by Cris Beam
Doreen Soto’s daughter, Shameka—the little girl who was removed when Doreen left her alone in the apartment to buy drugs—did not live in a group home. Shameka was immediately placed with a loving family in Brooklyn who eventually adopted her. She lived with them until she was nineteen. And then she went to jail.
I met with Doreen many times, both when she was an inmate at Bayview and after she was released. At first she lived in a halfway house in Harlem, and then another one in Queens; eventually she got her own single room with a shared kitchen in Brooklyn, which meant she could qualify for the apartment in the Bronx. Each time I saw her, Doreen looked happier and healthier. She had always marshaled a hearty laugh, but she emanated a deeper kind of contentment and equilibrium once she was free, had found a job and a church, and could attend twelve-step meetings every day on her own. She was losing weight to take pressure off her knee, and she was growing out her hair and getting manicures. She wore big pink polo shirts and khakis for her full-time job at a telephone answering service, and her ever-present pinkie ring was soon accompanied by a gold chain at her neck and sparkly studs in her ears, all bought on sale at Macy’s. Still, Doreen saved most of her extra spending money for presents for Shameka’s daughter, whom she was hoping to rescue from foster care someday.
Talking about Shameka was a visible struggle for Doreen, but she did it a lot. She volleyed between worry and resentment; whenever Shameka called her mother now, it was to demand money. Still, Doreen didn’t blame foster care for Shameka’s sour attitude or her run-ins with the law—she blamed herself, and the early separation.
“When she got taken, that was the best family she could have went to, but she was still placed in a home she didn’t know,” Doreen said one day when we met up in a diner for matzoh ball soup. Shameka’s family, the Taylors, lived in the projects in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, near the Navy Yard. They were religious and community-minded: Mr. Taylor served as the sergeant-at-arms for the building’s tenants’ association, and Mrs. Taylor turned on lights and appliances for her Orthodox neighbors every Sabbath. They easily folded Shameka into their large family, composed of eight biological and four adoptive children.
Mrs. Taylor encouraged contact between Shameka and her mother, but for more than a year after the removal, Doreen was preoccupied with drugs and never made a visit. She rallied for Shameka’s third birthday, though, when she met Shameka and Mrs. Taylor at the agency. Shameka didn’t recognize her.
“She walked all around that room, looking at me, for about an hour,” Doreen told me, tearing up at the memory. At the agency, Doreen placed a picture of herself on a low kids’ table, and Shameka picked it up. Carefully, Doreen called out the name she used for Shameka as a baby: Muu-muu. “Her reaction! She snapped her head right up. She remembered that.”
After hearing her name, three-year-old Shameka walked up to Doreen and stood between her legs, staring at the picture. “You?” she asked. She let Doreen hold her and call her Muu-muu for the rest of the afternoon. “She still has that picture today,” Doreen said.
Mrs. Taylor told Doreen that as long as she wasn’t high, she was welcome at the apartment anytime. But the birthday visit was all Doreen could muster; at first, she was “smoking dope, smoking crack, running like a madwoman,” and then she was arrested for possession and sentenced with three to five years. Doreen was sent to Bedford Hills—about fifty miles away by car, and a long trip for the Taylors to make with twelve kids at home. Doreen sighed heavily over her soup. “So from age three to six, Shameka had no contact with me. She was probably always thinking, ‘Where’s my mother?’”
Parents in prison traditionally don’t have many rights. When a mom like Doreen is incarcerated, she has to abide by both the rules of her sentencing, determined by a criminal court judge, and the tenets of the foster care agreement, determined by a family court judge. The family court judge usually requires visitations, which are almost always up to the mother to initiate; she must navigate prison bureaucracy to place phone calls to her caseworker to both coordinate and pay for a visit. Most inmates are jailed more than fifty miles away from their children, and gas money and travel time can be too burdensome for a foster parent to shoulder. Then there can be cumbersome clearance problems, or prison personnel who view child visitation as a privilege for good behavior.
