When children come to visit their parents in prison at Newton and Anamosa, the booths there do not allow for personal contact. .
Michael also said that there are some prison policies that deal directly with visitation. For instance, if a prisoner does something "bad" enough to be placed in lock-up they are not allowed to see any visitors at that time. Prisoners arrested on a sex charges are not allowed to have any children on their visitor list- ever. When children do come to visit he said "that the little kids are excited to see their parents, while the older ones, like teenagers, have better things to do then visit their parent in jail." He also said that mothers pay more attention to their children when they come to visit than the fathers. Most of the fathers have been in and out of prison many times and don"t pay much attention to their children when they come to visit. .
So, how much contact goes on between the parent and the child? The Survey of State Prison Inmates (1991), by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, found that 46 percent of women with minor children said that they had talked to their children on the phone at least once a week. While 45 percent had contact by mail at least once a week and only nine percent were visited by their child. The contact between imprisoned men and their children was slightly less with about 32 percent having talked to their child by phone in the past week, 30 percent communicating by mail to/from the children, and eight percent being visited by their child. .
What happens to these kids while their parents are in prison? Of the children with incarcerated mothers about half live with their grandparents, one-quarter live with their fathers, and the remaining one-quarter are placed in out-of-home care (Seymour 1998). The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 requires that states try to sever a parents right to their child after the child has spent 15 out of 22 consecutive months in out-of-home care (Katz 1998).
