Pre-Release Family Services - The Cleveland Federal Probation Office Response to the Impact of Incarceration on the Family
Donna Marie Kaminsky, Auditorium
Tuesday, September 15, 1998, 2:45 - 4:00 PM
Koenning
I can’t even see you back there. Everyone can hear? My name is Keith Koenning and I’m the chief probation officer with the federal court in Cleveland. My role here today is to place some context to this presentation by Donna Marie Kaminsky, and you’ve read about it in your program.
Let me tell you just a little bit about why we’re doing it. The probation office in the Northern District of Ohio covers the northern half of the state, about forty counties, so it’s a large geographical area, but a relatively small office because the federal system of course, is relatively small compared to the local and state jurisdictions. We supervise all persons released from federal prisons to those forty counties. It’s now as many of you know, called supervised release. It used to be parole and our job is to enforce the conditions imposed by the court on those terms of release or parole as it previously was known.
In a business sense, we are as a probation office competitors with the bureau of prisons and so, every time we fail as probation officers or parole officers, we give more business to the bureau of prisons, the federal bureau of prisons and as the, in my job, my job is to reduce that failure and so when we looked at that, one of the things that we knew and there’s enough research to show that, that makes a difference is what the family structure is like to that inmate who’s returning to the community.
The bureau of prisons spends four billion dollars a year on prison services in the federal government. Four billion, which isn’t a lot of money in the federal government, but it’s a lot of money and that four billion is spent on 120,000 inmates. I think that’s less than the state of Texas has in prison, but that’s four billion committed to the 120,000 persons who have committed federal crimes and who are in prison today. So, what we wanted to do and what I wanted to do is to see how we could spend some program money and some resources in developing something for the families on the outside who are left behind when those persons are committed to federal prison. So, for example, if four billion is spent on the 120,000, what kind of resources could be spend on family members. And I don’t mean to suggest that money is, equates to quality work in the community, but it doesn’t hurt.
So, four or five years ago, we started looking at this and we did some research and Donna Marie will tell you about that, we believe that whatever we do should be grounded in factual material. We believe that what we do will demonstrate effectiveness. We are not doing this in Cleveland because we’ve been asked to, we’re not doing it because we’ve been told to. We’re the only district to my knowledge that’s undertaking a program of this kind at this time in the system. We have legal authority to do so because all the federal probation offices, by law are to assist prisoners during the six months prior to the release from prison. We believe that’s the authority for us to be doing this work with the families prior to release from prison.
I’m convinced as an now older probation officer, I’ve been in the federal probation system for twenty five years, that this is an area where we’ve got to do more. We’ve got to work closely with the community, with volunteers, with the educational system, the health system, and for us not to be doing these things, is really staring failure in the face, so we’re hopeful about our little program in Cleveland. This is our response to what we see as a real need.
We’re very happy to be at this conference and I’m happy to introduce Donna Marie Kaminsky who has been with our office for several years. She’s been developing this program on a full-time basis and then doing some actual work as well with families and children and others related to inmates, so without going any further I’ll turn it over to Donna Marie and at the end of the program, hopefully we’ll have time for questions and any discussion. Thank you.
Kaminsky
Thank you Keith. I’d like to welcome all of you to our presentation and to tell you that our perspective is as Mr. Koenning said from the federal perspective. And so, to do that, I wanted to do just an overview briefly of what the federal system is, the federal judicial system is. As you are probably aware, there are two kinds of courts in the United States, the federal and the state. The federal courts of course are established by the U.S. government. And there are approximately 1,500 federal court judges. And about one million cases are brought each year to the federal courts. The state courts of course are established by the state or county or city within those states and there are almost 30,000 court judges and the number of state cases exceeds twenty seven million a year. And that does not include traffic and parking violations. In the federal system there are three kinds of courts that’s established by Congress. The first one is the district courts, and Congress has divided the country into ninety four federal judicial districts each with it’s own U.S. district court. The district courts are the federal courts where the cases are tried and each district has a separate bankruptcy court.
