Rough justice for the innocents?
The clamour for harsher prison
sentences is louder than ever,
but in depriving criminals of their
freedom, we’re also depriving
thousands of children of their
parents. Amanda Cropp reports
on the plight of those paying for
crimes they did not commit
N
10
your weekend
FEBRUARY 20, 2010
Illustration: Sharon Murdoch
ew Zealand has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in
the world and by 2016 our inmate population is expected to
hit 10,700.
When Verna McFelin hears statistics like that, her first
thought is not the financial cost of building and staffing new
penal institutions, but the human costs borne by the estimated 23,000
children whose parents will be incarcerated.
McFelin is the CEO of Pillars, an organisation that has helped about
7000 prisoners’ families since she founded it 22 years ago. That move was
prompted by her husband being sent to prison when the youngest of their
four children was just six weeks old. McFelin refers to her work promoting
a crime-free society as a “godly calling” and this short bustling woman with
striking long blonde hair is a tireless advocate for a group that attracts
scant public sympathy and little attention from those in authority.
When Pillars was left off the list of organisations invited to a Ministerial
Drivers of Crime summit last year, McFelin admits to being “pretty peeved”,
but instead of sitting around fuming she wrote a 34-page submission
detailing how extra help for prisoners’ families could make a healthy dent
in our recidivism rate and prevent intergenerational offending.
That submission pulled no punches, describing families dominated by
greed, selfishness and instant gratification. People who spend the proceeds
of crime on drugs, alcohol and gambling rather than food, clothing and
shelter for their children, who are not valued, are poorly parented, and
receive a substandard education.
Rather than write them off as hopeless causes, Pillars provides intensive
social work support to about 70 families in Christchurch and Auckland. As
finances permit, it plans to expand nationwide from a head office tucked
away in an industrial area behind Christchurch’s AMI Stadium.
A child’s drawing on the boardroom wall shows a sad-faced dad staring
through the barred windows of a brown building with menacing dark
clouds overhead, while the rest of the family waves at him longingly from a
neighbouring house. It speaks volumes about the distress kids feel at being
separated from loved ones in prison, something McFelin understands only
too well. She says the worst part of her husband’s imprisonment was the
nine months he spent on remand where the “no touching” rule meant he
couldn’t hold her hand or hug the kids, and she is the first to admit that
crowded prison visiting rooms are hardly conducive to maintaining normal
family relations.
“You almost need counselling skills to communicate with a person in a
visiting room... You’re face to face, you can’t walk away. It’s noisy, there are
security people walking around listening to you – it’s a completely different
environment to being at home.”
McFelin nevertheless managed to keep her marriage intact, and her
family’s first brush with the prison system was its last.
According to overseas research, children of prisoners are up to seven
times more likely to be jailed than their peers and in a US study almost 76
percent of adult inmates reported having had a relative in prison.
The dearth of New Zealand data on this issue is about to be rectified
via a major three-year Pillars’ study of inmates’ children funded with a
$109,000 Lotteries Commission grant. The first-year report, Invisible
Children, concludes that agencies working in the justice system are so
“child-blind” they fail to recognise the collateral damage that arises from
parental incarceration.
The research is based on interviews with 137 prisoners, 46 caregivers
and children of prisoners, and 26 government departments and NGOs. It
indicates that for every inmate, whether they are a parent or not, there are
2.2 children. With 8500 inmates at the time of the survey, this translates to
a “child muster” of 18,000, but researcher Liz Gordon says it could be as
high as 25,500 and they won’t know for sure until the third-year data has
been analysed. Almost half the prisoners surveyed had, as children, lived
with someone who went to prison, mostly fathers, uncles and brothers.
Maori were twice as likely as Pakeha to have a prisoner in the family,
but Gordon says this is not surprising given that Maori are imprisoned at
seven times the rate of Pakeha, and tend to live in large extended families.
There is still considerable debate over the causes of inter-generational
recidivism. One view is that children should be discouraged from attending
court hearings and visiting prisons because it puts them at risk of “imbibing
the prison culture” and being led into a life of crime.
Pillars research to date does not appear to support this because only
three percent of the prisoners surveyed had a lot of exposure to prison life
from a young age, but Gordon cautions that because of the small sample
size more work is needed to identify other influencing factors.
However Invisible Children leaves no doubt that imprisonment of a
parent has a major impact on kids’ lives, beginning with the moment of
arrest, which McFelin says can be extremely traumatic if kids see parents
handcuffed and taken away with no explanation.
Sending a parent to jail can of course bring changes for the better, for
example when a sexually abusive father is punished or the neglected child
of an alcoholic mother finally gets enough to eat. But mostly youngsters
were worse off, and both caregivers and children attributed that to the
absence of imprisoned parents, rather than their criminality.
