Word: program
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...quite true. April's mom Regla Sanchez, 26, is inmate No. 162850 at the Hernando Correctional Institution, 320 miles away in Brooksville, Fla., and April is looking at an image of her mother on a computer screen. This virtual family visit is part of a new pilot program, Reading Family Ties, run by the Florida Department of Corrections in an effort to help incarcerated mothers and their kids bond. But when her mom disappears from the screen, April's face crumples. "It's hard," says Isabel Strausser, the program's Miami coordinator. "A lot of times kids...
...impossible situation," says Leslie Acoca of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, who nevertheless argues that it is worse to separate kids from their mothers. New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility opened the nation's first prison nursery 100 years ago, and these days its parenting program has had dramatic results. Only 10% of women who successfully completed the program returned to prison, in contrast to 52% of inmates overall...
With older children, the task becomes trying to maintain some semblance of normal mother-child relations. In Plymouth, Mich., the Children's Visitation Program runs parenting-skills classes at the women's prison to help moms and their kids reconnect. "A lot of [the children] are very angry," says director Florida Andrews. "They've been stigmatized because their mothers are locked up." Girl Scouts Beyond Bars buses kids to prisons once a month, where the scouts hold troop meetings with their incarcerated mothers. Tanyall Law, 15, and her two sisters, members of the Girl Scouts Rolling Hills council...
...when she is coming home. She flashes three fingers, the number of months until her release. He marks off the days on a calendar. "It's really hard, being that I want to see them and touch them," Barrett says. "But if it weren't for this program, I wouldn't be able to see them...
Some states are dealing with the proliferation of mothers in prison by looking for alternative-sentencing solutions. California sentences some nonviolent female drug offenders to Family Foundations, a community-based residential drug-treatment program. In Santa Fe Springs, Calif., female inmates live in what resembles a converted school building with their children up to age six. "You're not just another number where you're not getting any help," says Sarah Ambrosini, 29, who lives there with her two sons, ages four months and 16 months. The program is expensive, averaging $40,000 a year per inmate, compared with...