The Fifth North American Conference on the Family and Corrections

September 14-16, 1998 - Bethesda, Maryland

Bridging the Gap Between Criminal Justice and Child Welfare Systems

Ann Jacobs

... most recently in the Mayor’s office where we’ve been doing alternatives to incarceration. And what I remembered very shortly after hitting the Women’s Prison Association was why I had spent so much time kind of avoiding the special issues of women in prison and it’s because it’s so poignant and so painful. And so difficult for all of us to work with women, we know that that’s what the guys say about working with women in the criminal justice system. We know that it’s true not just because women show up as somehow complex creatures with a lot of demands and requirements and needs that need to get addressed, but because they are kind of simultaneously involved in all of these different systems at once. You can’t deal with someone just ad a function of the criminal justice system. They’re simultaneously involved in the child welfare system, the public health system, and on and on and on.

And so taking over responsibility for the social services agency I had to do kind of a quick course in all of those systems and in fact I brought you information on our programs. I also brought you a very detailed version of what I’m going to talk about today so that you can take that away with you. You don’t need to take notes on it. We’d love to have you come visit and be a resource to you after this particular event.

But, what I wanted to talk to you about today was my crash course in the abyss that exists between the criminal justice system and the child welfare system. And you’re a little bit different audience than the one I normally talk to about this because my inquiry into it was funded by the Annie Casey foundation which has as it’s focus child welfare and gave me the opportunity to go into other jurisdictions and talk to child welfare people.

Particularly we did a lot of work in Maryland. Maryland was one of the sites that Annie E. Casey funded for their Family to Family initiative which was a national project of the Casey foundation to refocus the way that foster care and child welfare services were done in jurisdictions from the kind of presumption of stranger provided foster care to a presumption in favor of keeping kids in their own communities whenever possible with their own families or at least in the community with family based foster care as opposed to congregate care or institutionally based foster care. And in the course of them providing this assistance to a number of different states, they funded a number of technical service providers to help those jurisdictions wrestle with the very real problems of making that kind of shift. So they’ve developed this rich set of training materials that are there to help people who are trying to work with people who have substance abuse problems or who are trying to do institutional change and the materials that I’m sharing with you are really only one of twelve monographs that they have produced, that they would love to make available to any of you who are interested in it. So, like I said, I think you’re a little bit difference audience than the ones I normally talk to, about this particular topic.

When I go in and I talk to child welfare people, I’m talking to people who as I’ve discovered know very little about the criminal justice system. Have dealt with kids who have parents who are involved in it to a much greater degree than most of us would think or that they’ve been trained to do, and in large part have kind of given up on the mom. They have know the moms over a long period of time, over many years of primarily substance abuse, because as we know the majority of women who are in the criminal justice system are there for drug related crimes, or actually for possession or sales of drugs. The kids may actually have been know to the criminal justice system in advance of that particular arrest that we get to know the woman on. And while they have in most states even up to and including the recent federal change in child welfare legislation which is quite abysmal from where we stand being advocates for moms. Even in advance that most of the states have a responsibility for working with the biological moms toward reunification and often don’t do it very well. For a lot of reasons including that they’ve already…

One of the pieces that we have developed out of one of our programs quite accidentally is something that I just wanted to show you a snippet of a videotape and then show you a little bit more down the line. One of our programs is called the Sarah Powell Huntington House and it’s a transitional residence for women who are coming out of prison and jail who are homeless who seek to reunify with their kids, and who in New York got caught in that vicious catch 22 that if you come out and you want to go to family court and you want to get your kids back you have to demonstrate to them that you’ve got the right kind of residence. But if you come out and you’re homeless, and go to a homeless assistance to get the right kind of residence, unless you’ve got your kids in hand, they consider you a single and put you in a dormitory, kind of armory setting. So, we were able to with the support of the homelessness system to create this apartment building where women come in as singles, they share apartments as roommates, they start the visitation at the agency and then weekend visitation at our facility and then they get trial discharge where the kids are with them, they become a family with us, we are able to provide them with support services on site. We have a child care center for the kids that are up to school age and then we’ve got after school programs and weekend programs for the kids who are school aged. And we got this sort of, just, we’re always asking for money to do things, and we got this money from the Manhattan Neighborhood Network which is supposed to put access to cable TV for people who are traditionally excluded from access to those kinds of resources, and we thought, let’s let the kids do it. Well, I’m gonna show you what the kids have done. And I usually show it to people who sort of don’t know who our moms are and who are kids are and have to be enrolled in why they should want to put more energy into having the moms be with the kids. So, I don’t know if there’s any purpose in me showing it to you today except that I always find it moving. Would you…