Many children suffered physical, mental, behavioural and emotional
problems that deteriorated over time, with a small number described as
“walking powder kegs, badly in need of high-quality interventions”. Chronic
bed-wetting, nightmares, anxiety, anger and depression and aggravated
eczema and asthma were common.
In the Hutt Valley, the district health board has targeted families moving
into the area to be near relatives at Rimutaka Prison, but the report says
on the whole government agencies are either unaware of the issues facing
prisoners’ families or ill-equipped to cope with their needs.
Schools and teachers tried to be supportive, but most children seemed
destined to fail academically because they were distracted by concerns
about the absent parent, and boys in particular tended to slip behind.
Children’s education was also disrupted by frequent moves as families
followed prisoners transferred around the country. One family moved 12
times in seven years. Others relocated to get away from the scene of a crime, to
live with family, or because they needed to find cheaper accommodation.
Loss of income, usually the result of the male wage earner being
imprisoned, had dire economic consequences, and 80 percent of families
ended up on benefits. Financial pressure was exacerbated by the need
to pay legal defence bills, prisoners’ debts, costs of travel to prisons, and
buying phone cards so inmates could keep in touch.
McFelin says although ongoing contact is sometimes inappropriate,
such as where a child has been the victim of abuse, prison visits are
generally beneficial for all parties. But the survey showed well over half of
all families lived more than an hour’s drive from the prison so visiting was
often difficult. One family had to leave at 3am to make the 618km trip, and
the visits stopped altogether when assistance with petrol costs dried up.
Even though the Corrections Department tries to place prisoners near
family, McFelin says inmates are sometimes moved to the other end of the
country at short notice when musters “blow out”. Added to that, children
in Child Youth and Family care often have difficulty seeing their parents
because they rely on over-extended social workers and over-burdened
foster parents to arrange visits and accompany them to the prison.
McFelin is championing the idea of a Bill of Rights like that drawn
up by the San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents organisation,
which guarantees children will be kept safe and informed when a parent
is arrested, have the right to see, touch and speak with their parent, are
considered when decisions are made about their parent, and will be well
cared for in their parent’s absence.
Many children suffered physical, mental, behavioural and
emotional problems that deteriorated over time, with a
small number described as “walking powder kegs, badly
in need of high-quality interventions”
She sees no reason why pre-sentence reports should not include
an assessment of the potential effect of a given sentence on offenders’
children, and believes sentencing judges should strive to protect their
interests as much as possible without compromising public safety.
With prison sentences increasing, she says the impact should take into
account the potential damage to children and the associated financial
costs of foster care or welfare payments to caregivers.
McFelin’s recommendations to the Ministerial Drivers of Crime summit
also included a request that five percent of the Corrections Department
budget be allocated to supporting prisoners’ families during and after a
parent’s incarceration. Ideally she’d like all prisons to have family services
co-ordinators to arrange family meetings prior to release to ease the
transition, because having a prisoner rejoin a household after years of
institutional living can be a difficult process.
Not that McFelin is sitting on her hands waiting for authorities to act:
Pillars already has an active mentoring programme to prevent kids from
following in their parents’ footsteps. The organisation dropped social
outings for prisoners’ children in 2003 after outside research showed
that getting groups of high-risk youngsters together increased their
chances of offending. Pillars instead began matching children aged five
to 18 with carefully vetted and trained volunteers who can show them the
advantages of a crime-free lifestyle while doing fun activities that build
their confidence and self-esteem.
“We had a girl of about 11 who’d always dreamt of going to university
but felt that wasn’t possible because her family just didn’t do that sort of
thing. We matched her with a university student who took her out there for
orientation and now that girl feels comfortable about being on a university
campus, so it has opened a door for her.
“We had a very anti-social young man of about eight who called the
police ‘pigs’, and the mentor arranged for him to have a tour of the police
FEBRUARY 20, 2010
your weekend
11
aBOVE Verna
McFelin,
CEO of Pillars:
thinks attitudes to
prisoners’ families
have hardened.
Photo: Kirk Hargreaves
* Names changed
station. He wore a police
hat and talked to police on
a walkie-talkie and now he
wants to be a policeman when
he grows up.”
McFelin arranges for
me to meet 10-year-old
Victoria*, who lives with her
grandparents with one of her seven siblings.
Her mother is dead and served time before
she was born. Her father has been in and out
of prison as long as she can remember – “he
went to prison on my fourth birthday” – and is
on a rehabilitation programme after finishing
his latest stretch.
Victoria’s mentor is Susan*, a young teacher.
The pair get together a couple of hours a week
to cook, swim and watch movies, and Susan
encourages Victoria’s love of drawing with
trips to the art gallery – a place she would
probably never have visited otherwise.
Victoria talks to Susan about what’s going
on at home, says her schoolwork has improved
because of the extra help she receives with
homework, and clearly relishes the chance of
some undivided attention.
