All Alone in the World

Nell Bernstein

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781595585554
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. "An urgent invitation to care for all children as our own." —Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family In this "moving condemnation of the U.S. penal system and its effect on families", award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein takes an intimate look at parents and children—over two million of them—torn apart by our current incarceration policy ( Parents' Press ). Described as "meticulously reported and sensitively written" by Salon, the book is "brimming with compelling case studies... and recommendations for change" ( Orlando Sentinel ). Our Weekly Los Angeles calls it "a must-read for lawmakers as well as for lawbreakers." "In terms of elegance, breadth and persuasiveness, All Alone in the World deserves to be placed alongside other classics of the genre such as Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family. But to praise the book's considerable literary or sociological merit seems beside the point. This book belongs not only on shelves but also in the hands of judges and lawmakers." — San Francisco Chronicle "Well researched and smoothly written, Bernstein's book pumps up awareness of the problems, provides a checklist for what needs to be done and also cites organizations like the Osborne Society that provide parenting and literacy classes, counseling and support. The message is clear: taking family connections into account 'holds particular promise for restoring a social fabric rent by both crime and punishment.'" — Publishers Weekly, starred review

1

ARREST

ANTHONY WAS A SLIGHT and restless boy of ten with pale skin and huge brown eyes. In a nearly bare office adjacent to the room where his grandmother was attending a support group, he was in and out of his chair, squirming and wriggling, his eyes wandering the room.

“I lived with my mother and her boyfriend and then they made drugs and sold them in the shed and I was in the house and they weren’t even watching me,” he said in one breath.

While his mother cooked methamphetamine, Anthony watched television. That is what he was doing the day the police came. Anthony was five years old. The police broke down the door, then smashed through the floorboards looking for drugs. Anthony remembers a lot of things shattered or crushed after that, things that had belonged to his grandfather. He remembers an officer putting him in the back of a police car. He was frightened, and didn’t know where he was being taken.

“It’s kiddie jail,” he said of the children’s shelter in which he found himself. “A jail for kids. Actually, it’s not punishment. Actually, they punished me, though. Someone stole my watch. And they gave me clothes too small for me. They keep you in cells—little rooms that you sleep in, and you have nothing except for a bed, blankets, and sheets. You couldn’t even go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. They wouldn’t let you out.”

At the shelter, Anthony cried for his mother and his grandmother. His grandmother came right away when she learned what had happened, but it was two and a half weeks—and three family court hearings—before Anthony was released from the shelter and permitted to go home with her. She lived in another county, and child welfare authorities insisted that she secure local housing before they would release Anthony to her care.

“He was in so much pain,” she said of the boy who met her at the shelter. “He jumped in my arms from across the room and said, ‘Granny, get me out of here.’”

Anthony remembers the day he left the shelter. “I had a Wolverine and an Incredible Hulk in a plastic baggie in one hand and the other hand was holding my grandma and we ran down the street as fast as we can, away from the shelter.”

Anthony’s mother is out of jail now, trying to stay clean. Anthony knows if she slips up, the police will take her away again. He fears it will happen to him, too. Because of the way he was taken there, and how little was explained to him, the shelter has come to haunt Anthony.

“The third time you go in the children’s shelter, you can never go out until you’re eighteen. My uncle told me, and it’s true, too.”

Anthony drew from his mother’s arrest a few simple lessons: his mother was bad. He was bad. Authority was destructive. It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which a parent’s arrest would not be wrenching for a child. But Anthony’s fear and sorrow might have been eased by steps as simple as having someone take him into another room while his home was searched and talk to him about what was going on, or asking his mother if there were someone she might call to care for him.

These things happen, sometimes, when an individual officer thinks of them, or a chief mandates them. But the majority of police departments have no written protocol delineating officers’ responsibility to the children of arrested parents, and those protocols that do exist vary widely in their wording and their implementation. A national survey by the American Bar Association (ABA) Center on Children and the Law found that only one-third of patrol officers will handle a situation differently if children are present. Of that third, only one in five will treat a suspect differently if children are present. One in ten will take special care to protect the children.

The result is that an event that is by its nature traumatic—the forcible removal by armed strangers of the person to whom children naturally look for protection—happens in ways that are virtually guaranteed to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, that trauma.

