On any given day, one in ten American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision, be it in jail, in prison, on probation or on parole.

Little is known about what becomes of children when their parents are incarcerated. There is no requirement that the various institutions charged with dealing with those accused of breaking the law—police, courts, jails and prisons, probation departments—inquire about children’s existence, much less concern themselves with children’s care.

Conversely, there is no requirement that systems serving children— schools, child welfare, juvenile justice—address parental incarceration.

Children of prisoners have a daunting array of needs. They need a safe place to live and people to care for them in their parents’ absence, as well as everything else a parent might be expected to provide: food, clothing and medical care, for example.

They also need to be told the truth about their parents’ situation. They need someone to listen without judging, so that their parents’ status need not remain a secret. They need the companionship of others who share their experience, so they can know they are not alone.

They need contact with their parents—to have that relationship recognized and valued even under adverse circumstances. And rather than being stigmatized for their parents’ actions or status, they need to be treated with respect, offered opportunity, and recognized as having potential.

Too often, these needs go unmet and unacknowledged. Children have committed no crime, but the penalty they are required to pay is steep.They forfeit much of what matters to them: their homes, their safety, their public status and private self-image, their primary source of comfort and affection.

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“Children have committed no crime, but the penalty they are required to pay is steep.”
- Nell Bernstein

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I coordinate a group called the San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents Partnership, which works with public and community agencies to implement a Bill of Rights for Children of Incarcerated Parents. Based on interviews with children (bolstered by research), it holds fundamental the right to a lifelong relationship with a parent.

Our effort to make the rights realities in San Francisco got a jumpstart because our sheriff, Michael Hennessey, had already created some of the country's most successful crime prevention programs inside the county jail.

When we told him that we wanted family-centered contact visiting for kids to replace the “window visiting” they endure in most county jails around the country, for example, he didn’t blink. Instead, he assigned a top jail administrator, the unstoppable Chief Al Waters, to work with us over what turned out to be several years (and counting) to make that dream—that right—a reality for San Francisco’s children.

“Adult lives are shaped by childhood experience,”Hennessey had told me when I was writing my book, All Alone in the World:Children of the Incarcerated. “If children are treated fairly, and see government as a place to receive assistance as opposed to something that takes away rights, they will be more likely to reach out and respect government as adults.”

We work with every law enforcement agency in San Francisco, from police through probation, to help them see through kids’ eyes so that children can grow up respecting the law without having to feel “split” in their loyalty to their parents—a loyalty that comes naturally to children.

A criminal justice model that took as its constituency not just individuals charged with breaking the law, but also their families, might become one that played a part in stemming, rather than perpetuating, the cycle of crime and incarceration.

After I wrote my book, everywhere I traveled I was asked the same question: “What can we do to ‘break the cycle’ of intergenerational crime, addiction and incarceration?”

While I honor the impulse to help, I often bristle at the question and its implication that “the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.” Over and over, children have told me that it hangs like a cloud over their lives and prospects.

A Bill of Rights offers a solid framework for what we can and must do to help families, but not because children of prisoners are predestined to live out some “intergenerational cycle.”With the force of their own will and the backing of communities from San Francisco to central Minnesota and beyond, each child holds the key that unlocks his own destiny and infinite potential. IQ