The second kind of court in the federal system is the court of appeals and congress again has grouped the ninety four districts into twelve regions called circuits or courts of appeal and that’s what this slide illustrates. I also have made a handout which I’ll put available on the stage after the presentation in which you can come up and look to locate your state and which circuit you are in and perhaps what federal district you are in as well. There’s also a federal circuit which covers the entire country. If a person loses a trial in a district court, that person can appeal his or her case to the court of appeals which will review that case to see if the federal judge applied the federal law correctly. And you’re looking for twelve, because as I mentioned twelve and if you see the numbers there’s only eleven and that’s because the DC circuit is on the side and that’s the twelfth. And finally, there’s the supreme court in Washington DC, the most famous federal court. And cases from the courts of appeals or from the state supreme courts can be appealed to the supreme court. But the supreme court only hears a small percentage of the cases that are presented for them for review.
Our district as Mr. Koenning said is in the Ohio northern district and we’re in the sixth circuit. All federal probation officers are part of the judiciary. We are not law enforcement. We work for the federal judges and our work is primarily three fold. First, to do a pre-sentence investigation prior to the time of sentencing and at the federal level those pre-sentence reports are very detailed. In addition to a criminal history, one of the aspects of the pre-sentence report is a family history, a detailed family history tracing the family of origin and also any treatment circumstances that may have arisen in the individuals life. The second work of the probation office is to supervise offenders when they’ve been released from prison or when they’ve been put on parole. The third aspect is the prerelease services. As most of you are probably aware here who are attending the conference the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and I learned today in the presentation earlier that New Zealand has the second highest.
Between 1980 and 1994, this is federal prison population, the prison population more than tripled. In August of 1995 the department of justice reported that there were 5.1 million Americans or almost 2.7 percent of the adult population were under some form of correctional supervision. In 1980 the federal population was 19, 025. In 1993 it mushroomed to 89, 586, in 1995 the figure again swelled to 100, 315. That figure, 1997 was December 31, 1997, it swelled to 112, 973 and the most recent figure is as of August 28, 1998 is 121, 263. Incredible statistics.
If the recent incarceration rates remain unchanged, an estimated one of every twenty persons will serve time in prison during their lifetime. I think that’s a staggering statistic and one that should really concern us very seriously. In Ohio northern, we really have a small population. We have a 1,150 federal prisoners. These prisoners are as Mr. Koenning had suggested before, they’re housed by the bureau of prison and they’re housed in ninety one federal facilities throughout the United States and I don’t have a slide for it on our projection, but I did bring a map that indicates the location of the various federal prisons.
Each of these facilities have one of five security ratings. They are either a minimum security facility which is also known as a federal prison camp, a low security, medium security, or a high security also known as U.S. penitentiaries. There are also two administrative facilities which have special missions and those missions are the detention of non-citizens or pre-trial offenders. The treatment of inmates with serious or chronic medical problems or the containment of extremely dangerous or violent or escape prone inmates. Additionally to add to this statistic as many of you are aware throughout the country, the trend is to build more prisons and the bureau of prisons is in the process of constructing eight more prisons in several different states and those eight prisons will accommodate a total capacity of 7,221 additional persons.
Why do we have this increase in incarceration? Well, there’s really no easy answer to that. It’s very complicated and I’m only going to suggest a few reasons and they’re not comprehensive by any means. The first one is the increase in federal law enforcement. The element in the country is to crack down on crime and so there have been increases in federal law enforcement and in laws that pertain to that. At the federal level, there are also longer sentences. Many of you are aware that there are mandatory minimums so that an individual may go to prison for a mandatory five years or ten years, or fifteen years. I mention that because that’s also part of the rationale that we looked at at our office when we were considering the kind of programming that needed to be available for families. This longer sentence meant that parents were separated from their children from their families for longer periods of times, and that presented a problem area for us that we needed to look at to see if there was something that we could do to; we know not solve the problem, but at least solve some of the issues that may be presented by that situation. There are also increased penalties for career offenders. You are familiar with the three strikes you’re out mentality. There has been a concomitant reduction in good time allowances, and finally there’s elimination of parole at the federal level, especially.
