James Heimer
Jessiann Hodges grew up on Simpson Street in the 1980s when the crack epidemic hit urban neighborhoods hard. Her family was poor. Her father was in and out of prison while her mother struggled with mental illness.
Hodges first tangled with the law when she was caught stealing food for her family. She was 9. By 11, she was selling pot and ecstasy. By 14, she was participating in armed robberies and was eventually sentenced to Southern Oaks Girls School in Union Grove.
Hodges returned to Madison at age 18 and quickly fell back into the criminal life. She had a talent for business and returned to selling drugs and facilitating prostitution rings.
“Growing up I never had stability or structure built into any relationship,” says Hodges. “I was on a continuing cycle of incarceration with a whole demographic that believes we can’t make it when we can. There’s generations of restrictions and limitations that have been put on us.”
In 2003, Hodges — then 23 — had a daughter, Jaayd. It was a watershed moment, as she began to evaluate her lifestyle. She vowed to change for the sake of her daughter. But change didn’t come fast enough. When her daughter was 3, Hodges was arrested, charged and convicted of dealing drugs and forgery. She was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Although she’d spent much of her life behind bars, this sentence was torture. “Every day I cried and the pain never subsided,” Hodges says. “[My daughter] was in the exact same circumstances that impacted my life, living with my disabled mother in poverty. I wrote her every day with the hope she would still feel my love and not lose confidence in my absence.”
The pain inspired her to work even harder to break the cycle of incarceration her family struggled with. After going through a nine-month-long boot camp program, Hodges was released in 2010. Her daughter was 7.
Back at home, Hodges began to recognize the similar signs of dysfunction in her daughter. Now she strives to keep her from making the same mistakes she made.
“Like me, she never had structure or stability built into a relationship with anyone,” Hodges says.
Carolyn Fath
Jessiann Hodges (left) spent much of her teens and 20s incarcerated. But after daughter Jaayd (right), was born, prison became unbearable and Hodges re-evaluated her life.
Hodge’s situation is not unique. The United States incarcerates more people than any other country — and has the most children with an incarcerated parent. In Wisconsin, a conviction does not trigger any formal process to help children left behind. Aside from the obvious problem of being separated from a parent, children also struggle with a lack of resources and shame from their parent’s circumstances.
“The children of incarcerated parents have been invisible for a long time because of stigma,” says Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, UW-Madison professor of human development and family studies.
Poehlmann-Tynan has researched this population since 1996. She’s done the first ever observational study of children visiting incarcerated parents. Her work focuses on what will help children cope and thrive while a parent is incarcerated.
Poehlmann-Tynan says ultimately the problem is we’re locking up too many people without considering the consequences. “Five million children in the U.S. have seen their co-resident parent go to jail or prison and we don’t see a decline in the numbers,” she says. “There are children left behind and a lot of times it’s a traumatic separation. We need to think of that cost as a society.”
The state Department of Corrections doesn’t ask inmates whether they have children, so the precise number of parents in prison is unknown. The state does collect the information when inmates volunteer it. Of the almost 23,000 inmates incarcerated by Wisconsin, 9,687 Wisconsin inmates reported that they had 21,701 children (as of February 2017).
Poehlmann-Tynan says the lack of data is not unusual, in Wisconsin or other states. “I’m always coming up with estimates, because there are no official stats,” she says. “How can you help the kids if you don’t know how many there are or what their needs are?”
Linda Ketcham — director of Madison-area Urban Ministry, which runs comprehensive programming for families affected by incarceration — estimates that about 2,000 children in Dane County have a parent who is incarcerated.
These children often live in poverty with a higher risk of being homeless. They are at a higher risk of experiencing “adverse childhood experiences,” such as living with a drug addicted or an abusive caregiver, according to a 2015 report published by the nonpartisan research group Child Trends that uses data from the National Survey of Children’s Health.
“When a parent who is the caregiver goes to prison the kids end up living with relatives or an uncle or grandparents,” Ketcham says. “That’s another mouth to feed and then they sometimes have to move to another apartment.
“We have situations where we had grandparents who ended up living in motels because they had to leave their current apartment and yet they’re doing exactly what we expect them to do — that’s practicing family values, taking care of their family.”
Studies have found that these children are also at greater risk for having health and behavioral problems, performing badly in school, and becoming involved with the criminal justice system.
Some of this stems from the stigma of having a parent in prison or jail, which families inadvertently make worse by often trying to hide the truth from the child, says Poehlmann-Tynan.
“They’ll tell the child an alternate story, that the parent is in college or working or on a vacation,” she says. “Usually, the child finds out anyways. The goal is to protect them from a stigma. Nobody is doing anything bad, but it can undermine trust.”
