The look on my counselor’s face told me something was wrong. She asked if I had seen the news, then slid a pack of papers through the bars. The shock and horror of the moment were paralyzing. According to the reports, my 21-year-old son Hunter had tried to join ISIS and was arrested by the FBI at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
No parent wants to see their kid arrested. But there is a twisted agony in your child being arrested while you sit in a prison cell. I wanted to do something, anything, in that moment. If only I could talk with him, scream at him, or comfort him. In all my years spent in prison, I never felt so helpless. All I could do was sit on my bunk and cry.
I remember the 7-year-old Hunter who existed before I came to prison. He cared about everything. He was the kid who shuffled bugs off the sidewalk so they wouldn’t get stepped on by accident. I remember him sitting in front of the TV watching Star Wars and then running around for days confirming all communication with “Roger Roger.” He was bright, expressive, and beautiful.
I know my son as I know him—before the state and his mother kept him from any contact with me for more than 10 years. And I know his arrest was a direct result of my absence in his life.
I wish I were the only father who knew this pain. A 2022 Prison Policy Institute report showed there are 1,252,100 children in America with a parent in state prison. The National Institute of Justice calculates that children living with a carceral legacy are six times more likely to end up incarcerated. This leaves hundreds of thousands of children set up to be the next generation of prisoner, and a lot of parents in our prisons crying on bunk beds.
Intergenerational incarceration has left an indelible impact on my life. Like my son, I grew up with a father in prison. In 1997, my father and older brother were cellmates at Folsom in California. While they were in Folsom, I was confined within the same prison that holds me today. This makes Hunter the third successive generation of my family to be incarcerated.
Children living with a carceral legacy experience reduced life chances stemming from disadvantages that affect every element of their growth, development, and socialization. This legacy often cripples their ability to transition into adulthood as a functioning member of society. Having a parent in prison is listed as one of several forms of childhood trauma, according to a Centers for Disease Control classification of “Adverse Childhood Experiences.”
Well before Hunter’s arrest, I knew what he was facing. In an attempt to unpack what went wrong in my life, I became familiar with how my father’s incarceration impacted me. To raise awareness on this topic, I gave a speech titled “What Are the Chances?” at the annual Concerned Lifers Organization conference in 2018. In it, I explored the battle my son would face as a result of my incarceration. I spoke about the burden I placed on him and the consequences we face as a society with so many similarly situated children being set up for failure.
The human and capital costs of mass incarceration are hard to measure with raw numbers but can be seen—and felt—through the personal impact on families and communities. We observe this most acutely in the lives of children with incarcerated parents. They deal with stigmatization, shame, and bullying from other children, and they are especially susceptible to the harms of what criminologists call “labeling theory.”
I experienced all of this growing up. Labeling strongly shaped the future I envisioned for myself by pointing me toward the failures of my father. I cannot tell you how often I heard I was “just like” my father. It was such a prevalent conversation that my mother and her friends called me “Rerun.” My dad’s side of the family called me “Little Ray,” and my father, Ray Sr., was “Big Ray,” by default.
Comparisons between a child and a parent are natural and can have positive outcomes when the father is a doctor, or some other noble profession. But when the father is a prisoner, the effects of labeling are often detrimental. And when labeling is used with the intent to denigrate the child, the effects are devastating.
When I was 11 years old, I was in the hospital with a burst appendix. During this time, a nurse filed a report with Child Protective Services stating that my mother and stepfather had been witnessed calling me a wimp. They had said I was stupid and told me I would end up in prison like my dad.
While my experience is strikingly toxic, and I would like to believe unique, I know it is not. Many children face labeling similar and even identical to mine. It’s easy for children living with a carceral legacy to see prison as a destination for their lives and take on assigned roles, acting out antisocial, destructive behavior that leads directly to future incarceration. I think this is, in part, what happened with my son, and I know it happened with me.
While my judgment and sentence confines me within the Department of Corrections, a court did not explicitly sentence my son to life without a father. Depriving a child from an incarcerated parent is an extralegal action having no basis in law or policy. It stems from an ideology asserting that, since I came to prison, I don’t deserve to have a relationship with my son. However, this is just another way of saying that, because I came to prison, my son doesn’t deserve to have a father. This ideology is directly responsible for exacerbating intergenerational incarceration.
Growing up, I knew nothing of my father other than the bad things my mother told me. She was allowed to keep me completely out of his life while he was in prison. Maybe my father had something of value to give me when I was a child. I cannot say. What I can say is that I had a lot to offer my son, and his mother keeping him from me was an injustice.
From age 7 until age 17, every attempt I made to contact my son failed. During these crucial years, I spent my life in prison teaching a self-awareness course and mentoring others. While I was guiding troubled young people, helping them overcome the adversities in their lives, my son was left without my guidance when he needed me most.
When contact was finally established with Hunter, his mother expressed deep regret for her earlier decision. I’m sure it was not easy for her to admit this, and I believe her when she says she thought she was making the best decision for him. She subscribed to an opinion prevalent in society, the same as my mother did, and we are all living with the fallout from this error.
My son was looking for some place, any place, to belong. Just like we all do. Many children living with a carceral legacy find that place with street gangs or fringe groups; others turn to addiction or destructive lifestyles. Too many find a place to belong they did not bargain for. Hunter thought he’d found his place in radical Islam, and instead found himself in prison like his father, and his father before him.
We need to recognize the harms wrought by intergenerational incarceration and build social support structures and community-based programs to help mitigate them. This work could start with a focus on easing lines of communication between children and incarcerated parents. Additionally, we must deconstruct ideologies that assert mothers and fathers in prison are, as a consequence of their location, unable or unfit to parent.
Children will benefit from simply knowing they are loved, and many incarcerated parents have more to offer than those on the outside realize.