According to a 1991 bureau of justice statistics study, the study found that 68% of the federal inmates were serving sentences for drug offenses. That’s compared with the 21% at the state level. That statistic recently has gone higher to up to 65%. When someone serves a federal sentence also, you may be aware of this, they must serve 85% of their sentence. There’s no parole. They will serve 85% of their sentence, so if a person is sentenced to five years or 60 months, that individual serves 51 months before they’re released. They’re sentenced to 10 years or 120 months, they’re gonna serve 102 months or 8 1/2 years. Now, all of this as we know and as we’ve been hearing throughout the conference, has an impact on the family.
When a man or woman has been sentenced to prison, the entire family suffers, especially as we’ve heard, the children. The sudden and involuntary separation from the family creates economic, social, psychological, physical and mental health issues, and visitation and family separation issues. I’m only going to do a brief overview of what those issues are. I know other people in the workshop are presenting in depth studies of this and mine is just a cursory overview.
To give the setting for the research that we’ve done to come up with the kind of program that we are offering in our district. The economic issues we’ve heard. Often there’s a loss of income. If the offender is male and the female left behind was the wife of the significant other, if it were two family income now it’s a one family income. If it’s the female left behind, often she may not have been in a really high wage earning job and had children involved so now we have another issue of not only does the woman have to find a job but she also has to find child care.
The loss of income also results in loss of housing and that’s been an issue that we have worked with in our district. In California, the study says that 75% of the families who visit a parent in prison have incomes below the federal poverty level. There are social impacts as well. The families of inmates experience the same emotion as the inmates. There’s anger, there’s disbelief, there’s grief, maybe close friends start to drift away. The support system starts to crumble, and even in intact families where families want to support each other and want to support the person who’s incarcerated, we find that there’s stress and strain on those relationships as well because there’s differences of opinions about how those persons should be supported.
And then, the question comes up too, what do we do with the children? Should the children visit? Shouldn’t they visit? How do we explain this situation to the youngsters, especially when we’re dealing with youngsters under the age of six. Often the children are rejected by the immediate family because they hear comments such as, "well I told you your old man wasn’t any good anyhow". Or "I told you your old lady wasn’t any good anyhow" or "we knew that was gonna happen and if you don’t straighten up, you’re gonna be just like your mom, or you’re gonna be just like your dad". Or "you know there’s just no hope for you." So, there are issues that the youngsters have to deal with as well as the fact that their friends and schoolmates know about it.
I have one situation particularly with this with a family that I work with and this particular situation these were adult children but the woman that I work with she was coming to our support group. She had a brother who was incarcerated for life and a son that was going to be incarcerated for 20 years. And she said to me "Donna Marie, the worst thing that happens, it would be one thing if we only had to go through this once," but it was a conspiracy case so there were 18 other co-defendants. She says, "but every time another co-defendant is sentenced, it’s either on the news or in the newspaper. All the other persons are listed. All the other family addresses are listed and she said so we don’t do this once. We do this 18 times." She said "it’s just too much to bear".
There are psychological issues as well. We’ve heard some of those from other presenters. There’s the separation issue for the parent and the child. And, unfortunately and maybe ironically we have the situation where often when a parent is incarcerated that parent is leaving behind young children generally under the age of 13, under the age of 6, just at a time when that child really needs the social support of the family the most. But, that’s the separation that’s going to occur.
And, studies have also shown that in order to satisfy this family need, some of the children tend to join gangs because their social and family needs can be satisfied by that. A rather gloomy bureau of justice report predicts that within ten years the baby boomers children, and there are one million between the ages of 14 to 17, that 30% or 30,000 of those children will be involved in the criminal system.
That’s a horrendous statistic. 30% or 30,000 of those children will be involved in the criminal system and the prediction very sadly is that these youngsters will be called super-predators. The reason that they’re calling them that is that there’s been no positive adult presence in the home. There’s been no one there to set limits or to create boundaries for these youngsters. Additionally, studies indicate that children acting out behavior includes truancy, aggressiveness, running away, drug or alcohol use, acting in (which is self-punishing behavior; either burning themselves or cutting themselves), a tendency to daydream, a lack of interest in playing after school, poor performance in school, dropping out of school if they’re teens, and nightmares. And, later on I’m going to give a story about another family that I work with in terms of she just refused to believe that her youngsters who were present at the time of the arrest really knew that the youngsters were in prison. I went to visit her. The presenting problem that I went to visit her about was finding housing for her and in the course of the interview her two youngsters were there. The one little boy was nine and I talked about the family situation and she said his father had been incarcerated for three years and he was having problems with bedwetting still and night-walking (walking and having nightmares at night) and I asked her, I said "have you told your son that his father is in prison?" And she says, "oh no, she says, we’ve kept it a secret, everyone in the family has been really good about it. He thinks his father’s working in the military somewhere." And it, for the longest time, throughout the whole time we worked with this family, we could not convince the mom that she needed to tell these youngsters where the father was and that the father was definitely incarcerated. What was exacerbated by that situation is the youngster was present at the time of the arrest. It was a very violent arrest and she just could not comprehend or chose not to comprehend that this was having a psychological impact on her child.
There are also physical and mental health issues. These families are a high risk group because of the reduced income and because of the stress and strain of the whole procedure as well as the stress and strain of trying to visit and trying to accommodate that, there are serious physical or psychological problems that might have been handled before but probably will not be handled now. Not only due to the lack of income but also to the social stigma that is connected to having someone in prison.
So, we’re really looking at some difficulties there. We did a very informal survey almost a year ago in January. It had some student interns volunteering with us and one of the things that we did is contacted various social service agencies who were working with or who had reported working with children and working with families. And, we explained who we were and what we were doing and we were just doing an informal survey and one of the questions that we asked is in your initial intake interview, if an adult or child reports that one parent is absent from the home, do you ever probe that question anymore? Do you ask the question where is that parent? Is it a situation of separation? or divorce? or death? Do you ever probe it? And they will probe as far as finding whether there’s a separation or divorce and then we ask the question, well do you ever ask the question is the separation due to incarceration? And every single agency reported that they do not ask that question. That’s not part of their consciousness, not part of their intake process. So, we believe that part of our role too will be to do some community education in terms of what are the effects and who are the people that are presenting themselves for services?
And finally, the last issue which is very important is the visitation and family separation issue. When you get a chance to look at this map you’ll see that in our district it was really even increased situation. I understand that state prisons are also at a distance from various families but in our system in our district, up until a year ago we did not have a federal facility in Ohio. So, all of the individuals who are sentenced from our district are sentenced out of state. And the four closest facilities, there was McKeen in Pennsylvania which was a four hour drive, from Cleveland if I’m using Cleveland as the base. There’s Myland in Michigan which is a 3 hour drive, there’s Alderson in West Virginia which is the female facility which is a 6 hour drive and there’s Morgantown in West Virginia which is about a three hour drive too.
So, you see the family separation issue; the ability for the family to get to these facilities is difficult as well. I tell a story that I like to share with you because it made me even more sensitive to the plights of families when they’re visiting is that, as part of my job I’ve been visiting various federal facilities and I have very good directions to these facilities and I’m driving and I’m not under strain to get to that facility, but in two facilities that I was trying to reach, even though I had what were very clear directions, there was one road that I couldn’t find. I went up and down one street and I kept looking for the sign. There was no signs of the facility. I passed it three or four times. Finally I had to stop and ask for directions. I had to ask three or four people where this particular facility was. It was the fourth person who even knew and really I was only a block from it at that point. I share that story from this perspective in that if I as a professional and I’m not having any undue strain to get there. If I’m having difficulty getting there, I can imagine what the families must be enduring who are trying to get there. Making sure that they get there on time, making sure they don’t break any rules that, particularly if it’s the first visit. There’s a lot of stress and strain in trying to get to a location, make sure you do it right and find it. So, it’s something that I’ve experienced and can talk with the families about and this is really an important issue.
With all of this research that we were doing and finding out for ourselves, we decided that we needed to do something even more specific. We wanted to identify now that we had the general statistics, we wanted to find out how did that impact on our particular district. And what we discovered is we did a very brief and informal analysis of our pre-sentence reports. If you remember as I said earlier part of the pre-sentence report has the family history and the family information there as well as is connected with the pre-sentence report is the judgment and commitment order. What we were looking for on the judgment and commitment order is where that person was going to return after incarceration. So we were looking for a return residence in either Kiyahoga county or Lorraine county and we were looking for the term of supervision and the sentence that that individual had.