I did do these things, and we do recognize these things. It’s not what I did then, it’s what I’m doing now. And that took a lot of work, because in regards to myself, one of the first things I thought about was how am I going to make up to my family for all the bad things I did.

Well that was the part I was going to show you later and I’m not feeling flexible enough to sort of make it up from there so I’m going to ask him to put in the other tape and to show you the introduction to it. And then we’ll come back to this part a little bit later on. Part of the reason that I’m showing it to you is that in the course of your thinking about this stuff today when you go back home, you’ll think about some explicit activities to bridge the child welfare and criminal justice system and think about whether perhaps these tapes could be useful to you there because we’re happy to make them available to you. Now, oh I can do this right.

Video Tape

"My name is Miles Night and I am eleven years old. This is Autumn Austin, she is fifteen. And Crystal Green, she’s thirteen. We live on the lower East side. We live in a place called Huntington House and we’re television producers."

Ann Jacobs

That’s really what I wanted you to get. That’s it. I mean these kids literally did this all by themselves. They did the camera work, they did the editing, they did the scripting, and in their very first episode that’s how they started and they get to this point where they say and we’re television producers. And I mean as many times as I’ve watched this videotape it keeps giving me goosebumps because it speaks to the world as I think we’re all committed to having it be where these kids can show up as television producers or anything that they want, and they’re kids of people who have been or are incarcerated. And part of the abyss that we get to bridge in partnership with them is figuring out how to have that reality work a little bit better.

As I said my interest today is in enrolling you in carrying your work, supporting you in whatever ways we can to carry this work into the next place in your own jurisdiction. Um, I’m making an assumption that most of you work in the criminal justice system. Is that right? No. So maybe it would make sense for me to check in with you a little bit and make sure that what I’m going to do today is going to be worthwhile to you. Tell me where you’re from and what you want out of today.

…inaudible…

So, what’s clear to me and probably what’s clear to you is that both the child welfare and the criminal justice systems work with virtually the same kind of families. They’re overwhelmingly poor, they’re overwhelmingly effected by substance abuse. And yet in most jurisdictions, these two systems have almost no contact with each other. Don’t work together in any kind of systematic way, and in fact don’t understand each other or the mandates that are driving the other system at all.

What we discovered from the work that we did in Maryland, um, some of our information sharing that we’re doing in New York, in fact there’s a lot that you can do to bridge these two systems that’s even short of funding a new program. I mean, what it takes is a certain amount of consciousness, a certain amount of commitment, a lot of energy. A lot of dogged energy over a long period of time, and that kind of enrolling your colleagues in carrying this message or this banner with you because it gets pretty lonely, and in fact what you’re doing is kind of long term education towards systems change as much I would assert as trying to benefit those specific children or families that you’re seeing day to day, week to week month to month.

I don’t think that I need to run you through the data that talks about how many kids are effected by parental incarceration and why we should be concerned about this. That’s what this whole conference is about, that’s why you’re in the room, although we have done some work at documenting that for people who may not be aware of the scope, the number of children who are effected. It’s really not enough to think about the number of children who are effected by having an incarcerated parent on any particular day, the fact is that some child’s life is altered forever if their parent is involved in the criminal justice system and/or incarcerated. So you’re dealing with a cumulative number that’s much more mammoth than any of us I think have any real idea. In fact, the lack of any kind of data to document the number of kids is I think indicative of the kind of abyss that I’m talking about here.

So when we began to look at this issue, we tried to look at it as broader than just what happens when mom’s in jail or in prison. Because in fact, in this community, as under attended to as it is, there is more community around visitation in prison than sort of any other aspect of it that we looked at. And yet, I think that we need to look at it chronologically for the whole system. I mean, in fact it starts way before arrest but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s just start with arrest, and the fact that little attention is paid to the needs of children in the arrest process.

