California Investigates a Mother-and-Child Prison Center

By SOLOMON MOORE

Published: July 6, 2007

LOS ANGELES, July 5 — The authorities in California are investigating accusations that poor health care at a center where mothers serve prison terms with their young children led to the stillbirth of a 7-month-old fetus and endangered the lives of several children.

  

Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

The center is a dormitory-style alternative to the penitentiary setting.

Staff logs, statements by prisoners and interviews with investigators, staff members and prisoners’ families depict a facility where inmates and their children were denied hospital visits and medications, and where no one kept adequate records of accidents involving injuries that included a skull fracture and a broken collarbone.

The California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, one of several agencies investigating, is expected to decide this month whether to continue licensing the center, which houses nonviolent offenders, most convicted of drug crimes.

The problems at the center coincide with continuing intense scrutiny of health care delivery in California’s prisons. A court-appointed receiver was handed control of prison medical services more than a year ago after a federal court found widespread neglect and malpractice.

The 40-bed facility, located in San Diego and offered as an alternative to serving time in the customary penitentiary setting, has dormitory-style rooms for inmate and child adjoining shared living areas. It is run under the banner of the Family Foundations Program by a nonprofit contractor, Center Point Inc., which did not return calls seeking comment. See the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/us/06women.html

 

Home keeps mothers, children together

Julia Vail | October 16, 2008

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Crime has traditionally attracted a great deal of community attention.

While this attention usually manifests itself in arguments about the fairness of the justice system or the financial burden on taxpayers, little attention has gone toward the smallest victims of crime: prisoners’ children.

Separated from their parents, these children often are at risk for behavioral problems and stunted emotional development. Children of incarcerated parents are six times more likely to enter into the criminal justice system themselves, says North Carolina Sen. Ellie Kinnaird.

With the creation of Our Children’s Place, a facility that will serve as a home for incarcerated women and their preschool-aged children, the issue is beginning to attract attention.

“When mothers are incarcerated, people just assume that someone swoops in and takes care of their children,” says Melissa Radcliff, executive director of Our Children’s Place. “In many cases, we don’t even know where those children end up.”

Started in 2004, the nonprofit is renovating a building in Butner, N.C., where it plans to offer mothers hands-on training in parenting and job skills. Our Children’s Place, which aims to open the new facility in early 2010, is now located in the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. See Rest here: http://www.philanthropyjournal.org/north-carolina/women-and-giving/home-keeps-mothers-children-together