Mom and son who experienced parent incarceration ask lawmakers for alternatives to jail
Republished from WEKU.
Amanda Hall’s mother was incarcerated briefly when she was a child. Hall, now a director with the anti-mass incarceration organization Dream.org, told a committee of lawmakers in Frankfort at the time she felt an “overwhelming” sense of shame and anger.
She recalls seeing a newspaper article about her mother’s arrest on a teacher’s desk. Hall said she always felt loved by her mother despite the things she was going through, but no one offered her counseling or helped her work through her trauma.
Hall later became addicted to opioids and “things kept spiraling downward.”
“After my second son was born, I was arrested and sent to prison, and then my children had to endure the same pain that I did while I was incarcerated,” Hall said. “I missed their first steps, their first words, and my oldest son’s kindergarten graduation. It was devastating.”
Hall’s son, Jayden Spence, now a sophomore at Morehead State University, also shared the deep pain over his mother’s incarceration that haunted him for much of his life.
“We were both asleep in the bed with her when it happened, I remember being terrified as I watched her being taken away in handcuffs,” Spence said. “From that moment on, everything in my life changed and has never been the same since.”
Spence described the instability he experienced while his mother was imprisoned and the mistrust of authority he felt for many years.
“I saw how hard it was for my mom to rebuild her life, to be judged for her past, every time she was told ‘no’ because of her convictions, every negative comment said about her, I felt that too,” Spence said. “Looking back now, I understand that the suffering my family went through wasn’t random. It could have been prevented and treated.”
Advocates with the Kentucky Youth Advocates and the conservative criminal justice reform group Right on Crime proposed legislation that they say would help avoid similar situations. They asked lawmakers to require judges to consider a person’s status as a primary caregiver during sentencing, which they said would encourage judges to direct people toward services and treatment rather than prison time.
“When we think about just the high rates of kids who are experiencing parental incarceration, it really does create an urgency for us to find ways to minimize that impact,” said Cortney Downs with Kentucky Youth Advocates. “We need to hold people accountable for their actions, but there’s an equally important need for us to find a balance between applying consequences that really do match the actions, and then also considering the impact that it has on their kids.”
Downs said there were more than 115,000 children in Kentucky from 2021 to 2022 who reported at some point having had a parent incarcerated.
States that have taken similar action include Missouri, Illinois, California, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington and Tennessee. For example, the Tennessee law passed in 2019 requires courts to consider options that would keep a parent with their child.
Republican Sen. Whitney Westerfield, of Fruit Hill, who currently co-chairs the interim judiciary committee but is not running for reelection, said he regretted he wouldn’t be able to carry the legislation forward during the session that starts in January.
According to the ACLU of Kentucky, 64% of incarcerated women and 55% of incarcerated men are parents of minor children.
While the legislation would generally apply to all parents facing incarceration, states have often included carve outs for those convicted of violent or sex crimes. Right on Crime Kentucky said that it could potentially apply to more than 6,000 incarcerated parents, based on 2020 data.
“I propose to you that if Kentucky were to implement some form of caregiver consideration legislation, it stands to save this commonwealth almost $64,000 per eligible parent who is essentially subject to community enforcement, as opposed to incarceration,” said James Comley, the Right on Crime director for Kentucky and Tennessee.
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Originally published by WEKU.
Republished with permission.
