Press Release

Harris School Research Associate Susan George comments on impact of maternal imprisonment on children

Not Only Moms Sentenced

By Bonnie Miller Rubin
Tribune staff reporter
Published February 9, 2003

Seventeen years to the day before former Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese said goodbye to her 5-year-old daughter and reported to a California federal prison, Joanne Archibald made a similar journey through the same gates.

Archibald still remembers standing at the threshold of the Dublin Federal Correctional Institute and burying her face into the sweet-smelling neck of her 7-month-old son.

"I just wanted to drink it all in," she said. "I knew it would be a long time before I had it again."

While Loren-Maltese publicly anguished over what would happen to her daughter Ashleigh while she was incarcerated, similar scenarios play out in hundreds of homes every week. Indeed, Loren-Maltese has joined the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population: women with children under 18.

Most of these jailed moms are the primary caregivers, and experts say their absence can set off a chain reaction of dysfunction that may be felt for generations.

Not all children, like Ashleigh, can stay with caring relatives. Others bounce among foster homes, leaving friends and familiarity behind. Some may even lose their mothers forever if parental rights are terminated. Such disruption puts these kids more at risk for depression and delinquency, making them prime candidates to follow in their mothers' footsteps, experts say.

Yet the consequences of incarceration on children have received scant attention from the public and from policymakers. One effort to better understand is under way at the University of Chicago, where researchers are taking a closer look at the social and economic costs of locking up these women--most of whom have histories of drug dependency--and what it means for their children.

On any given day, about 84,000 female offenders are in federal and state prisons and nearly 70,000 in county jails. Of those, 80 percent are mothers who leave behind approximately 126,000 children.

In Illinois, the number of incarcerated women increased from 999 in 1990 to 2,892 a decade later, according to a report issued last year by the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. If the current rate continues, the number of women admitted to Illinois prisons will double every seven to eight years, and the number of children affected will double every five, said Susan George, co-author of the report.

While acknowledging the desire of society to punish its rule-breakers, she suggests citizens should be aware of the impact of maternal incarceration on children. "I don't think there's anyone who wants to say, `Let's make this so tough on kids that by the time they're 14, they're a mess.'"

A better solution, George said, would be to explore alternative sentencing that would keep non-violent women in their communities and closer to their youngsters. A handful of states have embraced another strategy: motherhood behind bars. Last week North Carolina unveiled a controversial program to house children younger than 9 with their imprisoned mothers.

The majority of Illinois children--60 to 65 percent--are placed with relatives other than the father. Another 20 to 25 percent are taken into custody by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and the remainder are with their fathers, said Gail Smith, an attorney and director of Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers.

Archibald knows she is luckier than most. In 1986 Archibald was a music therapy student at DePaul University and mother to a baby boy. Arrested in Hawaii for carrying drugs, she was sentenced to a year in the Dublin facility, about 40 miles from San Francisco. It was up to her to figure out who would care for her son.

Her roommate became David's guardian--his father was not involved--and moved to California from Chicago, renting an apartment near the prison so she could take the boy for regular visits.

"I'm still awed by her sacrifice--because it made such a difference," Archibald said.

Still, she worried about her son constantly. Was he healthy? Was he eating OK? Was he learning to walk?

"There wasn't a minute I didn't think about him," said Archibald, who also is on the staff of CLAIM, which has almost 1,700 clients.

It wasn't just that her son needed her; she needed her son.

"I made a tape of lullabies so he'd remember my voice."

Diana Delgado, a Chicago mother of four, served two separate sentences between 1994 and 2002 for a drug offense and writing bad checks, serving time in three Illinois correctional facilities: Dwight, Logan and Lincoln.

During her incarceration the children stayed with their grandparents, who did the best they could to facilitate visits. But Delgado had her own coping mechanism: "I'd write them every day. There wasn't a minute that I didn't think of them."

Not surprisingly mothers in prison are usually anguished, knowing that their behavior caused the separation. And children often feel a sense of guilt--that because they were "bad," their mothers were sent away.

"Kids think the worst," said Delgado, 31. "That it's like TV and you're living on bread and water. They need to know that their mom is OK."

Her children--13, 11, 8 and 3--are doing well. Her oldest son went through a period of rebellion and poor grades, she said, but things have settled down.

"Still, it takes years to heal ... and you can't do it without counseling. You've got to be open and honest with kids."

Most former inmates say it was a bad idea for Loren-Maltese to explain her absence--at least initially--by telling her daughter she was relocating to take a new job and wouldn't be able to see her for a while.

So do mental health professionals, who recommend age-appropriate candor.

"If you don't tell your children the truth, they'll find out eventually and lose faith in their caregiver," said Dr. Sharon Hirsch, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children's Memorial Hospital. "Stick to the facts ... and stress that you'll always love them."

Archibald--whose son was too young to remember she had been gone--opted for frankness.

"When he turned 7, I told him that I did something bad ... that I carried drugs and I had to go to jail. He saw it like a big `time out.'"

It's a shared history that the two revisit from time to time.

"He'll tell me: `Mom, I'm not ashamed. It's a part of who I am. ... It's a part of who we are.'"

Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune