Jail time should account for kids
Emani Davis sipped her coffee at the Buttercup restaurant in Oakland, Calif., on Monday morning as she considered her answer. I had asked what she thought of the plea bargain struck between the U.S. attorney general and Lea and Andrew Fastow, the multimillionaire couple charged with a slew of felonies in the Enron scam. The Fastows likely will be allowed to serve their sentences one after the other, so one parent will be able to stay home with their two young sons.
“My first reaction was complete outrage,’ she said.
I was surprised. Isn’t this how she wants the system to work, for prosecutors and judges to take children into account when sentencing parents?
“Yes, but I don’t think this case will set a standard,’ Davis said. “This is how they deal with two rich white people. They are still not going to care about the black mother in Oakland who sold drugs.’
Davis knows about children and prison. She remembers waiting all day for her father to show up at her sixth-grade graduation. He had been in prison since she was 6 years old, but Emani had convinced herself he would come home that day. Sixth grade marked, for her, the end of childhood, and wasn’t that enough time to be without her father?
For a year after the graduation, Emani refused to drive the nine hours with her mother from their home in New York to the prison in Virginia. But she missed him. He was her father. She loved him. When she began visiting again, she was old enough to wonder why there were no games in the visiting room, why inmates were so often imprisoned far from home.
Emani is now 25. Her father is still behind bars in Deerfield Correctional Facility in Virginia. And, in her job with the California prison-reform group Centerforce, she’s trying to change a system that is breathtakingly indifferent to children whose parents are imprisoned.
The Fastow children will soon join the more than 2 million children in America who have a parent behind bars. According to Amnesty International, a recent U.S. study found more than half of the children of women prisoners did not visit their mothers while they were incarcerated. Over 60 percent of the children who didn’t visit lived more than 100 miles from the prison where their mother was in prison.
“Children do the time, too, and they’re innocent,’ Davis said. “But the system deals with them as an extension of the way they treat the inmates.’
Only 13 percent of law enforcement personnel even ask whether an arrestee has dependent children.
Although national statistics aren’t available, California’s police protocols — or lack thereof — seem representative. By April, Adachi expects to hire a social worker in the PD’s office assigned specifically to coordinate the needs of children of parents in the county jail, the first of its kind in a public defender’s office.
Allotting resources to children of convicted criminals isn’t about being soft on crime, or about enriching the lives of people in prison. They screwed up. They’re paying the price.
This is about common sense and common decency. By fostering the connection between parent and child, by offering parenting classes and allowing parents to put the lessons into practice during their children’s visits, by making inmates take responsibility for the damage they have done to their children, we send home stronger, more nurturing parents who have a fighting chance of keeping their own children out of trouble.
“I look like the poster child of children of incarcerated parents,’ said Davis, a college graduate who speaks on the issue all over the country. “Even now, when I go inside San Quentin to work with the inmates, it’s overwhelming. I don’t see the cold-blooded criminals other people see. I see my father in all of them.”
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].)