WUNRN
http://womensenews.org/story/incarceration/150707/risks-are-high-teen-daughters-jailed-moms
USA - Risks Are High
for Teen Daughters with Jailed Moms
By Crystal Lewis - Teen Voices at Women's
eNews
Women with children are being incarcerated at a rising rate, with ominous
implications for girls in particular. "Children typically model their
behaviors based on the parent that is the same sex, so missing that female
figure is critical," says one advocate. Story reported with Annie Geng.
Photo
Credit: Thomas Hawk
July 8, 2015
- NEW YORK (WOMENSENEWS)--Janiah Lassic, 13, lives in Long Island, N.Y., and
attends Ralph G. Reed Middle School. Two years ago, her mother was sent to
Bedford Hills Correction Facility for Women, 75 miles away.
"My mom
told me that we had to go to court, and I didn't really understand the law
system then, but when they took her away that night, I started to cry,"
she said.
The
14-year-old daughter of Teresa Giudice, a star of "The Real Housewives of New
Jersey" who began her 15-month prison sentence in January, may say she
finds their visits "fun." But that's not how Janiah describes it. She
visits her mother at least once a week with her father.
"The
visits are long--I leave the house around 7:30 in the morning and come back
around 3:30 in the afternoon," she said.
In New York
State, 105,000 children have an incarcerated parent, finds a 2010 fact sheet
from the Osborne Association's New York Initiative for Children of Incarcerated Parents. The
Initiative, which has locations in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Poughkeepsie,
advocate for policies that help young people whose parents are involved in the
criminal justice system and helps children to maintain relationships with
incarcerated parents.
Across the
U.S. imprisoned population, more than 120,000 mothers and 1.1 million fathers
have children 17 years old or younger, according to a 2010 Pew Charitable Trusts report. Over 11 percent of African
American children have an incarcerated parent, compared to less than 2 percent
of white children.
Tanya
Krupat, Osborne's program director of the New York Initiative for Children of
Incarcerated Parents, said prison visits, which can be expensive, take a toll
on families. "Most prisons are extremely far, and many of these families
are financially struggling." Albion Prison, for example, one of three
women's prisons in the state, is 400 miles from New York City.
"Girls
in particular," said Krupat, "miss their mothers during their teen
years. They're going through so many changes without them. Children typically
model their behaviors based on the parent that is the same sex, so missing that
female figure is critical."
Krupat added
that teens often feel loneliness, abandonment, anger and "feeling like
everyone else has a mom" when they have a mom in prison.
Various
studies show that youth with an incarcerated parent--either a father or a
mother--are five- to six-times more likely to be incarcerated than other youth.
Less Data on Teens
The impact
of having your mom, in particular, go to prison--and how that differs between
boys and girls--has been studied quite a bit among young children. But far less
data is available concerning teens.
One person
who has studied this situation extensively is Peggy Giordano, author of the
book "Legacies of crime: A follow-up of the children of highly delinquent girls
and boys," published in 2012.
Giordano's
study began with more than 200 delinquent teens and followed them for 25 years.
Participants now have children who are teens themselves and she includes
studies with that second generation.
Female
teens, she said, often try to fill the mother's family role. "They're
trying to take care of their family--which is a positive thing, but it's very
hard and can lead to emotional problems. It forces them to grow up."
Families
with an incarcerated parent often contend with poverty, violence, substance
abuse, trauma and mental illness. That sets up a wide range of dynamics and
makes it difficult to isolate the effects of maternal incarceration on teens.
"Some
parent-child relationships are disrupted during incarceration," Giordano
said, "but sometimes the incarceration period is the only time these kids
speak to their mothers consistently because their moms have been in and out of
their lives and are now in one place."
To help
strengthen the incarcerated mothers' bond with their daughters, The Girl Scouts Beyond Bars program was established in 1992 by the
National Institute of Justice, and is offered in over 20 states. The program
helps teens visit their moms, and aims to teach leadership skills as a source
of support.
That support
is necessary because adolescents with incarcerated mothers often struggle with
school and mental health. Teens in Chicago who attended public high schools and
had mothers who were incarcerated had a 43 percent dropout rate,
finds a 13-year study conducted from 1991 to 2004, far higher than the 15
percent drop out rate of other teens.
Girls, Boys Stereotype
A 2010
University of Chicago study finds that boys are more sensitive than girls to the
frequency of maternal incarceration, but girls are more sensitive to length.
Adolescent males with an incarcerated parent are more likely to externalize
behaviors--by committing acts of aggression or delinquency--while female teens
internalize the stress of having a parent in prison, through anxiety or depression,
2012 data from the National
Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health show.
But Giordano
doesn't agree with that.
"One
stereotype is that girls internalize their emotions when they have an
incarcerated mother, while boys externalize," Giordano said in a recent
phone interview. "But these girls don't just internalize, because their
mothers didn't. Their mothers took drugs or committed crimes."
Although the
children of incarcerated parents are more likely to end up in legal trouble or
drop out of school, Giordano argues that these problems are not just because
their parents have gone to prison.
"These
teens have been through so many difficulties before and after their parent's
imprisonment," Giordano said. "And that's why--while having a Girl
Scouts visiting program is great--it's also missing the point."
To help give
a voice for teens with incarcerated parents, the Osborne Association began two
programs. Its Youth Experience Success, or YES Program, aimed at 13-to-15 year
olds, helps "shine a light" on teens' strengths by helping them
develop goals and learn how to build relationships and resolve conflicts.
Youth Action
Council, which is aimed at older teens, focuses on advocacy and turns their
stories into testimony by speaking to lawmakers in Albany, the state capital.
Such advocacy is essential in order to reduce the stigma of having a parent in
prison.
"Teens
are often embarrassed to tell their friends their parents are in prison,"
Giordano said.
For Janiah,
opening up about her mother isn't something she does with everyone. "I
only tell close friends about my mother," she said. "But it's not at
all hard. It's easy because we just talk about it like a normal thing."
Ominous Trend
While far
more children have a father in prison than a mother, research indicates that
arrest rates have increased more for mothers--more than doubling between
1991and 2007-- than for fathers during the same period, which increased 77
percent.
That's an
ominous trend, given the worse effects of a mother's incarceration on children.
A 2007
survey using data from the U.S. Department of Justice finds that the adult
children of incarcerated mothers are 2.5 times more likely to also go to prison than the adult children of incarcerated fathers.
While most
children of incarcerated fathers live with their mother while their father is
in prison, less than 40 percent of children whose moms are in prison live with
their fathers.
Researchers
find that 11 percent of children of incarcerated mothers end up in foster care,
compared to 4 percent of children of
imprisoned fathers.
"There
is a greater level of instability when a child's mother is in prison rather than
his or her father," said Osborne's Krupat. She added that siblings are
more likely to be separated than when the incarcerated parent is a father.
Luckily for
Janiah, she and her baby sister--who was born while her mom was
incarcerated--live with her father, and looks forward to catching up with the
time she's missed with her mother.
"We're
going to do all the things she told us she would do," she said. "Like
go on a Disney Cruise, Spa Castle and other stuff."