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A "stand up guy" in prison is tough, hard, quick to anger, violent, remorseless, and most importantly, emotionally closed. There is probably not another place in society where the most negative aspects of male culture so valued as they are in a prison
This is one of the reasons why even though parenting programs for women have been long recognized as being beneficial and integrated into the female prison regimen, it is only recently that the benefits of parenting programs for men have been accepted.
Dr. Larry Barlow, a Family Therapist in Tallahassee, Florida, acknowledged in a recent interview for the radio program LAW, POWER AND JUSTICE, that he had had a difficult time creating an awareness that parenting programs for men were important, and a more difficult time getting money for them. After all, there are not many people who are even interested in rehabilitation for prison inmates anymore, much less concerned with their parenting.
But, most men get out of prison, and as role models for another generation, they can set a good example, or a bad one. We, as a society, have to deal with the results.
It has long been accepted in the correctional field that a man is less likely to return to crime after he is released from prison if he has a family to go back to. This is one of the reasons why criminologists have argued for regular family visits to inmates in institutions in the least restrictive environment possible. Some states have even allowed conjugal visits for some prisoners. But, even when attention has been given to the relationship a man maintains with his partner, little attention has focused on his relationship with his children.
There are several factors which make this relationship especially problematic.
First, children are sometimes present when their fathers are arrested. The child, who looks at the father as the protector, sees that the protector can't even protect himself. The strongest figure in the child's life, does not even have the power to keep himself from being hauled off in handcuffs.
Second, when the father of a family is arrested, family income almost always drops significantly. Children feel abandoned by the father, and suffer economic deprivation because of his departure.
Third, maintaining a relationship with children while incarcerated is difficult. Women must frequently travel long distances in uncomfortable transportation to get to the prison where their partner is housed, and carrying children just compounds the difficulties of the visit. It's just easier to leave them at home.
Fourth, meaningful communication in a visiting room of a prison is difficult to say the least. This is especially the case for inmates who are not allowed contact visits and have to communicate through glass partitions.
Fifth, prison inmates are likely to have had a bad relationship with their own fathers, and don't have much of a role model to go by in trying to parent their own children.
Sixth, inmates are often embarrassed to have their children see them in prison. Some families maintain the fiction for years that the man is working elsewhere rather than admit to the children that he is in prison. Some men simply tell their wives not to bring the children back.
The Parenting Program devised by Dr. Barlow and his partner, Art Cleveland, asks men to examine things like the male inmate's relationship with his own father, the importance of the father figure in the life and development of a child, developmental stages of children and behavior that can and cannot be expected at particular ages, and what it means to establish a safe, secure and satisfying environment for a child. The program is information and skills based. It does not try to evaluate each man's parenting defects, but encourage men to examine those defects for themselves and come to their own conclusions.
Drs. Barlow and Cleveland have been impressed with the successes of their program. They find that men in prisons usually finish the program with an increased awareness of what it really means to be a father, an increased motivation to establish or re-establish a relationship with their children, and a certificate they can show to their partners in hopes of demonstrating their seriousness about maintaining a relationship with the child or children.
Programs such as this are not costly and if we have the chance of
breaking a family cycle of fathers passing abusive behavior on to their
sons, seems to me like we should take it.
