Mother-Child Reintegration Program

1. Mother-Child Reintegration Program Taylor McKeown Son

2. Intro • The Mother-Child Reintegration Program is a program to help keep relationships between imprisoned mothers and their children. • The mission statement of the Mother-Child Reintegration Program is to help keep relationships between mothers and their children strong and to make the reintegration program easier on both the mother and child. • The Mother-Child Reintegration Program is a state program and it is engaged in its mission because most women in prison have school-age children, and while the mother’s are in prison they lose all communication with their children. This program helps keep communication with mother’s and children going so that when the mother gets out of prison, they have not lost years of communication with their children. • Similar programs are the basic visitation program set up by the prison system and the Motheread program. The Motheread program is where mother’s can record themselves reading a book and then send the book and recording to their children so that it is like the mother is there reading the book to the child in person.

3. Problem • The problem that the Mother-Child Reintegration Program is addressing is the loss of communication between mother’s and their children while the mother is imprisoned. • Most women live with their children before they are imprisoned and then plan to continue living with them when they get out. There is nothing wrong with this thought, but most women in prison do not have any communication with their children while they are prison, which makes living together after imprisonment hard. • The main focus of this program is to help maintain communication between mother’s and their children, thus making the reintegration program easier on not only the women but also their children.

4. Solution • The solution that the Mother-Child Reintegration Program has come up with is to provide days where mothers and their children can come together and spend time with each other. • The prison system is very big on giving back to the community while the people are in prison. The Mother-Child Reintegration Program incorporates this into its program. • The way the program solves the problem is to allow the mother and children spend a day together twice a month. • In the morning, the mother and child will work together in a community garden. Then they will have a light lunch together. In the afternoon, they will have a cooking class using the crops grown in the community garden (season permitting). The meal made in the class will be geared more towards the age of the child. After they make the meal, the mother and child will then eat the meal that they made together for dinner. • This twice-a-month set up helps keep mothers and their children close by allowing them to spend time together.

5. Need • In order for this program to take off it will need some funding. • Depending how many children show up may cause issues with the food supply that comes from the garden. Funding would be needed to provide more food items and ingredients in order for everyone to have enough to make a meal. • The largest cost would probably be supervision for the whole project which would have to come from funding. • Also, transportation to the community garden and cooking class would cost money, as well as the class instructor. • The plot of land for the garden, the seeds for the crops, and all the garden equipment would come from donations. • The government has offered a budget but also the program would rely on sponsors and the community as a whole.

6. Future • The Mother-Child Reintegration Program will have a huge impact on the future. • Mothers and their children will have stronger bonds due to this program which will make mothers not want to leave their children again. • This program helps keep women offenders from repeating the same mistakes as before. • This program helps mothers and their children maintain communication and grow in their relationship with each other. • Also, this program helps the women and children by showing them how to grow a garden and how to cook.

7. Works Cited • Sharp, Susan, Ph. D. "Breaking the Cycle of Violence." Oklahoma Kids. N.p., 21 Nov. 2008. Web. 28 Apr. 2013. <http://www.okkids.org/documents/Study%20of %20Incarcerated%20Mothers%20and%20Their%2 0Children.pdf>. • Wright, Emily, Patricia Van Voorhis, Emily Salisbury, and Ashley Bauman. "Lessons from the NIC/UC Gender-Responsive Classification Project." University of Cincinnati. N.p., Oct.-Nov. 2009. Web. 28 Apr. 2013. <http://www.uc.edu/content/dam/uc/women offenders/docs/WGC.pdf>.