Gil Vaknin
Sesame Street’s Alex (second from left) is sad because his father is in prison. A UW professor helped create the programming to help families talk about incarceration.
Working with Sesame Street, Poehlmann-Tynan helped develop books and videos to help children, parents and caregivers talk about incarceration. Sesame Street created a new muppet, Alex, who is struggling with his father being incarcerated. In one video, he gets upset when his friends talk about getting their fathers to help them with a project. But he is then is coaxed to talk about where his father is and how he feels about it.
Marie Rivera remembers the last time she saw her father. She was in sixth grade and he had just been convicted of sexual assault. Rivera was allowed to see him at the Dane County Jail, where he was waiting to be sentenced.
“I could only talk to him through a phone and see him through Plexiglas,” she remembers. “He looked miserable from crying and crying, the whole family was in shock.”
Now 22, Rivera is still not allowed to see her father. Rivera — who believes her father is innocent — communicates with him through mail and phone calls, and now that he is located at Oakhill Corrections in the nearby town of Oregon, she drives other family members to visit him while she waits in the car.
“My life would be nothing like it is if he had been here with me. No matter what I did he would have supported me,” she says. “Instead he missed my 16th birthday as I was alone with a box of cake mix. He missed my prom, my homecoming, my graduation, my getting recognized for my high school GPA, my first job, my first breakup. It pains him to not be able to offer anything except moral support.”
Nathaniel Robinson was sentenced to prison for two years in 2014, just as his daughter was born. He worked hard to nurture a relationship with his daughter through weekly visits. It wasn’t easy.
“Kettle Moraine Corrections didn’t have much for kids. I read her some books, but when she was 6 months old we had to find creative ways to entertain her because we could only just sit at a table,” Robinson says. “I’d read to her or she’d play with my ID necklace.” As Robinson discovered, there are few outdoor play areas or quality toys at prison. Most visitations take place in a sterile room with assigned seating at adult-sized tables where families sit for up to three hours. A common sighting is a father holding multiple children on his lap.
The visitation rooms are under observation, sometimes by guards standing on an elevated plank who will order kids to sit down or quit running. Some prisons, like Taycheedah Correctional Institution, a women’s facility in Fond du Lac, offers a more inviting space for visits with young children, including a playground, child-sized tables, and space where families can cook meals together.
Poehlmann-Tynan notes that some advocates discourage children from visiting incarcerated parents, believing it is too traumatic. Others say all children should visit. But Poehlmann-Tynan couldn’t find any observational studies that had been conducted of children visiting their parents in prison or jail to see what the visits are actually like.
So, working with Sesame Street, Poehlmann-Tynan did her own. They provided the Sesame Street materials to families visiting inmates at four county jails, including Dane, Racine and two counties in Minnesota, to see what effect it had on the children. She found the visits were highly emotional for children, but also important.
“It’s great for children to have a positive visit and positive connections with their incarcerated parents. It can reassure them that the parent is safe, and they still have a relationship,” she says. “Certain kinds of visits can also be stressful.”
She found that children coped better when caregivers explained what was happening in simple, developmentally-appropriate ways.
The setting also matters. While state prisons are not great, county jails are generally worse, Poehlmann-Tynan says. Many require inmates to talk to their children on a phone through a Plexiglas barrier. “The Plexiglas visits are pretty stressful for young children,” she says. “It’s such a surreal experience.”
But many jails are getting better, offering more face-to-face contact, as well as opportunities to video chat, so children can connect routinely from their homes.
Poehlmann-Tynan is working on securing funding for two different studies. One would examine how mindfulness practices help children cope with having an incarcerated parent. The other is looking at how to improve the quality of contact between parents and children. That can happen by improving the environment of visitation areas or by making it easier for families to connect virtually by email or video chats.
Although prison sentences are longer than jail sentences, Poehlmann-Tynan says that in some ways they’re less traumatic for families. Some people revolve in and out of jail, creating a much more unstable family situation for children.
“From a little kid’s point of view, having the parent leave and come back and leave and come back, can be problematic,” she says.
Jas McDaniel
Helyn Luisi-Mills, left, helped mentor Marie Rivera, right, after Rivera’s father was incarcerated. Rivera calls Helyn “my person when I had no one.”
Although Rivera’s father was the one incarcerated, she also felt cut off from the world. “I wasn’t allowed to see my stepmom or my dad’s family for a really long time,” says Rivera.
Rivera’s isolation began to ebb, in eighth grade, when she met Helyn Luisi-Mills through MUM’s Mentoring Connections, which pairs mentors with children of incarcerated parents. Currently there are 50 children, mostly boys, waiting for a mentor.