Children sometimes view the actual arrest. Almost no attention is given to supporting an arrested parent in making provisions for their children. In fact, it’s difficult to do that, not just because they’re not given access to telephone and their address book, but because there’s a tremendous disincentive for them to be very honest about the fact that they’ve got kids at home because they’re afraid that the authorities will sweep in and take the kids away. There’s a lot of management of perception and reality around that that would have to occur to shift that kind of practice, but it’s worth looking at.

As a result of this kind of early on lack of attention, children are often left with caregivers that are not very well equipped to deal with their needs. Mom gets access to telephone, asks someone to pick up their kid, does that, without that person having any clear idea how long mom’s likely to be locked up. How long before arraignment, whether she’s likely to make bail, how long she’s facing. So someone who can take care of the kid for two hours after school may not be the person that someone could like place their child with while they go off and do a one to three year bit for a drug conviction. Which just contributes to the instability for the child. It starts from day one and it continues and sort of falls out like a domino effect based on that lack of attention early on.

We all know that kids need to visit their parents. They need to visit them soon. They watch cartoons on Saturday morning where what imprisonment means to them is somebody like penned up against a wall of a dungeon. And that’s what they imagine as happening to their mom. As horrendous as jails and prisons are, often they’re not as scary as what the kids makes up. And often the child doesn’t see the razor wire in the same way we do. They see their mom, she’s intact, she’s glad to see them

Approximately fifty percent of children won’t visit their moms even when they’re in prison. And yet we know that regular visitation has everything to do with the likelihood for reunification after imprisonment. And most systems don’t provide any kind of significant prerelease support to women who are coming out and they certainly don’t look at bridging this gap. The reality of the fact that there are moms who are also going to be on parole. When we tried to figure out what was going on in New York and we asked the parole department how many women coming out on parole have kids they want to reunify with, "what?". They didn’t know how many were mothers, let alone how many had children, let alone where those kids were, let alone whether there were any goals for reunification. I mean they were doing the best they could to do a home visit and to focus on trying to get the person working within a period of time.

And I don’t say this in a way that I want to be heard as faulting the individual parole or probation officer. There’s a way that their jobs have gotten defined and there’s a way that their case-loads are managed that really doesn’t allow them to pay attention to those kinds of things. And yet, what do we know about those women who are coming out. More important than getting to report to the parole officer or peeing in a jar on a regular basis or doing any of these other things, is making a connection with that child. And yet parole and probation officers are typically not oriented towards paying attention to that.

And in fact in New York City where we went through this total kind of rethinking of probation because they had very large caseloads, and never have been very well funded, and in fact probably never will be very well funded, the resources were reallocated in probation to focus on those offenders who presented the highest risk to public safety. Well those are never going to be women. So it means that the women basically were going onto probation and all they had to do was like this sort of minimal check-in a kiosk. Like going to a bank machine sort of I’m alive I’ve checked in but it’s not a vehicle for giving services. If one has a theory of getting arrested as also indicating that they’re some needs that need to get met if the person is not gonna come back as a second and third time offender with mandatory prison time, then we’re loosing an opportunity there to provide basic services. Included in the things that aren’t getting attended to have to do with their family responsibilities and their kids.

And then, for many of us in our jurisdictions, immigration is a complicating issue, drug involvement is very much what’s going on. Often there is a family history of family violence. Maybe I think our women have a disproportionately high incidence of having been victims of sexual abuse including incest including as children, so that there are a range of mental health and social service issues needs that need to be met simultaneous. To paying attention to the criminal justice obligation and the child welfare obligations and that suggests a whole different level and kind of attention to discharge planning, to managing that transitional process and providing resources in the community than most jurisdictions are able to do.

