by Anthony A. Cupaiuolo

On our refrigerator door is a handwritten note that reads:

Thank U
Love, D. & N.
4 The To People Who R Realy In Love

With its unusual abbreviations and misspellings, it’s a heartfelt thank you from two 12-year-old girls who recently spent part of a weekend in our suburban home, far from their inner city communities in Brooklyn and Manhattan. They spent the other part of the weekend visiting their mothers — applying make-up, doing each other’s hair, talking about school and boys, and doing whatever else adolescent girls do with their mothers in state prison.

We have served as “host families’ for the children of inmates for the past four years, but the visitation program has been going strong for two decades. During the school year, the children board a bus once a month on Saturday mornings for the hour-plus journey to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the only maximum-security prison for women in New York. The host families pick them up at the prison late in the afternoon and return with them on Sunday morning so they can spend a few more precious hours with their mothers before boarding another bus for the return trip to the city. During the summer, the children stay with their hosts for up to five days at a time and visit the prison each day.

We get a lot of compliments from friends and colleagues for our good work. They think we are just being modest when we reply that the kids warm our home with their energy, good humor and sincere gratitude. But we do pay a price — not because of the dinners, movies and brief loss of privacy, but because of our anger and frustration at a criminal justice system that epitomizes the institutional racism that remains embedded in our society. All six girls who have stayed with us repeatedly over the years are African American, and so are the overwhelming majority of the other children who partake in the family visitation program. According to state and federal statistics, almost 80 percent of the more than 3,100 women imprisoned in New York are women of color; 76 percent of all prisoners are mothers.

Why the moms are incarcerated varies widely. Close to 50 percent have been jailed for drug offenses, and many are the victims of the New York’s draconian so-called “Rockefeller drug laws,” which require long sentences for relatively small amounts of drug possession or sale. For others the offense may have been more serious. D.’s mom received a sentence of 30 years to life for homicide, certainly a heinous offense. But even a cursory look at the trial transcript strongly suggests that she was railroaded, having been threatened to “confess or we will send your daughter to foster care” and fingered by alleged co-conspirators who received lighter sentences and who now have recanted. An appeal is working its way through the appellate court, but homicide convictions are rarely overturned on appeal.

The girls we have hosted range in age from 7 to 15. They are different in many ways, as one would expect, but share the need for a decent education, emotional support and the basic opportunities of life afforded to most children. D. is one of the luckier ones: She is being raised by a retired grandmother who dotes on her, but whose increasing physical ailments make it impossible for her to adequately look out for D., especially with regard to her failing grades. N. is much brighter and committed to doing well academically, despite attending a school with the financial and personnel deficits characteristic of our nation’s worst urban schools. N. enjoys Sunday mornings in our home because she gets to enjoy a “luxury” she rarely receives at home: breakfast. N., along with her four younger siblings, is also being raised by a grandmother, but one who has to leave for work by 7:30 every morning. N. foregoes breakfast to insure that her brothers and sisters get off to school on time.

In our home, reading before bedtime is a must. Regardless of their reading level, the girls look forward to it as they do to the gifts of books for various occasions or the trips to the bookstore. They genuinely want to learn, and as we drive past the majestic suburban schools that stand in sharp contrast to their own, they often wonder aloud how much better it must be to go there. They are right.

We can’t get innocent moms out of prison and we can’t make their schools better. To maintain some semblance of sanity, we focus on having the kids enjoy their weekends. It may mean going to a movie we probably would never see on our own, such as Snow Dogs (not that bad, really), or renting an unlikely video, like Anaconda (clearly one of the worst movies ever made). My wife helps them bake a cake and then they decorate it with all the ice cream, whipped cream and strawberries that will fit. They enjoy seeing me cook pancakes and tell me that eating them isn’t that bad either. As implied in their note, seeing a married couple is a rarity for them.

When we went to the orientation session for new host parents, a question was raised about whether the stark differences between their life in the city and our lives in the affluent suburbs would create problems. The director replied knowingly and correctly that as long as we avoided garish displays of wealth, the children would suffer no embarrassment or discomfort. Since my wife and I are, respectively, a social service administrator and an educator, “garish displays of wealth” were unlikely. But we go our of our way to make sure that their bedroom and bathroom are prepared as well as for any other houseguest. They are comfortable in our home, and we are comfortable with them.

We kid, we tease, we laugh, we look forward to their visits and miss them when they leave. But we know that we are only applying Band-Aids. Unfortunately, public policy does not recognize children such as D. and N. as having special needs, so desirable services, such as counseling or respite care, are not generally provided to them or to their guardians. African American children routinely grow up without fathers because persistent patterns of race and class discrimination have marginalized so many of them. The children of incarcerated moms are victimized twice.

Anthony A. Cupaiuolo, a professor of public administration, was, until recently, director of the Edwin G. Michaelian Institute for Public Policy and Management at Pace University. He is the author of numerous articles on public welfare and related issues.

P o p  F o r u m
Discuss the issue of raising children 
while parents are behind bars  

Related Sites
Visit the Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents. 
The Children of Bedford fund provides educational scholarships for children of prisoners.
For a close-up look at the lives of children of imprisoned parents, read Rockefeller’s Children: The Collateral Damage of New York’s Drug Laws, by Scott Michels.
Every Door Closed: Barriers Facing Parents With Criminal Records, a report by the Center for Law and Social Policy, examines the obstacles parents face when they leave prison and try to reintegrate into society.