selection of Programs for Female
Offenders. Cynthia L. Blinn, ed. Lanham, MD: American Correctional
Association, 1997. 68.
19 The success of the programs at Bedford Hills is documented by books,
articles and manuals written by its inmate participants. Unlike the writings
and publications of most prisoner activists, these documents are more widely
accepted and acknowledged by general society.
20 Boudin, 84. The American Correctional Association has published several
books on mothers in prison, giving the misleading impression that there are
more than enough programs and facilities which encourage family contact.
21 Diaz-Cotto, 347. Cites anonymous interview, New York City. 15 April 1989.
22 Ibid, 366-7. Cites anonymous interview, New York City. 22 March 1989.
23 Human Rights Watch, 298.
24 Letter from Kebby Warner. Dated 29 April 2001.
CONTINUE
