Love under lock and key

A new book says the 2.4 million children who have parents behind bars are the real victims of America's prison boom.

By Sarah Karnasiewicz

Nov 15, 2005 | In debates about America's swelling prison system, a shadow population often remains unmentioned: the children of the convicted. But in a new book, "All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated," journalist and activist Nell Bernstein lifts the cloak of invisibility from prisoners' families -- and challenges the criminal justice system to stop punishing kids for their parents' crimes.

In the book, readers are introduced to Susana, 15, who has hugged her father only once but faithfully sends Father's Day cards inscribed with Bible verses to his cell at San Quentin. Seven-year-old Anthony has been set adrift in the foster care system since his mother had her parental rights terminated after shoplifting a Bic lighter from a grocery store. And there's Carl Metz, whose mother is serving three life terms for dealing cocaine, and who dreams of rapping on BET, wearing a "Free Danielle Metz" T-shirt.

Meticulously reported and sensitively written, Bernstein's book draws upon a decade of research and astounding personal interviews. Rather than abstracting the issue, she lets her child narrators lead readers through each stage of the criminal justice system -- beginning with the piercing shock of a parent's arrest and the arbitrary punishment of sentencing, through the humiliation of searches in sterile prison visiting rooms, into the maze-like mess of foster care. Kids and parents may dream of reunification, but Bernstein shows readers how often the cruelties of incarceration continue even after a parent is released.

Despite these grim realities, Bernstein -- a former Soros fellow who writes occasionally for Salon and is a Mother Jones contributor -- remains hopeful that change is coming. She scours the country in search of advocates who are working to improve the prison system's treatment of families and highlights programs that model a more humane approach to crime and punishment. She entreats readers to understand that it is not prisons themselves that dissolve family bonds -- but the application of justice without empathy. "We are able to lock people up ... only so long as we see them as useless," Bernstein writes. "But the majority of prisoners are mothers and fathers: they are needed in the most fundamental way."

Bernstein spoke with Salon by phone from her California home about the unbreakable bonds between children and parents, how Hurricane Katrina has devastated already-fragmented families, and why she believes prison is the modern-day equivalent of slavery.

Your book is about prison, but it touches on so many other issues -- drug sentencing reform, criminal justice, foster care, child welfare, and family rights.

Even though I've been working on this topic directly for about five years, the idea behind the book really began to grow five years before that -- and it didn't come out of an interest in criminal justice per se, but rather an interest in family. I spent almost a decade editing a youth newspaper -- and that was mostly in the 1990s, which of course was the "family-values" decade. If you think back to the 1992 Republican convention with Dan Quayle, you remember there was a growing public rhetoric around family values -- and the idea was that a lack of those values was attacking the American culture. At the same time, I was working in an office full of young people who were really fighting tooth and nail for family but were facing really intense pressures that made it difficult to maintain those connections. It was clearly not that they didn't value them.

It was just one of those cultural moments when the gap between rhetoric and reality got a little too big to stomach. And then right in the middle of that work, while I was doing some reporting on foster care, I met this kid named Ricky. Now, I thought I was interviewing him about foster care, so I asked how he came to be in the system and he told me the story -- which is in the book -- about being 9 years old, at home with his mother and his baby brother, when the police came and took away his mother and just left him there. Ricky spent two weeks taking care of a baby in an empty apartment before someone noticed. And hearing that made me realize how much of a role the criminal justice system was playing in the forcible disruption of families and also how completely invisible these kids were.

Really the statistics are staggering. In the book you say one in 33 of all American kids and one in eight African-American kids currently have a parent behind bars. How can they still be invisible?

The other number that really stands out for me is that one in 10 kids has a parent that is either in jail, on probation, or on parole. So if you think about the number of kids who have had or will have this experience, it is almost inconceivable.

How can they still be invisible? Well, that's something I've been struggling with. There was a story I saw just a few weeks ago in Police Chief Magazine...

Wait, did you say "Police Chief"?

Yeah, I know, people have asked me if I subscribe, but no, that's just the kind of thing people send you when you write about this stuff. But anyway, the article looked at the issue of how to deal with children at the time of arrest from a liability perspective, and ran through some cases that had made their way to the courts.

There was one case I knew about that really set the precedent for police liability, in which a man was pulled over for speeding and then left his three nephews alone in the car by the side of the freeway. And in that instance the boys wandered out onto the freeway, so the courts did find police liability. But there was another case that I hadn't known about where police pulled a woman over because her 2-year-old wasn't in a car seat and she had a couple of older kids in the car too. Then, when police ran her license they found that she was driving with a suspended license, so they arrested her -- but left the three kids, including the 2-year-old, behind.

So I read that, and I just sat there and tried to figure out how 10 minutes ago the police officers had cared enough about the welfare of that 2-year-old to pull his mother over because she needed to have him in a car seat -- but then the moment she crossed over and was arrested and became an "offender," suddenly her child didn't need or deserve even the most basic protections. So that's how these kids stay invisible.

But why do we treat them this way? In a way that's one of the central mysteries I explore in the book, and I haven't quite answered it yet. But I think that it comes down to this idea of American individualism, and our obsession with individual responsibility and just desserts and that retributive model of criminal justice, and the lack of imagination that makes us think the only way that we can deal with everything from writing a bad check to carrying a bag of marijuana is to pull people out of their communities and isolate them. That's a really profound mind-set and it's a mind-set that doesn't allow for the reality that people are connected to one another, and are part of families and communities that are disrupted when we use isolation as our main mechanism of correction.

Next Page: We have to keep these kids invisible because if we really saw them, we'd have to profoundly change how we do business

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