That said, in 1983, prisoners in New York State won the right to monthly visits with their children, as well as to attend their family’s hearings in family court. This law, however, often butts up against reality; again, caseworkers may be required to facilitate visits between parents and children but don’t have the resources to travel long distances or accept exorbitant collect calls. To appear in court, an incarcerated parent must be ordered there by the family court, and then transferred to and temporarily housed in a local jail like Rikers Island. The Department of Corrections may not process the order in time; they may fail to notify the inmate of the transfer; the court date can get changed; the potential breakdowns between an order and an appearance are endless. The end result, for a judge, is the specter of an absent parent. And then there’s ASFA—the federal law that mandates that children who have been in foster care for fifteen out of twenty-two months either return home or become available for adoption. Even if a parent has managed to demand, coordinate, and pay for the visits with her kids, she can’t demand to shorten her sentence. In the five years after ASFA’s passage, the parental termination proceedings for incarcerated parents more than doubled.
In a way, for a parent who gets arrested, it comes down to the luck of placement, both for herself and for her child. If she lands in a “good” jail—like Bedford Hills or Taconic in New York—she may get to live with a newborn in the nursery programs and learn critical mothering skills. Prisons like these partner with programs such as the Children of Incarcerated Parents, which provide transportation for older kids to and from the facilities. But if the parent lands in a worse jail, or gets assigned a caseworker who won’t return calls, she’s stuck watching the clock tick by on ASFA’s deadline.
Doreen was a lucky one. She was sent to Bedford Hills, and Shameka was placed with the Taylors, who kept up a connection by taking calls on holidays and making Shameka draw cards and pictures for her mother. This was a few years before ASFA, but still, Shameka’s caseworkers looked at Doreen’s trajectory and didn’t see much hope. Shameka was still a young kid, and they needed to place her somewhere permanent.
About halfway through Doreen’s sentence, Mrs. Taylor showed up at Bedford Hills. She was worried, she said; the agency wanted to move Shameka out of foster care. If Shameka, who was six then, was moved into an adoptive home, the agency could lose tabs on her. Doreen might not ever see her daughter again. Better, Mrs. Taylor thought, that Doreen voluntarily give up her parenthood and sign Shameka over to her. That way, she said, they could always stay connected.
“Ms. Taylor always made me feel safe and secure about seeing my kid,” Doreen told me in the diner. “I didn’t know what she was talking about, with this open adoption thing; it was like she was speaking a foreign language. I felt like I didn’t have any choice, though, because I was only a year and a half into my sentence. I didn’t want them to put Shameka back into foster care—where, who knows where she’d go. So I gave her up.”
Like many inmates, Doreen didn’t know she had any rights and didn’t know she could ask for them. She didn’t know she could have fought for custody again, when she was slated to be released on good behavior within eighteen months or so. She felt the despondency, the drag and shame of prison, and the sense of profound failure as a mother. She took Mrs. Taylor’s advice and gave over her daughter.
Looking back now, from a position of sobriety and stability, Doreen thinks she made the right choice. When she was released from Bedford Hills, she went back to using heroin and was in no condition to take care of her daughter. What she doesn’t know is how much her three state bids in prison—and subsequent absence from Shameka’s life—affected Shameka.
There are studies that link parental incarceration with increases in a child’s inclination toward aggression, isolation, and depression, but research doesn’t often show the nature or degree of these effects—especially because the circumstances kids find themselves in after a parent has been locked up can vary so widely. Despite being raised by sober and devout parents from the age of eighteen months, Shameka ended up mirroring Doreen almost exactly.
As a small example, Doreen told me the story of the day Shameka delivered her first child at sixteen—a bright, healthy baby she named Sharisha. It was Mrs. Taylor who called Doreen to the hospital; Doreen was out of jail at the time but still, as she said, “high as a kite.” Doreen showed up at the hospital loaded down with gifts. She had a bassinet, bottles, a bottle warmer, baby clothes, diapers—all for baby Sharisha. And she brought one new outfit for Shameka. Doreen realized, when Shameka complained that her mother hadn’t arrived with more presents for her, that Doreen had said the same thing to her own mother sixteen years before.
