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140 | 6 Conclusion Practice and Policy Implications of a Family Perspective on Parental Incarceration Selene’s Story Since the age of 11, Selene Diaz1 was the child of an incarcerated father. She struggled with this fact emotionally but soon gained acceptance in her innercity neighborhood by joining a gang. One thing led to another, and after fighting in school, Selene was arrested and sent to juvenile hall at the age of 15. Like so many of her friends there, Selene felt her circumstances were “normal.” After her release, a series of drug and theft charges kept her in and out of juvenile hall until she graduated to state prison. Selene’s mother was occupied with two parttime jobs and caring for three other children, one of whom was Selene’s infant son. Selene had little in the way of support or a model for another way of life. One day at the age of 22, after a 15-month incarceration, Selene was contacted by the Women’s Center for Empowerment (WCE), a nonprofit organization devoted to helping marginalized young women who are involved in the criminal justice system. Selene was asked to do outreach on the streets of her city for other young mothers like herself. Selene was shocked to learn that she would be paid for her efforts at WCE, despite her criminal record. Shortly thereafter, Selene was picked up and beaten by the police for spray painting graffiti. When Selene went to the WCE the next day and told her colleagues what happened, she was shocked at their reaction—an overwhelming “This is not OK!” No one had ever stood up for Selene before. The group then organized a demonstration in front of the police department protesting their treatment of Selene. Selene, now 30, lives independently with her son and works at WCE. She explains that the day of the police protest was a turning point in her life. Selene recalls: “I had never had anyone on my side before, someone to believe in me, someone who lived where I lived and knew where I had been. Up to the time Conclusion | 141 I was contacted by WCE I was invisible. With WCE at my side, I realized my life could matter. I did not want any girl to go through what I had and so from that point on, I worked to make sure that other girls like me would not be forgotten….when everyone else saw me as a hopeless case, WCE saw me as a stakeholder.” Selene’s case is a fictional dramatization; however, the organization that reached out to her is real. The “WCE” is in reality the Center for Young Women’s Development (CYWD) in San Francisco, one of the first nonprofits in the United States run and led entirely by young women. The CYWD is designed to target the most marginalized young women in the street economies and justice system and delivers intensive wraparound services with multiple components such as reading education, job readiness training , peer-to-peer mentoring, critical thinking, and political education. Why does this organization work? First and foremost, participants in the program are viewed as clients, that is, people there to get a service, rather than the “throwaways” of society. CYWD’s guiding principles include social justice, sisterhood, self-determination, and self-value. Part of its success lies in the fact that many participants self-refer, and they want to be there. The CYWD program represents evidenced-based intervention that aligns well with ecological theory and developmental contextualism. CYWD lives by the creed “Wherever young women are, that’s where we are” (Hester, 2010). As we will soon discuss, this kind of alignment between a program and the lived experience of parent offenders is critical in promoting change. Further, CYWD’s activism aimed at fighting oppression and breaking down social and political barriers for ex-offenders demonstrates a sensitivity to context and a holistic understanding of the challenges associated with incarceration that extend beyond the individual. The primary objective of this chapter is to explore in depth the “principles behind the program.” Here we advance family-focused policy and practice that align with our developmental, ecological systems framework of examining families in context. By critically examining current policy reforms and programmatic efforts aimed at incarcerated parents and their families, suggestions for innovation based on the themes and patterns derived from the empirical coverage can be offered. First, an integrative model is presented that summarizes these major themes covered...

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