Blow: Prison needn’t be a sentence for children of incarcerated

By Charles M. Blow / The New York Times

Deonte Smith was just 3 years old, and his brother just a baby, when their mother, Yolanda Diamond, was incarcerated. She faced consecutive life sentences plus 25 years after crashing into another vehicle while fleeing the scene of a burglary, killing two sisters, one of whom was pregnant, and a child.

Smith, now 34, remembers family and friends occasionally taking him, as a small child, to see his mother. On those early trips, she was able to briefly hug and kiss him before they had to be seated on opposite sides of a table for the rest of their short visits; prevented from having the physical contact that would be natural and normal for young children and parents: sitting in her lap, resting his head on her chest, her rubbing his cheek and feeling his breath.

But when Smith was about 8, he told me, his mother entered the Foreverfamily program and things began to change. Foreverfamily is an Atlanta-based organization founded in 1987 by attorney and activist Sandra Barnhill to serve the children of incarcerated parents, helping those children maintain regular, meaningful connections with their parents.

Foreverfamily would bring Smith and his brother to see Diamond, and she was able to visit with them for six hours at a time in a family center on prison grounds that was decorated to look more like a day care than a prison visitation area, complete with holiday decorations depending on the time of year.

Diamond lit up when she described it to me: “It had books. It had games. You could go outside. I mean, it was a full open space. You could get in the floor. You could just get in the rocking chair.”

The organization’s CEO, Camilla Ngurre Paul, describes these visits as being “like going to a party in the park.”

Smith credits Foreverfamily’s suite of services, including mentorships and college tours, with making him a productive member of his community. “I feel like I would’ve went the other way” without them, he told me. “I grew up in the projects, like, real poverty,” he explained, and by age 9 both of his parents were incarcerated. Foreverfamily helped him break the cycle. He graduated from high school, completed two years of college and has never been to prison. Now he is a father himself.

Paul says that Smith’s success story is common among those who’ve been involved with the organization.

We think of the carceral system as providing a measure of justice for victims of crimes, but we often neglect to consider that the system also produces victims: the innocent children of the incarcerated. A 2015 report from the organization Child Trends estimated that there were 5 million American children who’d had a parent imprisoned at some point in their lives.

When a parent is incarcerated, Paul said, “society punishes the children, too.” People make mistakes “and they have to pay the price to society,” she said, “but the children don’t have to pay a price for what they did not do.”

And that price can be severe. According to a 2017 article in The National Institute of Justice Journal, “Children whose parents are involved in the criminal justice system, in particular, face a host of challenges and difficulties: psychological strain, antisocial behavior, suspension or expulsion from school, economic hardship and criminal activity.”

But: “Research suggests that the strength or weakness of the parent-child bond and the quality of the child and family’s social support system play significant roles in the child’s ability to overcome challenges and succeed in life.”

Foreverfamily, Paul says, has worked with more than 40,000 children in some capacity since its founding.

One of the core services the group provides is the visits that helped Smith maintain a bond with his mother. Paul says that many of the families in her program are low-income and wouldn’t have the means to make these visits possible without assistance.

When I think of Foreverfamily’s aims in the grand scope of philanthropy, they are modest. The organization hopes to expand its program to more families and more prisons. “I also have a dream of just getting our own bus,” Paul told me; the group has been depending on a local church to donate the use of a bus for their trips.

Diamond has been out on parole for 10 years. She and a co-defendant have maintained that she didn’t take part in the burglary. Years ago, she connected with the parents of the sisters who were killed, who offered their forgiveness. She is working through her relationship with Smith and his brother, which is understandably difficult. As she told me, while looking adoringly at Smith: “It was a little sketchy, but we worked through it. You know, and we still growing. But it’s beautiful.”

Smith now volunteers with Foreverfamily. I asked Diamond what she would say to anyone considering a contribution to the organization: “I would tell them how life-changing it is. It’s vital. It is almost a necessity.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.