“My mother brought me one new outfit, and everything else was for the baby. I was like, ‘Hello? I didn’t die!’ My mother said, ‘All right, but you got the baby now,’” Doreen said. “And I realized I just did the same thing to my kid.” She shook her head. “Damn. History keeps playing itself.”
When Doreen was released from jail for the final time in April 2008, she didn’t know where Shameka was living. She knew Sharisha, her granddaughter, was staying with one of the Taylor daughters, who had been named Sharisha’s official foster parent. And just as Doreen had done when she was her daughter’s age, Shameka was running the streets, using drugs, and a warrant was out for her arrest.
There were things, outside of the Taylors’ or Doreen’s control, that had happened in Shameka’s life that made it harder. She suffered from epilepsy, which was controlled by medication, and from learning disorders, Doreen told me, which she thinks might have been brought on by the crack she smoked during pregnancy. (This latter suspicion is likely unfounded; in a major Journal of the American Medical Association review of dozens of articles, doctors found no evidence that children’s language and motor skills, as well as attention and behavior, are connected with cocaine exposure, though they didn’t look at learning disorders per se.) These conditions may have made Shameka more isolated or withdrawn, or less confident.
Whatever her circumstances, at sixteen, Shameka ran away—though sometimes she said she was abducted. She also said she was forced into prostitution, though when she found out she was pregnant with Sharisha, she made her way back to Brooklyn. Doreen said Shameka was traumatized but didn’t want to press charges or go through an investigation. And, Doreen said, after the runaway/abduction, her daughter was never the same again.
In this respect as well, Doreen sees a reflection of herself. “She’s definitely a photocopy of my behaviors. Definitely. Used to be, you gave me a little bit of attention and I ran with that. Shameka’s the same way—so easy to be lured.”
Doreen thinks her own need for physical attention came from the lack of it in her own household when she was growing up. Her parents loved her, she’s sure of it, but they rarely touched or hugged her. It was the same in the Taylor household; there was guidance and moral teaching, Doreen remembered from her visits—but not a lot of affection.
Maybe, I countered—but plenty of people grow up without hugs and they don’t get “lured” into drugs and prostitution. So call it a perfect storm: some emotional neglect mixed with neighborhood access, mixed with genetic disposition, and blam: you’ve got Doreen’s life trajectory. Compound it all with an early traumatic separation and a mom in jail, and you’ve got Shameka’s.
But then, Shameka endured a second major loss in her life—underscoring the notion that, although there may be a pipeline from foster care to jail, individual lives are so potholed with particulars they’re impossible to typecast.
Doreen told me about the fire almost as an afterthought. “And then, of course, when the Taylors died in that fire . . .” she said to me one day when we were talking about something else.
“What?!” I sputtered.
“Yeah, from two years old to nineteen, that was the only family she ever knew,” Doreen said. “That fire took a big toll on her, and she probably never grieved that.”
The newspaper report claimed there were seven people at home in Shameka’s childhood apartment when a kid, possibly a grandchild, started playing with matches. He dropped a lit match between two couch cushions, and the fire caught. The family hid in a bedroom to escape the smoke, but Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, as well as two of the youngest grandchildren, were already dead by the time firefighters arrived.
Doreen was between prison bids at the time of the fire and went to the funeral. She said Shameka was furious. “Shameka said, ‘I don’t know what the fuck you doin’ here,’” Doreen remembered. “And I ate that. I know I kept coming in and out of her life, promising to do the right thing, only to end up back in jail.”
But that evening after the funeral, Doreen said, Shameka softened. She and her three-year-old daughter, Sharisha, stayed with Doreen for two nights, all curled up in the bed together. Despite the circumstances, Doreen remembers those nights as the happiest she’d ever known; she hadn’t slept in a bed with her daughter for seventeen years.