A national study found that almost 70 percent of children who were present at a parent’s arrest watched their parent being handcuffed, and nearly 30 percent were confronted with drawn weapons. When researcher Christina Jose Kampfner interviewed children who had witnessed their mothers’ arrests, she found that many suffered classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome—they couldn’t sleep or concentrate, and they had flashbacks to the moment of arrest. If an arrested parent later returns home on parole or probation, officers often have license to enter the house at will—meaning that children may relive that trauma in their living rooms as well as their imaginations.

Police often plan raids for late-night or early-morning hours, when those they seek are most likely to be home with their families. That ups the odds that police will get their man, but also that children will awaken to see it happen. It should come as no surprise that sleep disorders follow.

Some narcotics officers report that they have children searched before releasing them to a relative or a shelter, in case they have drugs in their clothing or diaper. Washington Post reporter Leon Dash interviewed the son of a longtime drug dealer and prostitute who recalled being forced to strip and spread his buttocks inside his own apartment during police raids.

When police deem children in need of child protective services, the majority deliver the children in a police car rather than having a child welfare worker pick them up in a less-intimidating vehicle. About one-fourth of police departments routinely bring children first to the police station rather than to a shelter or other civilian destination. Officers who find themselves responsible for children at the time of an arrest complain that their “babysitting” responsibilities interfere with their ability to do their real job.

“It is unfair to keep young children at the police station,” one officer told the ABA researchers. “This is not a good place to watch children; there is no place to eat; they can’t sleep here; we often don’t have the supplies to take care of them, especially infants.”

A child who is picked up by police officers, transported in a police car, and deposited at the police station—where he may be deprived of food and sleep—will almost inevitably experience himself as having been arrested. To all intents and purposes, he has been.

In one jurisdiction, police supervisors described the following protocol for handling the child of an arrestee when no relative is available to pick him up: first, officers take the child to the hospital for a physical examination. Next, they transport him to the local juvenile detention center to “fill out the necessary forms.” Finally, they deposit him at a foster home.

This jurisdiction was presented as a model by the researchers who visited it. Both police and child welfare workers reported that their protocol was working efficiently and congratulated themselves and each other for their smooth collaboration. But try for a moment to imagine this circuit as a child might experience it (an exercise that is necessary because the researchers did not speak with any actual children). An armed and uniformed stranger handcuffs and takes away your parent, then places you in a police car, where you are separated from your rescuer by a metal grid. From where you sit, you can hear the crackle of the dispatcher on the radio reporting crimes and crises elsewhere in town. You are driven to the hospital, where you are required to take off your clothes and be scrutinized and prodded by another stranger. Then you are taken to a jail—just as your parent has been—where you sit in silence as the adults around you process the paperwork that will determine your immediate future. Finally, you are deposited at the home of yet another stranger, where you are given someone else’s pajamas and sent off to sleep in an unfamiliar bed.

It is quite likely that the various adults this child will encounter along his route will make an effort to treat him kindly. The problem is not the callousness of individuals but the mechanical indifference of multiple bureaucracies, each of which functions according to its own imperatives. These bureaucratic exigencies—rather than children’s experience—become the lens through which policies and protocols are drawn up and as-sessed. The system is viewed as “working” when it works for the institutions that comprise it—in itself, a legitimate end. But when children’s experience is not also given priority, the effect is to leave children feeling afraid, alone, and unseen.

“I just wish the police would have talked to me like I was a part of it,” said Christopher, who was whisked off to a foster home in the wake of his mother’s arrest—“which I was. But they acted like I wasn’t.”

The trauma children experience when a parent is arrested may set the tone for their subsequent relationship with the criminal justice system. A natural desire to protect oneself and defend one’s family evolves into a hatred of police, and authority generally—a rage that can make it difficult for a child to grow up to respect the law or trust its representatives.

“Adult lives are shaped by childhood experience,” observed San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessy, who said children sometimes call his jail looking for their missing parents in the wake of an arrest. “If children are abused by the criminal justice system, they will have hostility towards law enforcement as adults. If they are treated fairly, and see government as a place to receive assistance as opposed to something that takes away rights, they will be more likely to reach out to and respect government as adults.”

