The arrest and conviction rate of females has risen dramatically since the 1980’s, jumping 131% from 1991 to 2007. The Sentencing Project reports that 1.7 million children in the US has a parent in prison. Although women have made great strides during the past several decades, women still are the primary care-givers of children. When mom goes to prison, there is an insidious ripple effect that compromises many lives.
A perverse twist to the Adoption and Safe Families Act has created a system that is the opposite of what it was initially designed to do. The ASFA had good intentions, it was created to prevent children from moving through one foster home after another, and to speed up the adoption process to place children in loving homes. While nice on paper the Act plays havoc with the lives of incarcerated mothers and their children.
The ASFA Act allows the parental rights of an incarcerated parent time to be terminated after 15 to 22 months, sometimes sooner, according to a recent web posting by Rachel Roth on momsrising.org. If a mother is in prison or a treatment center and can’t physically care for her child, the court can terminate parental rights, even if the child was not from an abusive or neglectful home, living with relatives, and even if it is against the wishes of the child. The Women in Prison Project of the Correctional Association of New York claims that a third of these children were taken from their parents so they could be placed in an adoptive home, yet they actually stayed in foster care. The term for these children is “legal orphans”. The state does not acknowledge this fact.
Governor David Patterson of NY attempted to rectify the situation in June by signing the AFSA Expanded Discretion bill into law. Recognizing that the average sentence for females is 36 months, and that 78% of incarcerated women are mothers, and another 6% coming into the system are pregnant, supporters of the new law point out that the law will allow parents to have input via video camera or other means when meetings concerning parental rights are held. Foster care agencies must give parents in prison information about their rights and also provide them with links to services that are designed to forge the bond between parent and child. Rachel Roth commented that providing links to parents may not be practical as many times parents in prison do not have ready access to outside communication. The new law also takes into consideration that the 36 month average sentence for women in NY goes far beyond the 15 months allotted before parental rights could be terminated.
Only a few states have changed their laws with regard to mandating foster care for children of incarcerated mothers. Since the majority of women in prison are poor, and since African-American women are grossly over -represented in the criminal justice system, Roth concludes that poor children, African-American children and other minority children are shuffled into the foster care system, destroying families and communities.
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