Family & Corrections Network

The Fifth North American Conference on the Family & Corrections

General Session

Tuesday, September 15, 1998 - 8:30 - 10:00 AM [Auditorium]

Carol Burton

Announcements: There has been a change in the presentation that will be held today at 2:45. It was previously titled Welcome to the Matthew House, The Effects of Incarceration on Families. The presenter is now Don Ranham. He is a Yale graduate student. The topic will not be The Matthew House, but he will talk about the effects of incarceration on the family.

Secondly, there will be box lunches. You will need to pick the lunches up by 12:15 p.m. After that time, I am sure they will move them and you will have a difficult time finding lunch.

All of our workshops will be recorded. It is important that you speak into the microphone and speak loudly, otherwise the presenter will need to remember to repeat the question. There will be copies of these tapes available as we go.

We have Julia Farrell here today. Julia is developing a documentary film on women who are in relationships with offenders or males who are incarcerated or previously incarcerated, and she is looking for volunteers to interview for her documentary. You can find Julia usually at the back of the room or outside of the door.

As the day goes on I will be conducting other announcements, so please forward them to me. With no further ado, I would like to introduce our president and founder of Family and Corrections Network, Jim Mustin.

Jim Mustin (edited remarks): Thanks very much. I’m really overwhelmed to be here. It takes a couple of years, it seams, to plan one of these things and bring everyone together. I am always kind of stunned when I look out there and you people have actually arrived and this is happening.

We have got a lot of great folks here…We have people from all over who have all sorts of valuable things to share. I wonder who had the closest trip. If anyone is from Bethesda raise your hand. No. Who thinks they had the shortest trip to get here. Is some from Baltimore, perhaps? Yes. See the desk up front and they will give you an FCN button for coming the shortest distance. I wonder who came the farthest. Is anyone from outside the United States here. I know there are some folks from New Zealand. We some other folks from the UK. We have a Mr. Hoffmann from Israel. We have someone from Australia and Canada. We had several other people coming from Canada, it was a whole contingent, but there was an air strike by Northwest Airlines and Air Canada, and several folks canceled

A prospective of a person from another country and another culture can be extremely valuable. I encourage you to take advantage if we have presenters here from New Zealand and from Israel.

How many people are locked up in the United States today? Who knows? 1.8 million people are locked up. When we started FCN it was 1983 I was horrified that we were approaching half a million people locked up in the United State. The latest figure os 1.8 million.

How many families of offenders does that involve? No one really knows, because there hasn’t been an efficient way of counting them. If each person in prison has five people connected to them, that puts us around nine or ten million family members. There are as many as four times that who are on probation or parole, or under some type of court supervision. What about the people that aren’t under supervision currently, but have had an incarceration experience in their family?

How did Family and Corrections Network get started and what does it do? I was a family counselor in the juvenile courts in 1974 to 1979. I sort of burned out on family counseling and went to the Virginia Department of Corrections Academy for Staff Development where I started learning about people in prison. I got fascinated with the idea, what about the families of the prisoners and other adult offenders.

I went to the library and started looking for information on this and I found like nothing, nothing. I couldn’t find anything. I looking into textbooks on corrections, there wasn’t anything on families at all. Then one day I hit this thing called the Holt-Miller Report, research in California by the Department of Corrections. It reviewed the literature on family visiting and family ties for the past 50 years. It found that prisoners that maintained family ties will do better when they get out. To me this meant offender family who stay in touch perform a rehabilitative service, and they’re not charging us for it.

So I started talking with different people like Barbara Bloom who was with Centerforce. I said, let’s form an organization. Let’s get this information out there. We kept on going for a grant, but never got one. After three years of that I said: We’re not going to get a grant, so we’re just going to do it. So Family and Corrections Network was founded without a grant. We just started getting information and publishing it and asking people to pay us for the publications. It’s been a volunteer effort, sort of paying its own way and almost no grants involved as long as we’ve gone.

How do you get information on families of prisoners? Ed Hostetter, one of our board members suggested using the internet. Now, through our website, anybody can go into any public library, in the U.S. at least, they all as far as I know have free internet access setup in public libraries...

So I thank you very much. Sandy Barnhill, another board member of family and corrections network is going to introduce our keynote speaker.