Kim Cooper adored her 7-year-old son, Scott. But she had a love that was even more powerful, one that ruled her daily life.
When her son went outside to play, she would make crack cocaine on the kitchen stove in her Billerica home.
“It’s all I cared about,” she said. “I thought when I couldn’t get it I would die.”
One spring day in 1996, Scott went to a friend’s birthday party and returned to find his mother handcuffed on the floor. A state trooper, working undercover, had gone to the house and bought cocaine from an acquaintance of his mother’s.
Before mandatory sentencing for drug offenders, a judge would have had the option of allowing Cooper to remain free on probation while she cared for Scott. But today, Cooper is inmate F36663, sentenced to MCI-Framingham for five years for drug trafficking. She is part of one of the fastest-growing segments of the nation’s prison population: women. And with that segment grows another: children of female inmates, who are taken away from their mothers — punished, although they are not guilty.
For Scott, membership in the group has meant a weight gain of 40 pounds, temper tantrums at school, and antidepressants. He even tried to cut himself with a knife.
The boom in female incarceration has reopened debate over whether laws intended to capture violent drug kingpins, who are overwhelmingly male, should be used to lock up women, break up their families, and send children to overstressed child-welfare systems.
“It’s a classic situation where you treat people apparently equally who are unequal,” said U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner. “The results are unfair. It is not the case that family obligations fall equally on men and women, so not to take them into account is unfair.”
Mothers behind bars face a unique set of struggles, and their growing numbers pose new challenges to the penal system. Unlike imprisoned men, whose children are often in the custody of their wives, former wives, or girlfriends, female inmates are more likely to lose their children to the state.
The mothers are sometimes wracked by guilt, knowing their criminal behavior caused their separation from their children. Many dream of being together again with their children. But a new federal law designed to speed adoption of children into safe homes will make reuniting more difficult.
“There’s been such a rise in the female prison population, and with that has got to come kids who are left in the wake,” said Lorraine Carli, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Social Services. “If there are no other alternatives, those kids are going to end up in the foster care system.”
Jean Fox, director of Aid to Incarcerated Mothers in Boston’s South End, organizes van rides to bring a dozen children to visit their mothers at MCI-Framingham each week. When their mothers get out of prison, Fox tries to help them with the transition. But it’s not easy.
“When a woman goes to prison, she loses her house, her furniture, her kids, everything,” Fox said. “So when she comes out of prison, she has to start all over again.”
Fox’s small non-profit, and others like it, are struggling to keep up as more women are imprisoned.
The female population in state and federal prisons jumped six-fold between 1977 and 1998, from 12,279 to 82,761, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Two-thirds of the women behind bars are mothers of minor children, according to the bureau.
Fourteen percent of the female inmates’ children in Massachusetts are in custody of the Department of Social Services, according to a Wellesley College study. Ten percent of the children are in foster care and another 2 percent have been adopted.
Some analysts worry that child-welfare systems, already shouldering unwieldy case loads, cannot handle the stress of more children.
But defenders of mandatory drug sentences say getting children far away from their drug-addicted or drug-dealing mothers is more critical than keeping together such families.
“What we have to ask ourselves is: Are the parents effective role models and are the children better off by having other people involved in their lives?” said Plymouth County District Attorney Michael Sullivan. “Sad as it is, it’s probably in the best interest of the child to take the child from those environments.”
“It’s unfortunate, at least for some of these kids,” said state Rep. Francis Marini of Hanson, Mass., the Republican minority leader. “You have to be responsible and it’s the father and mother of that child who are the cause of a child being in foster care.”
Some mothers inside prison acknowledge that they were not fit parents when they were on drugs. Cooper said she has received counseling in prison, and may be a better mother to Scott in the future.
That is, if she gets the chance.
After going to prison, Cooper watched helplessly while her bond to her only son frayed. First, Scott landed at his grandmother’s house in Maine, where he grew emotionally volatile and angry. He was admitted to Jackson Brook Institute in Portland after he tried to cut himself with a knife, which a doctor told his mother was a suicide attempt.
“He was just full of all of these feelings and didn’t know how to get them out,” Cooper said.
Cooper’s parents couldn’t handle Scott, and her former husband’s mother wanted no part of him, she said. Scott would have gone into foster care, but his father took the boy and moved to Guam.
“I don’t know what’s worse,” she said, referring to the choice between foster care and her former husband.
Even after they leave prison bars behind, some women will face new challenges in reuniting with their children because of a recently enacted federal law.
Signed by President Clinton in November 1997, the Adoption and Safe Families Act makes states terminate parental rights, with few exceptions, if a child has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. That means women sentenced to long prison terms stand to lose their children.
Compliance with the law is mandatory for states to receive millions of dollars in federal aid.
Fox, of Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, said attitudes against women in prison are hardening, and her job of helping families reunite will only get tougher.
“Just because a woman is in prison doesn’t mean she’s an unfit mother,” Fox said. “For a lot of women, incarceration is not the answer. Sometimes, drug treatment is the answer and incarceration makes things worse.”
Carli, the Department of Social Services spokeswoman, said families plagued by drugs, poverty, and crime are often pulled apart by two state agencies: the departments of Correction and Social Services.
“The profile of women going to prison is generally single head of household, and that’s about 50 percent of our case load,” Carli said. “On some level, the DSS and the prisons are drawing from the same pool.”
