By Stefan Norman
Shelley Dwyer is hoping that her three-year-old son doesn’t follow in his father’s footsteps.
The Centretown resident says her partner of five years and father of her son, Devin, was arrested earlier this winter for a breach of probation after a series of impaired driving charges.
He’s now behind bars at the detention centre on Innes Road until some time in April. She says that on a regular basis, she’s left trying to dry the tears of a child crying for his father. Dwyer is also expecting another child.
On March 4, the House of Hope, a halfway house for men, held a public forum on how parental incarceration affects children. The forum, part of Poverty Awareness Week, examined community corrections and criminal justice issues.
“He wanted his father to take him skating this morning,” says Dwyer, adding that her son can’t yet understand the situation.
Before his father’s last arrest, she says Devin would become upset when his father returned to the halfway house for the evening.
Dwyer says Devin’s father has other family members who’ve had encounters with the law and she fears her son may fall into the trap himself.
“He’s very aggressive,” says Dwyer, adding that Devin makes a point of attacking children much larger than himself. She adds her son has also become violent towards her on occasion.
Dwyer says Devin once told her one day that he wanted to become a bully, so he could go to prison like his father.
“The hardest part is seeing my son being hurt,” she says. “I try to be emotionally there for him and explain that daddy made a bad choice.”
Dwyer says there are few nonjudgmental sources of support for people in situations like hers. However, she says the House of Hope’s family support program is an exception.
Jillian Crabbe co-ordinates the program. She has helped to connect some 50 Centretown residents like Dwyer with housing, food and clothing resources in the community.
The National Crime Prevention Council funded the program in the past. But Crabbe says funding for the program is exhausted – now it’s expected to provide for itself.
She says one of the program’s biggest assets is its ability to offer support to those who feel they don’t have anywhere else to turn. With no source of funding in sight, she says those people will be left to fend for themselves.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” says Dwyer. “I think it’s crucial.”
Emani Davis of the Osborne Association – a New York organization that helps prisoners, former prisoners and their families – spoke at the forum on March 4.
She says children with incarcerated parents are five times more likely to become offenders themselves.
Davis, 22, is speaking from experience. Her father has been imprisoned in Virginia for 15 years for felony murder. In the case of felony murder, the accused needs only to be an accomplice to the crime. She says her family has seen her father’s applications for parole denied five times.
“The hardest part of being a child of an incarcerated parent is knowing that my father is locked up in a cage like an animal,” she says.
Though her father has been in prison for more than two thirds of her life, Davis says he has remained a source of advice and emotional support.
“People make the assumption that they [incarcerated parents] weren’t involved in their children’s lives prior to their arrest,” she says, adding that the need for support from other areas of the community increases after arrest.
“These kids are still going to school, still in the communities,” says Davis.