Articles | Book Reviews | Education
Prison Is a Member of Their Family
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
This is a reprint from The New York Times, January 12, 2003. The article is too long to reproduce here but it is well worth reading. To do so click on to the following link: www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/magazine/12PRISON.html The Editor would also like to know if there are equivalent stories within the Canadian scene. Does this scenario ring a bell with our own readership?
Since Nina was born, Lolli has been dressing her for prison. Nina wore new baby clothes for visits to her 16-year-old father, Toney, in a juvenile detention facility not too far from their Bronx neighborhood. As Nina grew, Lolli dressed her daughter for the rarer afternoons in faraway New York State maximum-security visiting rooms. The gaps between visits gave Lolli time to save and shop for the brand-new outfits on layaway. In the inner city, being ''dressed'' has always been important: it means you are provided for, a part of bigger things. Sloppiness and stains were physical evidence of failure, of poverty winning its battle against you. The night before visits, Lolli would spend hours doing Nina's hair in her father's favorite style -- Shirley Temple curls. Nina groaned and grimaced. Lolli tugged and yanked. Nina winced whenever Lolli cleaned her ears (Toney sometimes checked). In prison, as on the street, a well-dressed family enhanced Toney's stature. Interactions were public, and appearances mattered.
On a cold morning early last month, Nina, who is now 12, stood on her stoop, dressed, waiting to visit her father. She was glad about going to see him, eager to go anywhere, to get away from her boring block in an upstate New York town and the chaos of her house. She has been an upstate girl for more than seven years, but like her mom, she still rocks a city style. Nina's thick, dyed blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she flashed a new pair of silver-and-pink Nikes. She was wearing a dark blue velvet sweatsuit Lolli bought for the day. The sweatsuit came from a corner store, whose Bronx-born proprietor imports the New York City ghetto style upstate.
As long as Nina could remember, the prison system held uncles and cousins and grandfathers and always her father. Nina, like Toney and Lolli, was raised in the inner city; for all three, prison further demarcated the already insular social geography. Along with the baby showers of teenagers, they attended prisoners' going-away and coming-home parties. Drug dealing and arrests were common on the afternoons Nina spent playing on the sidewalk as she and her parents hung out with their friends. People would be hauled away, while others would unexpectedly reappear, angrier or subdued. Corrections officers escorted one handcuffed cousin to Nina's great-grandmother's funeral; her favorite uncle had to be unshackled in order to approach his dying grandmother's hospital bedside. The prison system was part of the texture of family life.
Since 1974, the year Toney was born, the incarceration rate for young men in America has quadrupled. In his Bronx neighborhood, as in the poorest communities around the country, prison is now a well-established rite of passage. A 2000 study by the U.S. Department of Justice found that about half of the nation's inmates are parents of children under 18. The study also found that almost 1.5 million children had a parent in prison, an increase of more than 500,000 children since 1991.
Many inmates lose touch with their families -- more than half of all fathers in state prison report having no personal visits with their children. But the family that maintains a significant connection must arrange and rearrange their relationships -- their lives -- around prison.
Posted by editor on September 30, 2003 10:43 AM