Relocation Blues - Technology Information

As prisoners are shipped out of their home states, Carol Fennelly uses the Internet to preserve fragile family bonds.

IT IS SWELTERING SUMMER MORNING in Washington, and in the silence of the basement of the Shiloh Baptist Church, 9-year-old Diamond is squirming in his seat. As an image forms on the color monitor before him, Diamond's eyes widen and the fidgeting ceases.

"Hi Dad!" Diamond shouts as if it were up to him to cover the distance that separates him from his father, DeWayne Mixon, who's incarcerated 360 miles away in the Corrections Corporation of America Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown, Ohio. "Can you see me?" Diamond asks.

Thanks to the efforts of activist Carol Fennelly and a pair of low-end computers connected through the Internet, Mixon -- serving a three- to nine-year sentence for assault -- can see and hear his son. After an extended visit earlier this summer, it is the second time in five years he's seen Diamond.

When the federal government initiated its takeover of Washington several years ago, one of its first moves was to close the decrepit Lorton Correctional Complex and start shipping the city's inmates to distant private prisons. This practice reflects a national trend. The number of prison beds in for-profit facilities has grown from 15,000 in 1989 to more than 120,000 today as state and federal authorities turn to the private sector to address overcrowding caused by the incarceration boom of the last two decades. A side effect of this move toward private prisons has been the decimation of family bonds, as thousands of prisoners have been sent to serve sentences far from home.

Fennelly spent the '80s and most of the '90s advocating for the homeless in Washington, living in and running the city's 1,400-bed Federal City Shelter. Prolonged hunger strikes and other dramatic actions made Fennelly a household name in Washington. While the city's homeless population has decreased, the prison population has exploded, as it has across the country to 2 million nationwide. The transition to prisoners' rights was a natural one for an advocate accustomed to helping the most ignored segments of society.

"We have too many people in prison today whom most of the rest of the nation does not give a damn about," says Fennelly. "I don't know how to make people care about those 2 million prisoners, but I do believe they care about the children. And if I can make them care about the children, I can ultimately make them care about the dads." When Washington started moving prisoners to Youngstown, Fennelly went with them to look for ways to keep the city's emigre prisoners connected with home and family.

While watching television, Fennelly saw a mention of Internet software that allowed face-to-face teleconferencing. She immediately brought the idea to prison officials: Why not use the software to let Youngstown inmates visit with their children at home in Washington?

It was not an easy sell. Security concerns made wardens wary of permitting online access behind prison walls. Fennelly responded by hiring Digital Access Corporation, which provides security programming to the Pentagon, among other clients, to strip down her PCs so they could be used for nothing but teleconferencing. Youngstown officials signed on and have supported her efforts ever since, Fennelly notes.

With an initial grant of $20,000 from Washington-based Cafritz Foundation, Fennelly acquired computers and software and launched the program. According to Mark Fellows, program manager at the Youngstown facility, the teleconferencing complements what inmates are learning in parenting and drug-treatment classes, motivating them to change their lives both during and after their incarceration.

Fennelly commutes every other week between Youngstown, where she has two computers in the prison, and Washington, where two are installed at local churches. Using Microsoft NetMeeting software, prisoners' children are able to talk with their parents, introduce them to their friends and show them school projects.

Fennelly doesn't intend her teleconferencing program to be a substitute for in-person contact; she also sets up offline visits and recently held a weeklong summer camp for Washington children to spend a week in Ohio with their fathers. But for many Youngstown prisoners, online contact with their kids may be the only kind they get. And contact of any sort, Fennelly believes, is crucial to the future of the inmates and their children. One study found that inmates who did not participate in family visitation were three times more likely than those who did to violate parole after their release. And children of prisoners are more likely to become offenders if they don't get the support they need.

In a 40-minute teleconference with his son, DeWayne Mixon makes it clear that this concern is foremost on his mind. "Be careful out there," he lectures Diamond, who lives with his grandmother and three siblings in Washington's Edgewood Terrace housing project, which is known for drugs and crime. "Now, you know right from wrong, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Don't be out there doing nonsense and acting crazy, you hear me?"

"Yes."

"'Cause you better than that, you hear me?"

"OK.... Daddy? Daddy?"

The connection has dropped, and not for the first time. The low-income neighborhoods in which the two churches are located aren't wired for cable modem nor DSL, so Fennelly must use a standard telephone line. She does not have the bandwidth to run both sound and streaming video at once, and must alternate between the two, freezing the images in order for father and child to talk. Even so, the computer crashes regularly, requiring a pause of several minutes as it is restarted.

