Family & Corrections Network
The
Second North American Conference on
Fathers Behind Bars and on the Street
November 6-8, 2002 St. Louis, MO
The Story of Many, Often Invisible Families
by Liz Gaynes
Thanks to FCN – since 1984, FCN has been a resource for me, my family, and the Osborne Association.
I share with the permission of my family, especially with the permission of the man I married in 1976, Jomo Davis.
We appreciate the opportunity to share our experience, but on behalf of millions of wives, partners, children of prisoners, we have more to offer than our experience - we are not the warm up act, the anecdote, the sad story. But we do have a story, one that needs telling, because it is the story of many, often invisible, families.
My children – Ari and Emani – grew up in prison visiting rooms. I have taken them to visits in a dozen different jail and prison visiting rooms. And the scores of visits have not reduced the stress that precedes every visit, and the sadness that follows it, year after year.
I have spent hundreds of hours waiting on lines with (mostly) women, and as some of you suspect – yes we DO have a secret handshake, we DO teach each other how to get the most from a visit or a phone call, and we CAN keep a secret
Nowhere in my life is it more clear to me that our prison system, the way we incarcerate, and the way we ship prisoners from place to place, with no regard for their family connections, is the single clearest descendent of chattel slavery. Our country’s legacy of chattel slavery lives today on Virginia’s State Farm, and throughout our prison system.
It’s not all bad. My children were mentored by many individuals, including formerly imprisoned men, their father’s comrades who came home before he did, as well as extended family and friends
But the story is more than the experience, it is what we learned from it, and what we did with what we learned:
Emani’s father has been locked up since 1984 in the Commonwealth of Virginia. He has been turned down for parole 6 times, the most recent being just a few weeks ago. Before he got locked up, he was – although we were separated – a loving father. When he got locked up, I told him this was not going to be an excuse to drop out of his children’s lives or be relieved of his obligations.
I believed he was not relieved of his duties as a father. I expected him to participate in raising his children, and he did. We entered into a covenant, as important to us as marriage vows, about how we would raise our children. Jomo and I both did what we could to help our children cope with the stigma, shame, and upset of seeing their father locked up, treated like a child or a monster, and being away – missing from the moments when we all want our parents. When I began looking for support in doing this, back in the 80’s, it was pretty thin pickings.
When I tried to turn to “professionals” for guidance, they told me that they would treat the incarceration of a father like any other “abandonment”. But I knew it wasn’t. I found wonderful therapists like Dr. A. J. Franklin and Dr. Jaime Inclan, men of color with experience with families who had been through this. From Jaime Inclan, for example, I learned that sometimes children want to “wait” for their parents to come home and don’t want to grow up before that time, so they can still have their parents take care of them when they do come home, and this sometimes causes them to delay their development and growth.
It helped me understand some of my children’s resistance to growing up, and it helped their father have different kinds of conversations with them (don’t promise them activities that young children like, talk to them about being adults together).
We learned a lot from this experience, mostly that it was in fact possible to be a father from prison, but we had little impact on improving the situation for visits and prison programs in Virginia.
Luckily, I lived in NY, where Attica had opened up the prisons and I was lucky enough to have among my friends and colleagues, not only ex-prisoners, but also prison wardens and corrections officials who, as fathers themselves, were interested in my experience and believed me when I said it didn’t have to be that way
I was in the fortunate position of having been a lawyer for several years at New York’s Prisoners Legal Services agency, and then director of the Osborne Association, an old (established in 1931) and respected nonprofit that serves prisoners, former prisoners and families.
We began FamilyWorks in New York State men’s prisons in 1986. We didn’t have a curriculum. Everything we saw being done elsewhere was either for women, or for fathers in the community or middle class fathers. At that time, there were no comprehensive parenting programs in any men’s state prison.
So we made it up. We developed a parenting curriculum for incarcerated fathers that runs 4 months, that now has hundreds of graduates, that has been evaluated, and that makes a huge difference in the lives of the men who take it. But we were not willing to offer a course without significant family services attached to it, both inside and out. At the time we started, there were no children’s centers in men’s prisons, but we learned from the women. We built beautiful children’s centers in three visiting rooms, equipped with games and toys and computers, staffed by inmate caregivers and one civilian from Osborne, providing an opportunity for fathers to visit with their children in a very different environment.
And we began doing outreach to families, in the visiting rooms, on the buses, and in community organizations, and found – some of you! Osborne has sites in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, and is able to serve families and returning prisoners throughout New York City, offering a wide range of services including drug treatment, job placement, HIV services, etc.
A couple of years ago, realizing that a lot of families will not come to us for services, we established a Hotline for our Family Resource Center. This is a toll-free Hotline for New York’s prison families, staffed by volunteers who are all former prisoners and family members. Through this phone hotline, we can offer families support, answer questions about everything from prison transportation to information about disciplinary proceedings.
We didn’t use the word “re-entry”. That would have sounded like what an astronaut did when he landed. We just prepared for fathers hitting the streets. Since that time, my standing offer to the hundreds of graduates of FamilyWorks programs, to take them out to lunch if they call me when they get out, has gotten me dozens of lunches with people hitting the streets.
I’ve been in dozens of support groups, taught dozens of parenting classes, sat with dozens of families before and after release. Although I think I know quite a lot about what is wanted and needed for successful transition for people who have been in prison and their families, at the end of the day, I am just a family member, and what I know doesn’t seem to count for as much as one published “study” that purports to follow a few guys around and asks a few questions.
But I’m grateful for the studies that show that people with strong family ties do better. It has enabled our work to seem more legitimate.
The premise of our work with incarcerated fathers and their children and families is simple:
· Children love their parents, and parents love their children
· People can be bad citizens but good parents
· Incarcerated fathers can provide much of what children NEED from them, while in prison
· Relationships between fathers and the mothers of their children have a profound impact on kids – men need to learn how to support their kids’ caregivers
· In most cases, contact between incarcerated fathers and their children has, or could have, a positive impact on men and their children.
These principles make sense to me both as a family member and as an experienced practitioner. I continue to notice, of course, that when I speak as the director of the largest Multi-Service Nonprofit Criminal Justice organization in the state of New York, this opinion carries some weight. When I say merely that this makes sense to me as a family member, I must deal with a different kind of skepticism and stigma. I appreciate the opportunity to come here today to speak in both my roles, and hope that someday, all the sources of my experience and knowledge are equally recognized, as they have always been at FCN and among many of you here today.
Thank you.
Contact: Liz Gaynes, The Osborne Association, 36-31 38th Street, Long Island City, NY 11101-1612.