CHAPEL HILL -- A new
North Carolina initiative is setting out to help ease one of
the biggest problems that incarcerated women face: separation
from their children.
Our Children's Place is a prison
reform program that would allow a small number of nonviolent
female prisoners to live with their young children while
serving their sentences.
"We've got to think
differently when we're incarcerating these men and women with
children," said state Rep. Ellie Kinnaird, an Orange County
Democrat, "We're incarcerating a whole generation."
Kinnaird spoke Tuesday to about 100 people about
challenges for incarcerated women.
After facing
unexpectedly fierce public outrage after a published report,
advocates of Our Children's Place decided on a different tack
of intimate forums to demonstrate why the facility is
necessary.
Tuesday night's panel at the Stone Center
at UNC Chapel Hill included Kinnaird, Melissa Radcliff,
executive director of Our Children's Place, and former
Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps, who spent time in
federal prison for misdeeds in office. Natalie Bullock Brown,
host of UNC-TV's Black Issues Forum, moderated the discussion.
Kinnaird called the current prison system a "tragedy,"
stemming largely from the nation's negative attitude toward
prisoners.
She said that children with parents in
prison are six times more likely to go to prison.
According to the state Department of Correction Web
site, 2,738 women and 35,946 men were incarcerated as of
November.
One of the biggest challenges for
incarcerated women is separation from their children.
Our Children's Place is a nonprofit that offers an
alternative for mothers convicted of non-violent crimes to
live with their young children while serving their sentences.
Instead of living in a traditional prison facility, 10 women
and up to 20 children will live in a 57,000-square foot
building in Butner. Eventually, the program would expand to 20
women and their children.
Radcliff said she expects
the facility to open in 2009.
"When the [mothers]
leave our program, they will be better prepared to provide for
their children," she said.
Although Our Children's
Place will be equivalent to a minimum security prison,
Kinnaird said it's important to make sure it doesn't feel like
a prison for the children living there.
Final details
for acceptance into the program have to be worked out, but
Radcliff said women with short prison terms may live with
children younger than kindergarten
age.