For Susan, their friendship means she
can show this bubbly intelligent girl a whole
other world, at the same time role-modeling
how to interact with people, right down to
remembering ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’. But
will it make a difference in the long term? “I
can only hope that one day, something I have
said might cast a shadow of doubt about going
down [the wrong] track, and if it does, I think
it’s all been totally worth while,” says Susan.
In December, with the help of a $15,000
grant from the Paul Newman Foundation
Charity, Pillars launched Just-us, a website
providing online counselling for children of
prisoners, information about court procedures
and prison visiting, and advice for teachers
and others dealing with inmates’ families.
In some communities, having a family
member imprisoned is more readily accepted,
and a caregiver interviewed for the Pillars
study commented that because 15 percent
of the kids attending the local school had
relatives “inside”, her children didn’t stick
out, so they were never bullied.
But in reality there is still a huge stigma
attached to having a “jail bird” in the family.
One girl was so humiliated she said her dad
worked for the government, figuring it wasn’t
a lie because he worked on a prison farm.
McFelin says friends are a lifeline and it’s
devastating if that support is cut off. “A lot
of children lose their friends simply because
the parents of those children don’t want them
mixing with prisoners’ kids. It’s important
that children engage with their peers, and as
soon as that breaks down they don’t want to
go to school, truancy happens, and they drop
out. That begins the spiral downhill.”
McFelin worries that attitudes towards
prisoners’ families have hardened in recent
times and attributes this to the frenzy of
publicity around high-profile crimes and the
vocal Sensible Sentencing Trust campaign for
tougher penalties. “I can see where they’re
coming from – victims need a lot of support,
and I agree with that. But if we’re looking for
answers to reduce crime in New Zealand we
need to be a lot more strategic, rather than
just saying [give them] longer sentences.
“People are a lot more judgmental
because of the media hype. They’re looking
for somewhere to put the blame. The prisoner
is away, but the family is standing there in
front of you so you blame them.”
McFelin knows that getting a better deal
for prisoners’ children will be a battle, and is
banking on the Pillars research to finally get
more politicians and bureaucrats on side.
However, if she is looking for inspiration
to continue her work in the face of an
unsympathetic public, she need look no
further than her own family. “It makes me
feel really good to know that we have not
been part of those statistics. When we
discuss our situation we realise it has made
us better people and we are grateful for
the experience.” YW
A Daughter’s Story
Samantha was only 14 when her father
stabbed a relative to death after an argument.
Fifteen years on he is still in jail and Samantha
and her two younger siblings still suffer the
disgrace of having a murderer in the family
– “It’s our dirty secret.”
Having their violent and mentally ill
father behind bars ended the beatings and
unpredictable behaviour that had made
their lives hell. “It was a shame he had to kill
someone before he got the help he needed.”
But there were plenty of negatives too and
visiting prison was an ordeal. “I remember the
big concrete walls, walking through big gates,
and big barred doors. It was cold and we were
huddled together. It’s not where you want to be.”
Being the subject of gossip in their small,
close-knit community was excruciating, and
rather than have to say her name out loud in
the local pharmacy Samantha took her photos
to another suburb for developing. Even now she
avoids the area in case she is recognised. “I was
so glad to get married and lose my surname.”
Samantha’s brother and sister were bullied
mercilessly at the local primary school, and
she says the fact she left school without
any qualifications was largely due to her
father’s crime.
“Absolutely I would have done better
without the murder. I’m getting back into
studying now and doing well, but I had a
lot of time off school with counselling and
attending the trial and I just didn’t want to
be there because I kept getting teased.
“You lose a lot of friends and people don’t
want to know you anymore. They say you’re
going to be a murderer like your father. My way
of dealing with it was to laugh it off; really it
hurt, but you didn’t let other people see that.”
Samantha’s mother scraped together the
money to pay for her older daughter’s sessions
with a private counsellor, who took her on a
tour of the courts and explained what would
happen at the trial
Seeing the victim’s blood-stained clothes
on display and getting glimpses of crime scene
photos was a shock, but overall, attending the
trial was helpful. “I knew exactly what was said,
my brother and sister didn’t and they are [still]
full of questions.”
Solo mum Samantha visits her father
but is increasingly reluctant to continue
subjecting her two small daughters to the
inside of a prison.
Security measures prevent her taking in
toys or snacks, and it is stressful coping with
bored, hungry children. “I can take one bottle of
formula and a nappy in a clear plastic bag.”
Her five-year-old is terrified by the
metal-detector alarms set off by underwire
in bras or metal jewellery, and Samantha is
worried the children will notice the couples
attempting to surreptitiously have sex in the
visiting area.
Looking back Samantha is grateful for the
help her family received from Pillars in the
early days and would like more support made
available to prisoners’ families, who she says
should not be held responsible for crimes
they did not commit. “You can’t change your
family, you’re not supporting their crime,
you’re supporting them. As a child the ties are
very strong, even when the memories are not
that great.”
* Name changed