In 1994 when this was done we looked at one fiscal year from October 1st through September 31st 1994 and we looked at the pre-sentence reports from that year and we sentenced from our district over 600 individuals a year. We were looking at those pre-sentence reports. Our conditions or criteria were that the individual had to be returning to Kiyahoga or Lorraine county and that they had to have a sentence of 15 months or longer. The reason why they had to have a sentence of 15 months or longer at that point we were in the stage of helping to form a community based organization called family bridges and we were looking for a program that was for individuals that could benefit by that program.
The number that we show there 214, is really a small figure because when we were going through the pre-sentence reports we excluded any pre-sentence report that did not have a JNC attached to it. So we ended up really only looking at four or five months out of the year and we got a figure of 214 individuals that would be returning to Kiyahoga county.
I also want to make an aside here, that’s consistent with our statistics as well. We know that the largest number of persons who are incarcerated come from Kiyahoga county and that is true on the state level as well. The Ohio state institutions there’s 47,000 individuals incarcerated and approximately 11,000 a little over 11,000 come from Kiyahoga county. The remaining 30 some thousand come from the remaining 82 counties. So, that again was our focus as well as the fact that our office is located there. In addition to looking at these particular criteria, there were some other things that we were noted as we looked at that.
Number one, that many of the offenders were experiencing serious marital relationship complications due to their criminal activity. It was a common occurrence for the family members to openly admit drug or alcohol abuse. Not only from the offender but from the family members as well. And also there were financial issues that were noted as a result of the families absence. But what we looked at was the number of children left behind and on the pre-sentence reports, we had 78 offenders of that 122 left behind 177 dependent children. 177 under the age of 18. So, we decided that we had enough information to verify that in fact there was a need in our district. We knew that there would be, but now we wanted to find out what the prisoners themselves would say and how they would describe their needs. So, we did a one page 14 question needs assessment which we sent to the offenders to the facilities where we had the highest number of offenders incarcerated. I just want to share some of those statistics for you here. The needs assessments that we sent out, we sent out 767 questionnaires. We mailed to 711 men and 56 women. We made a concerted effort to contact every woman that was incarcerated from our district because the women population is small anyhow and we knew that the women had special needs.
We were very gratified by the response. We wondered what kind of response we were going to get. We had 338 completed questionnaires returned to us which represents a 44% return rate. That is real extraordinary. I have to say that not only is it extraordinary because of, we didn’t provide postage for them but just because it really demonstrated the need. The women, 86% of the women returned those surveys as well. From that, we found of these questionnaires we found that 353 inmates reported having 585 children under the age of 18 years of age. 80 offenders with 185 children 18 years or older.
This is the breakdown:
- 267 children under the age of 6
- 210 under the age of 13
- 108 under the age of between 14 -18
- 185 over 18 years of age
I might mention because of a point that was made yesterday in the diversity workshop yesterday, when we were looking at children, we did not exclude or focus on the family or origin or the nuclear family. We were looking at children that individuals had from previous relationships or from, whether it was a common law marriage or whether it was a legal marriage or whether there were children from other relationships while the person was married. We included the number of children from each of those. We were not making any distinction on that.
The other question that we asked them is if we had an organization that responded to your needs do you think it would be beneficial and 91% of inmates said yes. We knew we were on the right track. We asked them to identify their own areas of needs. This is what they came up with.
1.visitiation 167, represented how many inmates checked off that area
financial management, employment training and referral, which we’ve heard is a big one, stress management, general emergency assistance, family counseling, housing, child care assistance, child counseling, individual counseling, nutritional information, alcohol and drug counseling, and related alcohol and drug programs, parenting classes, and the last one which was very interesting, dealing with handicapped or disabled family members. I included that question in there because in the cases that I have been working with on a very informal basis. I discovered that many of them, and it was indicated in the pre-sentence reports as well, many of them were dealing with aged parent or with spouses who were had some kind of medical situation, chronic medical situation in which they needed assistance.
