NEW PERFECTIONIST: Korey Sufka was in and out of Minnesota correctional facilities 20 times before reclaiming his life with his family. He said he wants to set a better example for his daughter, Kalileigh.

My daughter asked me one day out of the blue, ‘Dad, is anyone perfect?’ She then looked at me without missing a beat and said, ‘I think you’re perfect.’”

Korey Sufka recalled the words of his now seven-year-old daughter, Kaileigh.He knew he was far from perfect. Having been on a whirlwind tour of Minnesota county jails and the Lino Lakes Correctional Facility, for everything from domestic assault, to theft and check forgery, he had been largely absent from his daughter’s life.

His actions, he later theorized, were in retaliation of his father. A bitter divorce and feelings of abandonment left him without a male role model. Falling in with a crowd who lived outside the rules, Sufka chose a path that would land him in jail or prison twenty separate times.

“I felt like my dad was never there for me, yet in those times of loneliness I was thinking, ‘I’m not there for my daughter either,’” he said. “I had an epiphany—the guy I thought I hated the most was the man I was turning into. I certainly didn’t want my daughter using drugs when she was 16 or 17, because her dad was always in jail or prison.”

Indeed, Sufka’s fears were not unfounded. Research shows that a child’s risk of criminal involvement may increase up to six-fold when he or she has a parent who has been incarcerated.

“Unfortunately, children repeat the behaviors they see and are exposed to,” said Lee Buckley, Community Re-Entry Coordinator for the Minnesota Department of Corrections.

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“I had an epiphany—the guy I thought I hated the most was the man I was turning into.”
- Korey Sufka

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John Smith, former director of the Central Minnesota Re-Entry Project (CMNRP), has seen the trend firsthand. “There are a lot of guys coming in for services that are from families with long criminal histories,” he said. “It’s inevitable. We can almost predict the percentage of their kids that are going to have some relationship with the criminal justice system.”

With nearly ten million children nationwide experiencing the loss Are Children Condemned to Repeat Criminal Cycles? of a parent due to incarceration, the generational cycle of crime makes for a bleak outlook. In general, experts suggest that children have a wide range of responses to this trauma, including anger, anxiety, fear, sadness, aggression and violence.

“The way family systems work is that they perpetuate behaviors.Those systems are extremely difficult to break out of even when you’re trying to,” said Dr. Michael Robertson, a St. Cloud area psychologist who has worked extensively with children and their parents who have been incarcerated.

“Incarceration can create a disruption of the family,” he added. “The issues are different than what might be seen in the rest of the population. I think those things have a big impact on kids.”

Today, Korey Sufka is the mentor program coordinator for the CMNRP. By all accounts, he has managed to break the cycle. He recalls the message he brings to incarcerated parents.

“I tell them that our kids view us as perfect people, so our actions give them their definition of what perfect is. We as parents need to understand that if we are developing their impressions of perfect, we need to do some major soul searching and look at our actions.”

In addition to re-entry programs that offer parenting classes, most agree more needs to be done to reach out to the children. The Council on Crime and Justice suggests putting in place community awareness programs and support groups similar to those for military families. They also emphasize the importance of providing children with role models in the absence of an incarcerated parent.

Despite the statistics, however, Sufka contends that no child—especially his own—is condemned to follow the missteps of her parent. “There is a large group of people who have beaten the odds,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how you were conditioned, you can make a change.” IQ