And then, I mean and this will end my list of the problems and the barriers and my sort of battering us all with those, you know, we’ve got an external environment that gets increasingly hostile towards our clients day by day. We’ve got increasing penalties for most criminal offenses, especially drug offenses, this two and three strikes and you’re out stuff. At the same time that we’ve got this welfare reform which in my state makes enormous requirements on people, including that they participate in work assignments that no one is making any effort to reconcile with when they have to go to parole or probation, when they have to go to family court, but to keep the entitlement coming in, which keeps the residents, which keeps you out in the community, which keeps you able to talk to the court about getting your kid back you have to do these things. At the same time that we’ve got managed care in most jurisdictions making it harder to get medical care and you know, I won’t even go into all of that. And we’ve just had a change in federal legislation governing child welfare that’s going to create a presumption of loss of parental rights in 15-22 months when you know the sentences are going up.

On every level of analysis the individual on her way up to the institutional and systemic, it’s a harsh climate for women to be trying to get their lives together and try to take up responsibility for their kids. We could be making it a lot easier and part of starting modestly part of what I think would help do that is if we started becoming educated to each other’s systems. And to enroll stakeholders and, well we all know what stakeholders are, in the importance of addressing the special needs of incarcerated children and to be developing and modeling these kinds of collaborative working relationships between the systems. And, to identify existing resources, not be counting on windfalls of new programs that can serve as a foundation for more comprehensive strategies for working with incarcerated parents and their families.

So, what we did in Maryland and what this publication that I’m going to give you outlines was kind of a quick and dirty needs assessment and moving toward action planning for the state. We help them as consultants and I think consultants can be helpful, but I think there has to be local initiative and leadership to do something or else no one owns it and no one owns it and no one is going to make sure that it stays on the table. Something like this is going to be most effective if you can tap into very high levels of particularly the executive branch, what you want is someone who has the authority to call people from very diverse worlds together to begin to piece together what this looks like from a bunch of different perspectives. And ideally you want someone who’s gonna go to the highest elected officials including the governor and the mayor and county commission and say, you know, we’re really missing the boat here and need to refocus some of our resources slightly differently. And have someone who can see the big picture and go oh, if we take a little bit of this out of criminal justice and put it over here in drug treatment, or in child welfare we’re going to meet some sort of more global good.

We started with trying to do your basic statistical data gathering. You know what’s the size of the incarcerated population, how many men, how many women, how many of them are parents, how many of the kids are in the child welfare system with an incarcerated parent, what are the parents being convicted for, what’s the likely length of sentence, what’s the kids sort of history of involvement in the child welfare system, etc. etc. And to make a long story short, there’s not a lot of this kind of data.

But, there are formulas that we’ve pieced together and that are included in this that allow you to do some math to get to some basic numbers that will allow you to get to what you’re talking about and what you’re talking about is that the number of women are going up. 75-80 percent of them are moms. 70 percent have custody of about one child or more when they were arrested and statistically they’re parents of 2.4 children. So you do the math, and you come up with, particularly in urban jurisdictions, a significant number of kids who are currently affected by current parent parental incarceration and there’s a similar formula for the men.

I don’t mean to leave the men out, I think the incarceration of a father is extremely important it’s just that in my experience, well I work with women, and they were more often the custodial parent so I’d start there and assume that we all carry this other commitment to also supporting fatherhood.

In addition to the data that we gathered we engaged in this process which I call kind of surveying the universe which is talking to as many people as possible that represent as many different points of view as you can get represented and doing it in a bunch of different ways. One on one, informal conversations, more formal focus groups.

We got people from child welfare, child protection, foster care and adoption, preventive and family preservation and you’re right, they all see the world very differently. In some jurisdictions they’re the same people, in most they’re not. I mean in my experience they’re not. And they see it very differently from the family court judges. And then you’ve got the legal guardians and court appointed special advocates. And then you’ve got the social services and advocacy organizations and that’s just different points of view within the child welfare world. In criminal justice you’ve got prison and jail people. Jails are really under-attended to. This is like, an area that we badly need to pay attention to, etc. etc. You’ve got advocacy groups and community based agencies, providers of substance abuse treatment, providers of mental health services, children’s advocacy groups, women’s issues groups, men’s groups, churches, etc.

Give some consideration to what the political issues are. How that’s sort of governing the way that the conversations can be constructed. As I said we did quite a few focus groups and it was real interesting. And out of that we decided to take child welfare people to correctional facilities so they could see for themselves what they were like. And that was an awesome experience, because while many workers had gone on an individual visit to try to take a child in for visitation, they’d often had such a bad experience that they never wanted to do it again or think about it again. And they certainly didn’t reflect on the things that were driving the ways jails and prisons were managed. Nor had there been any kind of systemic conversation between people from both of those systems so we did that.