Ana, fifteen, has been watching her mother get arrested for years, for crimes such as forgery and drug possession. Once, she saw an officer snatch the cigarette from her mother’s mouth and throw it to the ground. Another time, she heard her mother crying that the handcuffs were too tight and were hurting her. “I don’t care,” the officer answered.

Ana’s brother, now five, witnessed these gratuitous cruelties throughout his early childhood. “When he sees the cops now, he’ll run, because he’s scared of them,” Ana said. “He’s all, ‘They took my mommy and they hurt her.’”

Seeing one’s parent helpless and restrained at an age when one still wants and needs to see her as omnipotent can be deeply disorienting. Lorraine watched police search her house and arrest her mother for drug offenses throughout her childhood. What left her most embittered, Lorraine said, was the fact that she rarely received an acknowledgment of her presence, much less an explanation.

“I was left thinking, ‘What could my mother possibly have done that they can come in my home and invade my privacy?’” Lorraine said. “I’d watch them handcuff my mother and take her to jail, thinking, ‘Don’t they know that she is beautiful in my eyes, and that I could help her get better? That she has a child at home who yearns for her presence?’ I remember crying to the police, ‘Please don’t take my mother away from me.’ Yet time after time, I would watch them handcuff my mother, place her in the police car, and drive away, leaving me to wonder, ‘Will I see her again?’ I began to hate the police.”

Children who do not manage to hate the authorities are likely to blame themselves. Jennifer was twelve years old when she returned home from science camp one afternoon to find police in her home. They arrested her mother and took Jennifer to a shelter. She felt, she said, “that my life was over. That I would never see my family again. I thought I had done something wrong, because I had to go away, too. But my family says I didn’t.”

Jennifer was twenty-seven years old when she told this story. She still didn’t sound convinced.

A parent’s arrest is the moment when a child’s invisibility is made visible; when it is communicated to him most explicitly how little he will matter within the systems and institutions that lay claim to his family.

With appalling regularity, young people describe being left to fend for themselves in empty apartments for weeks or even months in the wake of a parent’s arrest. In most cases, these children were not present when the parent was arrested; they simply came home from school to find their parent gone and were left to draw their own conclusions—not to mention cook their own dinner. But some told of watching police handcuff and remove a parent—the only adult in the house—and simply leave them behind. These stories bring home like no others the degree to which children are simply not seen, much less considered, within the criminal justice system.

The first time I heard such a story was from Ricky, then sixteen. Ricky’s mother, like one-third of all incarcerated mothers, was living alone with her children at the time of her arrest. Ricky was nine years old, and his brother was under a year.

“The police came and took my mom, and I guess they thought someone else was in the house, I don’t really know,” Ricky said. “But no one else was in the house. I was trying to ask them what happened and they wouldn’t say. Everything went so fast. They just rushed in the house and got her and left.”

After that, Ricky did his best. He cooked for himself and his brother, and he changed the baby’s diapers. “Sometimes he’d cry, because he probably would want to see my mother. But he was used to me, too,” Ricky said.

Ricky burned himself trying to make toast and got a blister on his hand, but he felt he was managing. He remembered that each day, his mother would take him and his brother out for a walk. So he kept to the family routine, pushing the baby down the sidewalk in a stroller every day for two weeks, until a neighbor took notice and called Child Protective Services.

Social workers came and took Ricky’s brother from him, just as police had his mother. The boys were sent to separate foster homes. Ricky saw his mother only once after that, years later, when he ran into her on the street and she told him she was working on getting him back. A year after that, he received a letter from a stranger with a hospital return address, telling him his mother had died. He never found out how she died, or what had happened to her in the years following her arrest.

I spoke with Ricky again a few years after our first meeting. He was nineteen, and doing well. He had been lucky in foster care; he had landed with a loving caregiver who had made a stable home for him. As a teenager, he had been contacted by his brother’s adoptive parents and had been able to forge a new relationship with him. Now he was attending a suburban junior college, where he had been recruited for his football talents.

As we walked around campus, Ricky seemed calmer than when I had met him three years earlier, confident and happy in his new role as college athlete. It was late summer, and he was registering for classes and getting ready for the upcoming season.

We talked again about the events...