Imprisoned fathers locked out of services

By Matthew Blake

The Rev. James Coleman estimates that he helps 1,600 male ex-offenders re-enter society each year at the West Side Health Authority, a nonprofit based in the West Side’s Austin neighborhood.

Coleman’s mentorship and support program reaches out to clients while in prison and then channels them into a community support network upon their release. Its services include everything from resume writing and computer training to therapy.

But what separates Coleman’s program from most similar services offered elsewhere is that it attempts to reconnect their clients with their children. “This area has certainly been neglected,” Coleman said. “I really believe that a lot more can be done.”

Others point out that family connection services do exist, but that they are typically designed for female ex-offenders. “I know almost no one who focuses on the men,” said Patricia Schlosser, former social work coordinator at Lutheran Social Services of Illinois, a church-based agency that provides services for mothers.

“This issue is compelling because there are so many more fathers incarcerated,” said Elise Zealand, author of a Columbia Law Review study in 1998 that argued more family connection services would benefit fathers.

According to the Illinois Department of Corrections, 94 percent of the 41,000 prisoners in Illinois, as of Aug. 9, 2006, are men.

“With services to the father you’re really getting double bang for your buck,” Zealand added.

But such programs remain largely inaccessible to male prisoners.

“It’s a severe problem,” said Martin Feliciano, who works with ex-offenders at Humboldt Park Social Services. “There aren’t services for fathers to get a relationship with their family and kids.”

As a result, Feliciano said, many of his clients lose touch with their children and the stability and sense of direction that parenting can provide.

Schlosser said that the overall scarcity of services for ex-offenders has pressured agencies to focus employment programs on the men and child care on the women.

“In terms of employment training programs, the fathers are more easily received—the women have less skills in the first place,” Schlosser said, explaining that many men had manual work experience before prison, which makes job placement after incarceration comparatively easier.

In Feliciano’s experience, this genderbased allocation of limited resources leads to further problems. “Mothers are reunited with their children but can’t feed or clothe them,” Feliciano said. Men, on the other hand, tend to move from job to job at the expense of family and community, he said.

Service groups do have their reasons for focusing family connection services on women.

Gail Smith, director of Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers, known as CLAIM, echoed many service providers, saying that mothers should receive more services. “Most of the children who were living with incarcerated parents were living with the mother.”

A 2000 study by Christopher J. Mumola, policy analyst at the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice, revealed that 64 percent of mothers in state prisons and 84 percent of mothers in federal prisons lived with their children, compared with 44 percent of fathers in state prisons and 55 percent in federal prisons.

Mumola said that more services should go to both mothers and fathers, but that children typically experience more trauma when the mother is incarcerated. “In terms of sheer numbers of children affected, more services should go to the father,” he said. “But a disruption to a child’s life and a new home is much more common when the mother is incarcerated.”

Bob Dougherty, executive director at St. Leonard’s Ministries, a nonprofit based on the West Side, agreed that not enough funding exists for mothers or fathers.

“There’s a need of services for everybody,” said Dougherty, whose agency provides family connection services to both male and female exoffenders. “There’s a hole in the dam and only so many fingers to plug it.”