Co-detention: Raising Children in Prison
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A central assumption underlying our review is that separation of parent and child during incarceration is detrimental to the parent-child relationship and to the child’s adjustment. Several innovative programs in the USA and Europe have been designed to allow the mother and child to remain together during some portion of the incarceration period. Prison nurseries, in which the mother gives birth in prison and raises the infant in the institution have a long history in the United States.
Since 1901, the nursery program in the Bedford Hills Correctional facility in New York, the oldest such program in the country, has housed female inmates who have given birth during their prison stay. Mothers and infants are permitted to stay together until the child’s first birthday and a parenting program is provided as part of the program. Unfortunately, there has been no formal evaluation of this effort.
A program developed in the Nebraska Center for Women was modeled after the Bedford facility to provide a live-in nursery for infants up can be avoided by provision of some form of community-based sentencing, instead of prisonbased incarceration (Meyers et al., 1999). These alternatives include house arrest, half-way houses where mother and children reside, and day programs in which mothers attend programs in a correctional institution during the day but are permitted to return home at night.
Devine (1997) surveyed 24 community-based programs for mothers and children in 14 states. Community sentencing programs yielded reduced recidivism and increased family preservation — outcomes that have positive implications for children’s adjustment. In view of the cost effectiveness achieved by reducing the number of incarcerated women, it is surprising that these types of programs are available to only a small percentage of women violators.
Because the vast majority of offenses committed by women are relatively minor and non-violent (e.g., drugs, prostitution), alternatives to regular incarceration merit more consideration (Jaffe et al., 1997).
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