“Heyln was my person. She was my person when I had no one,” Rivera says. “When we met I was the one who had to keep my head high and hold everything together. She became my outlet and my distraction. Heyln and MUM helped me in a time when I thought life was barely worth living.”
Luisi-Mills, a social worker with The Road Home, helped Rivera stay focused and out of trouble. Rivera is now working as a medical transcriptionist, having trained online with a full scholarship through private funders.
Luisi-Mills’ “big sister-like” supportive role has lasted nearly 10 years.
Studies have shown that having one caring person and an ongoing positive relationship can lessen trauma and prevent negative outcomes for children experiencing serious hardship.
MUM is the only organization in the city that specifically focuses on trying to connect children with their incarcerated parents.
Its programs include Mentoring Connections, which paired Rivera with Luisi-Mills. Other program include: Reading Connections, where incarcerated parents are video recorded reading a book that the child can later watch; and Family Connections, a program organizing family trips to nearby prisons. Meanwhile, Just Bakery and Circles of Support are geared toward helping people adjust to life after incarceration.
Other agencies do have programs to help, but they focus on children who are exhibiting behavioral problems. Julie Ahnen, child protective services manager for the Dane County Department of Human Services, says that earlier intervention is ideal. But it is difficult identifying children with an incarcerated parent and unclear who should take the lead on that.
“Our role is to intervene when concerns are raised,” she says. “So developing prevention programs needs to be much further upstream.”
Nick Pinske, the Madison schools’ lead psychologist, says the district is attempting to identify children with parents who are incarcerated. A district initiative focuses on students coping with trauma, which includes those with an incarcerated parent.
Routine screening asks all students questions about their moods, sleeping habits and other things that could reveal traumatic experiences like watching a parent be arrested or incarcerated.
Pinske says the district is also trying to build better relationships with families to encourage them to share similar information. But that’s easier said than done, especially with people who have been marginalized.
“If they have felt institutionally or historically wronged by a system, it’s our job to address that and unravel that as partners such that we can reach them and have them available for the supports that we have to offer,” says Pinske. “These programs primarily meet the needs of students of color. It’s an unfortunate truth that they are a group that is more in need of our trauma intervention, but the neediest students getting the most most support is a model I can live with.”
Hodges’ memories of school are bitter. Although enrolled in advanced classes, she felt excluded both for having a father in prison and for being poor. “You’re feeling like you want to get a hug, and you want to laugh with those kids over there, but it’s those voids, not being treated like a person, being invisible, take its toll,” Hodges says. “You’re not the kid teachers are excited to see, you’re not getting the little shiny stars.”
Poehlmann-Tynan says that school can play an essential role in helping children cope with having a parent in prison, which can be done without singling them out. Merely educating all children that some people are in prison can have a huge benefit.
She notes that the Sesame Street series she worked on also developed materials for children coping with a parent in the military, parents who are divorcing and experiencing a natural disaster among others. Letting children know that people face a variety of problems and situations can help them be resilient.
“If people make it a point to educate all kids, they will know they’re not alone,” she says.
Poehlmann-Tynan has applied for a $500,000 grant for a pilot study at the Dane County Jail that would look at ways to facilitate child-parent visits.
“One of the things we put into our new grant proposal is to have visit coaches, trained professionals who can help kids once they come into a correctional facility,” she says. These coaches would also help the families get the most out of the visits.
The grant would also help provide funding to give children of incarcerated parentsXO laptops — small, durable computers — that the children could use to video chat, email and record messages to parents with.
Although children with an incarcerated parent have more risk factors, Poehlmann-Tynan notes that many endure and some thrive.
Hodges is fighting hard to make sure that her daughter is one of them. Her goal as a parent is to shield her daughter from the same shame that she endured growing up.
Seven years after being released from prison, Hodges has had remarkable success — despite even more hardship. She graduated from the UW Odyssey Project, and now attends UW-Madison.
She started working full time at Madison schools as a janitor in 2016 and bought a condo. Soon after, she was diagnosed with kidney cancer but is now in remission.
As she moves forward making up for lost time at home, Hodges attributes her success to her daughter.
“Just the separation and lack of communication as a child grows takes its toll, but then when you leave a toddler and return to an almost teenager — there’s this gap in even knowing each other,” she says. “I have worked every day to regain her trust, so she can simply trust the world around her.”
Ketcham says this devotion is not uncommon, despite some who blindly believe that being in prison means you are not a loving parent. “That’s not the case, they love their kids, their kids love them.”