The disappointment on Diamond's face each time this happens highlights not just the limits of the technology at hand, but the distance between father and son. The preciousness of the bits and pieces of their fathers these children experience though the computer underscores the magnitude of what has been taken from them -- and from the 10 million other children who have felt the impact of parental incarceration.

"You be good out there," Mixon tells his son as the session draws to a close. "I love you, OK? Give Daddy a kiss on the cheek."

"How am I supposed to do that?" Diamond asks.

In a telephone interview from the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, Mixon says he hopes the teleconference session will be the first of many and will give him the chance to be a good father. But it is also a painful reminder of the things he is not able to do for his son, and the risks Diamond faces as a result.

"It's killing me now," says Mixon. "I know that he definitely needs me. I just want to be careful what I say to him. Talk to him about doing good in school. Tell him to watch who he hangs around with, because a lot of them young boys out there can be bad little role models. And I just don't want him to follow in my footsteps."

Seeing Diamond at the summer camp and then on the computer monitor has given him a new resolve to make this his last time behind bars. "He listens to me," adds Mixon, "but being as I'm not Out there, my hand is in the air. It's in the air. And I can't fault nobody but myself. He knows I'll do anything I can to make sure that he's all right. But basically, the best thing for me to do now is just get out and act like I got some sense.

This kind of epiphany is exactly what Fennelly is looking to facilitate. Prison, she says, can offer a "redemptive moment in someone's life, when they have been taken out of the context where they were doing the things that got them there in the first place. A lot of times, because prisons are no longer focused on rehabilitation, that moment is lost. But if you can reach people when they want do do something in their lives -- they want to be part of their family; they don't want to come back to this place -- then that moment can become valuable, and it can lead to the redeeming of a life that might literally be lost."

There may be nothing so potentially redemptive as parenthood, explains Fennelly -- an idea generally overlooked when it comes to men. When Washington's prisoners started heading out of town, Fennelly says, there was an outcry about mothers being separated from their children, but "nobody bothered to ask what would happen to the dads and their relationship with their kids. ... Once a dad gets in prison, he's no longer considered a part of his family. Nothing in our society encourages this man to stay involved with his children."

Youngstown's Fellows agrees. "There are some things done for women prisoners," he says, referring to efforts to maintain family contact, "but very little for men." Fennelly's program has been well received by inmates, says Fellows, who believes that in some cases teleconferencing may have advantages over face-to-face visits. "It's much easier for a father to present himself in a favorable light at a computer desk," observes Fellows, "than if he's inside a double crash gate and razor wire."

Since the program was launched, Fellows has gotten calls from administrators at private and staterun prisons interested in setting up their own teleconferencing programs. One ambitious effort already exists in two state prisons in Florida, where 100 women are able to talk with their children and read to them from storybooks using Microsoft NetMeeting. Florida Department of Corrections consultant Anne Holt hopes that "when the participants come home, it will be easier to reintegrate into the family and the community, and therefore they won't come back to prison."

The children's reaction to the teleconferencing program, adds Holt, has been powerful and immediate. Smaller children will climb up on the table and embrace the computer. One little boy asked, "Mommy, why can't you get out of the TV?"

Denise Johnston, a former pediatrician who heads the Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents in Pasadena, Calif., believes responses like this are cause for concern. While Internet visitation supplemented by periodic in-person visits are useful to older children, kids under 6 may find it confusing. Johnston says that because of television, "they're used to dealing with those kinds of images, and their understanding of them is that they're not authentic." A child whose primary contact with a parent is on a computer monitor, Johnston says, may wind up with the impression that "their parent is the same place where TV shows take place. Wherever Drew Carey is, that's where Daddy is."

Another concern is that this technology may make it easier to justify shipping prisoners out of state. "If we come up with ways to address family needs when the correctional systems do something that is completely inhumane and untenable, we're going to facilitate more of these types of decisions," says Johnston. "'These people are in Ohio? Oh well, let's put them in Texas.'"

"The heart of locking somebody up," explains Johnston, "is the deprivation of love and touch." Teleconferencing's advocates on both sides of the prison walls would acknowledge the Internet can, at best, address only half of that equation. But as the prison population continues to grow, and more children are separated from their parents, a better-than-nothing solution looks pretty attractive.

"Do I think that teleconferencing will ever take the place of a hug?" asks Fennelly. "No. Neither do these kids, and neither do these men." But for children who are hungry for whatever parental affection they can scavenge from an impossible situation, a face on a screen can have a tremendous impact.

"I watch these little girls' says Fennelly, "and when Dad says, 'Hi, beautiful they sit up a little taller in their chairs."

Nell Bernstein (nebernstein@earthlink.net) is a media fellow with the Center on Crime Communities and Culture of the Open Society Institute.

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