by The Register-Guard Staff
Cradling stuffed animals to remind them of their own children, who researchers predict could well follow them to prison, inmates at Shutter Creek Correctional Institution this month completed a series of parenting classes designed specifically for the school of hard knocks.
“It’s something they need to teach people before they’re parents, like in high school,” says Patricia Baldridge, a 51-year-old inmate from Lane County who was in the class.
“We really believe this is the program where we have the most impact. We will get people to make changes, once they take responsibility for their children, that they wouldn’t make for themselves,” says Sharon Darcy, head of Pathfinders, the nonprofit agency under contract to teach the parenting course in six of Oregon’s 12 prisons. A seventh will begin this month.
Long-term inmates frequently sob as the curriculum unfolds, as they see themselves in their children’s eyes, says Sharon Clark, who manages the educational programs at Shutter Creek.
“It’s a very hard class for some inmates, when they start to understand the impact they’ve had on their children,” Clark says. “The statistics are very, very grim for children of incarcerated parents. That’s the cycle we really are trying to break.”
In essence, the curriculum coaches inmate parents on four points: how to reinforce a child’s positive behavior, how to properly discipline bad behavior, how to monitor children’s activities and how to create positive family problem-solving experiences so children learn how to participate in nurturing relationships. Teachers emphasize structure and consistency in parenting. It’s up to individual parents to choose which of the research-proven parenting techniques are best for them.
In the long run, corrections and child development experts believe that the classes will improve the way offenders raise their children and lower the odds that children of inmates will grow up to become inmates, says Claudia Black, director of the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute at Portland State University.
While data is scarce, estimates are that children of inmates are five to seven times more likely to be imprisoned than are other children, Black says. Nationwide, 2 million children currently have a parent in prison, a 50 percent increase since 1990. Two-thirds of Oregon’s 12,700 inmates have children under age 18, Black says.
“That equates to 20,000 children in Oregon who have a parent in prison,” Black says.
So far, almost 900 Oregon inmates have attended parenting classes since the Oregon Legislature funded them as a pilot project in 2001.
As word spread among inmates, interest grew to the point that state prison officials shifted money within their budget to add more classes.
That’s how Shutter Creek got its program. The first class of about 60 inmates had 99 children among them, says Patti Knight, the Shutter Creek health service manager who lobbied for the classes.
Parent education was a natural fit at Shutter Creek because the prison already houses the SUMMIT program – an intensive six-month schedule of 16 hour days for 180 inmates. SUMMIT teaches offenders to recognize and change the attitudes and habits that lead them to crime.
“They recognize-a lot of them – that their problems started in their teen years or before, and they realize what a difference they can make in their own kids’ lives,” says Julie Martin, a management assistant at Shutter Creek.
At the outset in 2001, program advocates were surprised to learn how little research is available to design a prison-focused parenting curriculum. So they created their own, says Mark Eddy, a research scientist at the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene.
The center worked with state corrections officials, non-profit prison education programs and others to design the 36-lesson curriculum. The team also got a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to do a five-year scientific study of the curriculum’s impact on school progress, personal and family relationships, and emotional development of inmates’ children.
Corrections officials from other states and Canada have sought information about the curriculum. Once the results are documented, Oregon officials expect even greater interest. “It’s shocking no one else is doing this,” Black says. “Oregon is so cutting edge on this.”
Parent education is not the total solution, she says, but it’s part of Oregon’s growing focus on children of inmates that extends from state prisons into local communities.
“Parent education is one part of an overall strategy. Inmates really do need support when they get out in the community,” Black says.
Bladridge, the inmate from Lane County, says parent education works on two fronts from an inmate’s perspective. It helps inmates understand the origins of some of their own problems, and it explains how inmates create problems for their own children.
Looking back, Baldridge realizes she lacked parental guidance because her father died when she was young, leaving her mother with two young children.
“Mom worked all the time. It was just us. If I didn’t cook, we didn’t eat dinner,” Baldridge says.
So, when Baldridge had her own children, she set out to be a great parent. But the parenting classes showed her she was inconsistent with discipline and failed to guide her children to build their own independence – critical mistakes that shaped her life and theirs.
“My kids walked all over me. Whatever they wanted, they got,” she says. “There were times when I should have said, “It’s your money this time, not the handout.”
When it came to discipline, Baldridge was a pushover.
“I didn’t follow through. I wasn’t very structured. It was easier to give in,” she says.
Neither of her children has been imprisoned, but Baldridge embezzled from three employers over the years.
She got a five-year prison term in 2002 and owes $77,000 in restitution to a local trucking company where she worked. Much of the stolen money went to support a daughter and two grandchildren, she says.
Baldridge, unlike many inmates, was not into drugs. Over the years she held good jobs in customer service, human resources and bookkeeping. Although she says she doesn’t understand why she became a thief, she knows she always tried to buy her children’s love.
“Had I given them more structure, I may not have felt I needed to do that,” Baldridge says. “I wish I had know everything we learned (in parenting class) when I was raising our children.”
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2005, The Register-Guard, www.registerguard.com.