When mom goes to jail

Published 8:00 am Wednesday, November 2, 2005

Islanders become mentors for Kitsap youths whose parents are incarcerated.

As a longtime prison researcher, Roger Lauen understands that although children don’t go to jail, when a parent is incarcerated, kids are punished, too.

As a mentor, he knows it.

Since January, he and his wife Jane McCotter have been mentors to an 8-year-old girl and her 5-year-old brother in North Kitsap who live with their grandmother. The children have only seen their mother, who is incarcerated in California, a few times in the last three years.

What Lauen and McCotter give the children isn’t money or gifts, but their undivided attention.

“What we’re saying by our actions is we’re interested in them,” Lauen said.

“After a few months, I feel like I would just like to maintain this beyond the one year (commitment). They’d feel sad and abandoned (if we left),” McCotter said.

“I would!” Lauen added.

The island couple are volunteers with Mentoring Children of Promise, a program of the national nonprofit Volunteers of America similar to the Big Brother, Big Sister concept.

Mentors make a commitment to spend at least six hours a month for one year with a child age 5-15 who has a parent in prison.

Local organizer Keely Perrin says the program, which is active in Kitsap, King, Skagit, Snohomish and Pierce counties, has 100 kids enrolled and 50 matched.In Kitsap, eight kids are waiting for mentors, including two young girls on Bainbridge Island, ages 9 and 6, whose father is incarcerated.

All mentor applicants go through a rigorous screening, including a criminal background check, in-home interview, reference check and an intensive three-hour training. Waiting a few months for a match – for personality and location – is not unusual, Perrin said.

“We really wait for the right person instead of matching right away,” she said.

What’s most important for kids is consistency, she said, because their lives can be emotionally and physically unstable with one parent absent for long periods, and perhaps having had to move.

“All the feelings that come with one parent being gone – abandonment, fear, guilt, – they’re just more vulnerable than the typical kid,” Perrin said.

From his 28 years of work in developing alternatives to prison, Lauen says that having a mentor can be a big difference for kids.

“They might otherwise follow in the incarcerated parent’s steps,” he said. “If a family is dysfunctional, it increases the probability that the kids will be. The first way it shows up is kids making choices of who their peers are.”

When the incarcerated parent is the mother, just 28 percent of children have their father as the primary caregiver; over half live with grandparents in such cases, according to a 1997 report by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Perrin was paired just eight months ago with her mentee, an 11-year-old girl whose mother is in prison.

The girl surprised her mentor, saying, “she helps me realize I can go to college,” even though the topic had never come up before.

“There are the things (children) are taking in and observe about you that hopefully are positive,” Perrin said. “The one-on-one time, I think, is important.”

She sees mentors playing a role that social workers or counselors cannot.

“Kids have had experience in the system and may not trust social workers and counselors. We’re just regular people. We’re not trying to help them, but getting to know them and develop a relationship,” Perrin said, and be “a positive adult the kid can bounce ideas off of and have fun with.”

Perrin’s mentee displays a sometimes astonishing maturity for her age. Vis-a-vis her mother who has been in and out of jail because of a serious drug addiction, “Her understanding of it blows me away,” Perrin said. “She hopes the judge will order her mother into treatment.”

Lauen and McCotter volunteered because their own grandchildren live far away and because of Roger’s work, they knew how devastating incarceration can be on family members.

The problem is growing. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that in 1999, state and federal prisons held an estimated 721,500 parents of minor children – well over half the prison population.

The number of minor children with incarcerated parents increased by over 500,000 from 1991 to nearly 1.5 million minors in 1999.

The three to five hours a week Lauen and McCotter spend with their mentees lets them “stay in touch with youth.”

The couple treat the kids as they would grandchildren, taking them to the park and other little outings, but also setting limits when they “act out.”

“You develop a relationship with them very quickly – you get invested in their tempers, wishes and desires,” Lauen said.

* * * * *

Promising pairs

For more information about Mentoring Children of Promise program either as a mentor

or mentee, call Keely Perrin at (360) 286-4872 or email keeleyperrin@yahoo.com.