Foundation Focuses on Children of Incarcerated Parents

The Pittsburgh Child Guidance Foundation released a report last month, "Changing Lives Changing Systems: A Decade of Advocacy for Children of Prisoners" that outlines findings, achievements and work yet-to-do to address ongoing challenges that children and families face when a parent is incarcerated. The Foundation is a service coordinator, advocate and grant fund distributor working in Allegheny County, where ten thousand parents are incarcerated every year, separated from eighty-five hundred children. At least twelve percent of kids in Allegheny County will experience a caretaker being incarcerated in their lifetime, and the PA Prison Society estimates one hundred thousand children affected by parental incarceration across the state.

 

Over the past decade, the Foundation partnered with the Allegheny County Jail Collaborative and others to research major problems facing children, parents, and caregivers, to determine how their lives are affected by the system and where there was room for advocacy. The initiative found that having one person incarcerated has the potential to impoverish a family for generations. In addition to lost wages, family members pay high costs for commissary and phone calls, court fees and lawyers. Being labeled a felon continues to have detrimental effects on people’s ability to get jobs after they are incarcerated, further damaging the family’s economic potential and stability. For children with incarcerated parents, having less access to resources made some kids feel different or angry. Some teens who were interviewed cited fighting in school or not getting attached to people in relationships out of abandonment anxiety. A three decade study on boys in Pittsburgh found that boys with incarcerated parents were more likely to drop out of high school, and that boys who drop out of high school were more likely to become incarcerated. Other children who were interviewed felt like it was their responsibility to take care of their elderly grandparents or alternative caretakers if their parent was locked up.

 

Some recommendations made by the Foundation to interrupt the prolonged negative economic impact on incarcerated families were offering subsidies to caregivers and changing the employment landscape for formerly incarcerated people. A previous report by a joint governmental commission compiled in support of a Pennsylvania bill, found it problematic that non-relatives who foster children are able to get financial assistance to provide for children’s needs, but alternate caregivers who are family members or friends of incarcerated parents cannot receive financial assistance from the state. Changing the employment landscape for formerly incarcerated people would require an increase in reentry services to help people find jobs, moving the box, quitting access to old incarceration records once people have turned turned their lives around, and supporting conscious raising movements to lessen the fear that employers have surrounding the stigma of incarceration.

 

Changing Lives suggest that more people are beginning to catch on to how supporting strong families and giving resources to reentry services decreases recidivism rates and jail operating costs. The Foundation and Jail Collaborative have the joint goals of raising awareness on how repeat crime and recidivism take its toll on the community and the effects on the community of children growing up traumatized and impoverished by mass incarceration. Recent justice reinvestment initiatives by state government in Pennsylvania found that every dollar spent on reentry services saves six dollars in incarceration costs. Increased programming to prisoners at the jail is part of the reentry initiative supported by the Foundation and outlined in the Jail Collaborative’s three year plan.

 

In it’s 2011-2012 progress report, the Collaborative has seen positive results for families and recidivism rates, by having designated treatment pods, work opportunities for prisoners in the jail, drug and alcohol treatment, graduated systems of rewards, increased mentoring and family support programs. They were also able to set up and fund a discharge center, so people weren’t being released from jail at two in the morning without a bus pass or their medications. The Jail Collaborative with the Pittsburgh Children Guidance Foundation aim to reduce recidivism rates by ten percent yearly. At the time of this report, only ten percent of prisoners at the jail could access education, family support, and comprehensive reentry services.

 

The Collaborative acknowledged in its three year plan the need to put children at the forefront and change policy that negatively affects families. The initiative found problems for children and families regarding staying in contact, having healthy visits and maintaining parental rights. Some progress was made by the initiative in extending phone service hours at ACJ, so outside people would be able to find out what was going on with their family members inside. A kid friendly visiting area was constructed in the lobby of the jail, that makes waiting for visits easier for children and families. SB1454 is legislation that would stop the current practice of terminating parental rights after 15 months of incarceration, and would allow parents who were actively loving their children while incarcerated, to maintain their parental rights.

 

In addition, SB1454 mandates training programs for police officers regarding arresting parents while children are present on the scene. The initiative found many children exposed to traumatic situations when their parents were arrested and no clear guidelines for what police officers are required to do. A family court judge worked with the initiative to develop guidelines for police training when making arrests in the presence of children. These include asking people if they are parents, allowing parents to designate alternate caregivers and call them, permitting parents to comfort their children, moving kids to another place when their parents were being handcuffed, creating kid friendly spaces or comfort places where kids can wait with the cops for alternate caregivers, and training cops in childhood trauma. The bill was introduced by Senator Greenleaf and could be implemented by 2013.