62% of the inmates checked one to five areas of needs. 20% of the inmates checked 6 to 10 areas of needs and 5% checked between 11 and 15. We asked them also, we gave them an opportunity to include other areas of concern and they provided us with this information: they wanted help with how to deal with lengthy sentences, how to deal with the transfer to different facilities, the concerns of the single inmate without family, and they wanted family information and orientation to prison life and procedures.
These were things they wanted their families to have. And they of course raised the question of the cost of transportation to the prisons for families with children and on their own they added how to maintain strong family relationships while incarcerated. It’s really a concern. Our needs assessment really corroborated with everything that the literature was indicating at the time and as Jim Mustin had said earlier this morning, in 1994 and 1995 there really wasn’t a lot of literature out there. There was just a small amount of literature .
If you haven’t found this book, one of the books I would refer to you is Children of Incarcerated Parents. It’s edited by Katherine Gable and Denise Johnson and I think Denise Johnson is here today at this conference. I really recommend it because it gives you in depth information about the impact that incarceration has on parents, on wives and on children. I’ll leave it available for you to look at.
Another resource is Crime and Punishment in America by Elliot Curry and he offers some alternatives. If you’re looking for some additional information whether you’re writing grants or just some additional background information I found both of these sources very very helpful. So, with all of that information what should we do with it?
Well, we really work very hard to help community based organization called Family Bridges to form, which it has formed and is still in it’s developmental stages. Then our office undertook Pre-release Family Services. This is our mission statement: to provide information, education, support services to the families of bureau prison system inmates during the last six months of imprisonment and following release. You notice at the following of release we do not give a time line there because it’s a voluntary program and we believe that we will stay with the families for as long as they need us. For some persons that will be short term. Once their physical needs are met and some support programs and for others it might be a little bit longer.
We also think that this is really important because the other aspect of doing this is that we want to provide information, education, and training to existing child welfare and human service organizations on the issues that families of the incarcerated persons experience. To go back to the example that I made earlier about some of the human service agencies not being aware of that. Secondly, we hope that our program will open the door for citizen participation in the correctional industrial complex. That in many ways remains closed to those families not directly impacted by it. So, it’s an ambitious program we believe but we think it’s a very necessary program.
What do we do? We offer comprehensive pre-release services. Our first point of contact with the families is at the family orientation. I send a letter to inmates who are going to be released within a two year span. That begins my initial contact. I send the letters to the inmates themselves so that they themselves can know that we’re going to be contacting their families. At this family orientation we use the families that have been identified wither by the inmates or by information that we received from the pre-sentence report and we talk about what happens after prison. The release to the community, who would be released to a halfway house. What are the requirements or the guidelines that concern that? What the home confinement program is. What’s going to happen on supervised release. And we also talk about the home inspection. One of the most important things that happen after the family orientation, and I will tell you that people leave and thank us and say, you know they come with apprehension because they get a letter from the U.S. District Court and they open that letter. They come with maybe a degree of apprehension because they see us a part of the system. After they leave our family orientation thank you very much. I needed to know what was going to happen next, this has been very helpful.
At the family orientation not only do we cover these materials, these questions here and answer their questions, and I provide the liaison, we also offer support services. Our support services are a monthly support group. After they’ve attended our orientation I meet on a monthly basis off site, not at the probation office, and we discuss the issues that affect (particularly women but there have been some men, some parents that have come to the group) and we primarily deal with transitional issues. What happens while someone’s incarcerated. The key area, the key problem area that we discover is once the inmate whether male or female gets to the halfway house, those are other transitional issues that become apparent at that point and they need some additional support. We also have a skip program which I think Debbie Key developed from the PACT program(Parents and Children Together) we’re using that material and it’s support for incarcerated parents all though we’ve expanded that to at risk kids in general and that program is going to have it’s pilot this fall in an inner city school. We do referrals to community agencies that can provide the families with whatever needs they have. I offer very direct service in the sense that I will transport persons that need to be there. We do a case management kind of referral. We don’t just call them up or give them the phone number. We actually go with them. I set up the appointments. I go with them if I need to go with them. We do some follow up to make sure the needs have been met and then I keep a contact or a follow-up with them to see if any other needs are apparent. It’s not just a referral. We’ve offered and haven’t done yet life skill classes in all the areas that those inmates have mentioned. Those would be areas that would be concern to them, stress management, nutritional, parenting skills. We haven’t been able to implement that yet, but that also was part of our vision. Finally we offer family reunification. On the brochure I have here I call it reintegration. I think that term just kind of scares people off so I’m changing the term to family reunification. I am dealing with that on an informal basis again with women in the support group. In that way I still have not set down with an inmate and a family member but am dealing with it now from the point of view of the family members themselves and the issues that they identify that they need support with in this time.