Out of that process we got to a point of identifying what we thought some of the major issues are. Again these are dealt with in more detail in the publication that I brought you but what we saw was that workers in both systems were frustrated. And they were particularly frustrated with each other. You know for child welfare workers it’s tremendously time consuming to take a child to prison, and then they’d show up there during the count. They don’t know what count is. And they’d show up there with gifts that the children had made that they wanted to give their parents. They couldn’t bring those gifts in. So they invested all this energy and they were just feeling thwarted and then additionally criminalized because they had to go through the metal detector, take off their shoes, explain that it was an under-wired bra, etc, etc., etc. They didn’t like it. They also felt dissed, we learned by the fact that jails wouldn’t tell them the day that somebody was going to be released. They didn’t understand what jails did and that jails didn’t know when somebody made bail or when somebody was going to be released from court. So those things were just another public servant withholding information from them. There were no fewer misunderstandings on the other side and so part of what had emerged were these areas where they needed to learn each other’s systems. Criminal justice people do not, they’ve never heard the term permanency planning. They don’t know when those child welfare workers are under some kind of pressure to make a decision about who’s going to have permanent custody of that child and that the more rigorously managed systems, that person is supposed to make that decision and that placement in a year. So, in my jail somebody could sit there for a year waiting for trial. You know, the systems are just like…like that. Um, we saw that the individuals interpretations were guiding how they were managing their jobs and responsibilities.

We saw that the child welfare people were really angry with the moms. They’ve known them for a long time, they’d seen them relapse a number of times, they’d be disappointed, they’d watch the kids be disappointed. And for them, this arrest is often the last straw. But then you’ve got the correctional counselor who’s seeing the mom sober, and seeing the mom, you know, like in this, within the walls showing up like a smart articulate loving caring parent who wants her child back. You know, and again you’ve got the kind of concerns like missing each other and not sort of factored in, you know, like we’re seeing the same situation from a different point of view, it’s like no I’m right, no you’re right. That kind of struggle was getting acted out over and over again.

We saw that resources in both systems were wasted by a failure to collaborate. That some families were being served by multiple systems. Some women were getting lots of parenting classes, some in the prison some through child welfare, ditto like drug treatment. Other women weren’t getting anything at all. There were certainly limits on the kind of cross system, collaboration, cooperative planning, information sharing that was going on.

We saw the incarcerated parents receive inadequate support. That in most jurisdictions they’re not resourced in a way where women are able to make very good use of their incarcerated time anymore. That there’s not the kind of links with community based agencies to smooth the transition, discharge planning starts too late. It doesn’t start when they hit the door, which is what we all know theoretically what we should be doing. And there are lots of reasons that that was occurring. I mean most often working effectively with incarcerated parents is hampered by the fact that the prisons are far away from where the moms come, where the kids are, that there are variations in policies governing visitation. Hours and days and the alphabet this day, and you know it’s like this big mystique and mystery that’s hard to govern. Women have very little access to telephones. Telephones, you know, use of the telephone can break the economics of the people in the community that are accepting all of these collect calls and if it’s stranger foster care there’s no way of really maintaining that contact. There’s a lack of private space in most facilities for case-workers to meet with moms and to do any kind of planning around some of these sensitive issues. It’s difficult to make referrals for people on the outside when they’re still on the inside. You know, drug treatment programs want to have a face to face interview.

In the old days you could start somebody’s processing for welfare eligibility, and therefore Medicaid eligibility before they were released. Now one of the ways of cutting back on costs is to make them come out, make them go through a very detailed process, and then wait 45 days. Well, how does somebody who is truly destitute survive in that period of time.

And then, children lack a stable place to live while they’re parents are away. There’s, you know, in most cases it’s the rare cases where there’s any kind of support mechanism to help the child deal with what they are particularly dealing with. To just sort of beat the drum that I am particularly concerned about, there is really far too little attention in community based corrections and alternative to incarcerations. This whole reliance on jails and prisons as a place to deal with women involved in the criminal justice system is virtually unneeded and unnecessary. And most of these families don’t need to be broken up at all if we could make the shift to doing more of our punishing of people at the same time that we start our restorative work, and do it in the community.