“Shameka is still a baby, ’cause after she’s been with me after five minutes, that kid comes out of her,” Doreen said. “It’s like, ‘Mommy, I want to play this; Mommy, let me hold you; Mommy, pick me up.’ You want me to pick you up?! You fuckin’ two hundred pounds!”
If she could, Doreen told me, she would take Shameka back, let her live with her again, let her be a baby, and try to repair what was broken so long ago. “I’d keep her under my supervision at all times, put her in the bed with me at night. All that. Because Shameka never slept in a crib, she only slept with me.”
Doreen let herself fantasize but quickly cut it short: she knew her daughter was using drugs; letting her too close could mean a relapse of her own. Shameka may have been vulnerable at the funeral and on prison visits when she read to her mom or babbled about boys, but she could also be vicious and demanding. At the time we talked, Doreen was living in a subsidized halfway house for the formerly incarcerated; she couldn’t have visitors, let alone overnight guests. And there was a warrant for Shameka—even talking with her on the street would be a violation of Doreen’s parole.
“She could be with me and a cop comes by and they’d call my parole officer to let her know I’m with a fugitive; I can’t have that. I’d kill myself before going back into the penitentiary,” Doreen said, her eyes hard and fierce. She sat for a minute, and the anger on her face twisted into pain. “She’s my kid, and she’s fucked up. I don’t know how to help her.”
Kecia and Doreen were not friends when they were incarcerated together. They both took my writing class, though Doreen needed it and Kecia attended to stave off boredom. Doreen was jovial with everyone; if she were a tree, she’d be an oak—strong, solid, and welcoming. Kecia was more wary; her taut musculature and stony expressions said “Don’t touch,” and she was wound up tight inside, her fierce intellect doing battle with her grief. I don’t know if their differences developed from their backgrounds: Kecia came from foster care and Doreen did not. But Kecia said all the previous foster kids she knew who were now serving time projected a similar kind of remove.
“There’s an attachment disorder that happens in foster care, that creates a sense of instability, even if everything is sitting still around you,” Kecia said to me that night we were talking in Bayview’s conference room. “Even if everything is secure in your life, you’ll always have that insecurity.”
But how does that lead to crime? For Kecia, it’s a process, a long chain of damage (self-inflicted and otherwise) stemming from an original violation of trust. She’s read a lot of Erik Erikson, a social psychologist who wrote about a person’s developmental stages. She said people don’t go fro
m foster care to jail because they don’t have resources and need to steal (though that is sometimes true), or because an institutional life is the only life they know (though that may be true too). They move between the systems because a life stage has been irreparably damaged. They can’t trust enough to care, and they can’t care enough to hold on to a better life.
The attachment begins in infancy, goes the theory, and with it something called “basic trust.” “Babies cry, and they learn that somebody comes, and they calm down,” Kecia explained slowly, as though she were teaching a class. “In that, babies learn that they have some type of power. This is the basis for some very important psychological things later on: you need faith, you need hope, and you need confidence that you can manipulate things to get what you need.” When parents are negligent or, as Kecia suggested, so poor that long work hours or suboptimal child care keeps adults from tending to a baby’s cries, this “basic trust” is broken.
This is what happened with Kecia—and a lot of the women she interviewed in prison for her thesis. Kecia’s mom was a single mother forced to work long hours, and Kecia was the only child. “I remember going to babysitters, always being in a room alone. I was always crying. I remember that; it never leaves you.”
Despite the fact that Kecia had already graduated from college and her writing skills were excellent, she wanted to take my precollege writing class anyway. I let her be my teaching assistant, which mostly worked out well: she was quietly constructive with her feedback on student papers, but she occasionally butted heads with the stronger personalities in the room—like Doreen. When Doreen had a point to make, which was often, Kecia would lean back in her seat and purse her lips, staring hard at a distant corner of the chalkboard.