Finally, the question that we ask, that you may ask is why bother, why do this at all? We believe the families, all families but especially families at risk need support in order for children to develop and mature in healthy ways. Stronger family ties for prisoners as research has indicated is a critical ingredient for success when a person is released. It is also prevention for intergeneration of criminality. Families or prisoners in crisis deserve support. We are hoping that our program, which tries to address those issues in the two year span before a person is released will help that person when they’re released at the halfway house and released from that to actually make the successful transition to the community and become successful not only within themselves but with their families as well. As our programs develop we will continue to do research of the effectiveness of our programs. We believe that we will find a lower than average return to prison for those persons whose families receive appropriate services during the period of imprisonment and that families who receive services will during the time of imprisonment will experience a lower rate of incidence that adversely effect and impact the children and family.
Finally, I’d like to close with a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, "Why do this? In a real sense all life is interrelated. All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever effects one directly effects all indirectly." We believe that we really need to make that statement and connect with other persons and with other families. If we don’t, as the African American saying is, It takes a village to raise a child, it takes a whole community to be protective and to be supportive for families who are in crisis. Incarceration is just one type of crisis that families endure. Thank you.
I’m open for some questions at this point.
Question from audience
I think this is wonderful. I don’t know if Barry McCaffrey supports everything you’ve said but if he does hey, that’s terrific. I’d like to ask you if my perceptions are correct. In addition to inmates not in federal system not being placed in institutions closer to their families it’s not only necessarily because the institutions aren’t there but also because of crowding conditions. For example if you have federal institution that is maybe 110% capacity versus thus say that’s Texas and you’re in Ohio and you have one that’s maybe 105 capacity you’re going to be sending them to the one that has less inmates. The other one is if a federal prison is built in a small town somewhere in the state with a very low economic base, the emphasis to have the inmate placed closer to the family really isn’t considered. That’s kind of my impression, that it’s more economically advantageous to place the prisoner there. I’d like to know what you think of those, are my observations correct. I just wondered what I’ve come up with. In general I think it’s great. It’s wonderful to hear you say that and I applaud your effort.
Kaminsky
Thank you. I of course cannot speak officially for the bureau of prisons because I’m not a bureau of prisons employee but I have had some very close contact with them and I can tell you their policy is to place individuals as close to their home as they can. But there are other considerations other than space and one of the considerations is what is their crime? What is their criminal history? Has there been any violence in their criminal history? Do they need aftercare treatment. They look at all of those factors and then they look at what is the facility that can best address those needs and they do try, we’ll say if they can’t place the person close to home during the initial part of the incarceration there’s a very concerted effort to bring those individuals close to home during the last 18 months that they can get them there. So there are, your perceptions are correct, there certainly are overcrowding issues that are a factor but it isn’t the only factor. I think it’s a complicated issue. Thank you for your comments, too.
Question from audience
Yes, could you tell us who are the people who are doing this, what are they qualifications of the people that are doing the pre-release planning.
Kaminsky
I am a staff of one. I am it at this point. I do hope to have, because our program is small and because we’re doing it on a very case by case basis and maybe Mr. Koenning can address that too, but we do intend to enjoin with community agencies and professional volunteers to work with us on the various aspects of this for the direct service part that we can’t perform.
I’d like to add that we’d like to keep this a separate part of the organization. Parole officer side of things. When we begin looking at Family Bridges organization which is a separate non-profit that’s dormant and prepared various grant proposals I think we were looking at all professionally trained.
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