There’s a much longer list of some of the issues that we found as a result of this information gathering process. And that I will spare you right now. What I want to talk about, just to hit the headlines, we also spoke of and listed some of the obstacles preventing productive visitation. Talked about the barriers that women leaving corrections face when they try to reunify with their families. Yeah, well like so what, we all know all of this stuff and what do you do about it?

We tried to engage the people in the room in thinking what they could do about it. Short of completely transforming the world, although I don’t think we should loose that thought, or loose our commitment to doing that. And short of getting a windfall from the legislature which happens very occasionally. And, we began to outline together some possible initiatives that various jurisdictions can take on and they all have certain principles that are reflected in them.

And one is, and I think that this conference is very much in the spirit of this, draw on the participation and the strength of the intended beneficiaries. They’re not you know helping or rescuing those poor people. They’re really efforts that are done in partnership with the parents and the children that they’re intended to be helpful to. They expand the initiatives that we’re proposing, expand the community of interested and stakeholders. They’re absolutely at their core. Is that we have to be talking to more and more people all the time to let them understand why this reliance on incarceration is unnecessarily expensive both in human costs and taxpayers costs. And expensive to as is relates to particularly the moms and the children because sometimes they can only hear the children, they’re ready to write off the parents. These initiatives actively develop new community linkages to churches, community organizations and volunteer groups. They’re culturally relevant. They identify and serve children without stigmatizing them. They provide therapeutic interventions without stigma of therapy. They generate better information on which to make good policy and programmatic decisions.

So, the initiatives that have been formulated in the jurisdictions that we’ve worked in fall into a number of different categories and let’s see if I can…I don’t know if you can see that or not, again it’s in my handout. Um, this is so cool, you all will have to stop by here and see what modern technology offers because I’ve never seen this before. There’s a set of things that we proposed that have to do with fostering and supporting an inner agency commitment to working together. Some of it is as simple as just making a commitment to having regular inter-agency meetings. At the caseworker level to deal with specific cases and at higher levels up to deal with more systematic or systemic issues or more policy oriented issues. Related to that, designate a liaison within each system to act as a facilitator for personnel from the other systems. It can be someone in the prison who will help locate mom or someone in the child welfare system who will help locate the kid or someone in the prison who will like, tell you if you’re going to call and you need to arrange for some special visitation, who will help you do that. To regularly collect information that reveals the overlap between the two systems. Because we all have to keep making arguments to the higher ups about why we should do this and what difference it will make in the narrow concerns that that person carries around with them professionally. So in other words, like how many children in placement do have an incarcerated parent right now? And if you look at that you might look at more specialized caseloads. It might make visitation a little bit easier.

Developing manuals and developing cross-training so that staff and the child welfare system have a basic understanding of the operations demanded of the criminal justice system and vice versa. Just what are the basics of the child welfare system. I mean, I operated in criminal justice and public service for a couple of decades without ever like focusing on oh yeah, child protective, oh yeah, preventive. Let alone permanency planning. I’m discovering that my colleagues in child welfare similarly don’t know about arraignment and bail and parole and the difference between parole and probation. Why that makes any difference in terms of what they’re trying to do with the family.

Those kinds of manuals can be accompanied by a directory of key personnel in each system. You know, like who you need to call if you need to troubleshoot a problem in the child welfare system. Who should you call if you want to arrange a visit at that particular prison. Um, so we in Maryland worked on publishing a directory of correctional facilities that included maps and directions. The hours and rules governing visitation. Phone calls, mail to prisoners, a description of the programs that were available in the prison. Child welfare often can give credit for the parenting program that occurred in the prison. And a contact person within the facility. We suggest that you conduct regular collaborative case conferences and in fact we found that in Maryland child welfare was willing to do discharge planning of women leaving Jessup who had children in care. You know, so there was no criminal justice capacity for doing that, but at least it was a way of plugging that gap for those people. And their frustration was getting those people involved before the women left Jessup. They were loosing them.

***End of transcript***