Troy Delone calls it the “generational curse.” And he fears his son might be its next victim.

The 16-year-old’s volatile behavior recently became too much to handle for the relative he was living with, so he was sent to the Louisiana Methodist Children’s Home in Ruston.

The children’s home was founded in 1906 to provide care for “orphans, children who had no others who could care for them.” Today it serves as a psychiatric residential treatment facility.

“He has these fits of rage where he gets real angry. But we know underneath all of that he’s hurting because of his mother and his father’s situation,” Delone said in an October interview inside Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where he was serving a life sentence for armed robbery. In December Delone’s sentence was commuted and he was released.

Delone went to prison shortly before his son was born. Five years later, his son’s mother was imprisoned on drug charges.

“It’s been 11 years without his mother and all his life without his dad,” Delone said. “He was optimistic and real hopeful about us coming home but as he began to get older, he began to understand the severity of our situation and it began to weigh on him. He started really, really acting out, rebelling against my family.”

Delone said he is in contact with his son and doing what he can to steer him in the right direction, but he worries “every waking moment of the day” that his efforts might not be enough, that his son will follow in his father’s footsteps and end up in prison.

Delone’s son is one of 94,000 children in Louisiana who have or once had a parent serving time. And like many of them, without support systems to help him cope with the loss of his mother and father, Delone’s son spun out of control and ended up in state custody.

Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the world, tearing at thousands of families across the state. And yet there is no government initiative on a state or a local level specifically designed to help the children of incarcerated parents.

“When young people experience trauma and lose their safe place, their parent, they respond. They feel isolated. They don’t have anyone they can trust and they act out,” said Crystallee Crain, director of the San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents Partnership. “And if we say it’s for their best interests and don’t have any support systems then we’re missing the point. It has a long-term impact.”

Melissa Sawyer, executive director of the Youth Empowerment Project, a nonprofit group that helps juvenile offenders reintegrate into society, said the fact that the state locks up more people per capita than any other place in the world might explain an apathy toward helping the children and families affected.

“Maybe initially, when (the children are) really young, there’s a bit of sympathy but I don’t think it’s actually deep-seated or deeply felt here, and I think that’s part of the problem,” Sawyer said. “It’s going to take some sort of culture change or raising awareness around this issue.”

The need is definitely there, said Amanda Schroeder, chief program officer with Communities in Schools, a nonprofit organization that provides social workers to 14 area schools. Whenever she conducts group discussions in schools and the topic of parental incarceration comes up, “All of a sudden all of these kids’ hands will raise and they’ll say, ‘Well, my dad’s in jail. My mom was in jail,'” she said.

Most people, including teachers, might not realize the scope of the problem because it’s not something the children talk about. Some students might shy away from admitting they have a parent in prison because they are ashamed, Schroeder said. Others may not talk about it because parental incarceration has become so commonplace they don’t see a need.

“It’s normalized,” Schroeder said. “You don’t talk about that your parents went to college because all of your friends’ parents went to college.”

The key, however, is to get children to open up because while it might seem like they’re holding it together on the outside, internally they are wracked with turmoil and fear, things that adolescents and teenagers typically don’t know how to process in a healthy way, Schroeder said.

“It is a very traumatic event to have a parent removed from your life for a long time. And it’s been proven that if you have chronic PTSD that it can actually have a change in your worldview,” she said. “Part of that is you start to believe different things about the world. ‘It’s a scary place. It’s a place where I’m not safe.’ And so when those things start to be your reality, then that can actually change who you are.”

The San Francisco solution

There exists a patchwork of agencies and nonprofit groups locally that provide services to vulnerable young people and their families, such as the Youth Empowerment Project. But few offer programs specifically focused on the children of incarcerated parents. And these children face obstacles and problems that are unique to their situation, according to a 2014 report by the San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents Partnership and its sister organization in Alameda County.

“While separation due to a parent’s incarceration can be as painful as other forms of parental loss (such as death and divorce), it can be even more complicated because of stigma, ambiguity, and lack of social support and compassion that accompanies it,” the study said.

Several cities and states have focused on breaking the “generational curse” of parental incarceration by targeting it through criminal justice changes, in addition to creating a safety net of easily accessible support services.

The San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents Partnership is a coalition of social service providers, government and law enforcement agencies, and community members. It advocates for policy changes in all aspects of government that would benefit children with parents in prison. The coalition recently worked with the police department to implement specific guidelines on how children should be treated when their parents are being arrested.

In addition, it is in discussions with the Department of Child Support Services about instituting a policy stating that children can’t be put into the system before the arrested parent is convicted.

This is all possible because the San Francisco partnership has gotten buy-in from local law enforcement and government officials, said director Crystallee Crain. Their members include representatives from the district attorney’s office, the police and probation departments, and the sheriff’s office.

“This is a huge reform time in the criminal justice arena in general and folks are looking for what’s going to be the unifying point,” Crain said. “And it’s very hard for someone to say ‘I don’t care about the trauma that a child experiences from having a parent incarcerated.’ So it’s a unifying point.”

For example, families reported having difficulties visiting their loved ones in the San Francisco County Jail. So the San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents Partnership worked with the sheriff’s department to improve the visiting policies. Out of these efforts, the sheriff’s department created an Internal Visiting Committee to “foster rehabilitation and maintain family ties by improving the ways in which inmates visit with their families and community members.”

As a result, opportunities for parent-child visits increased to 32.5 hours per week in 2011 from 11.5 hours per week in 2007, according to the San Francisco partnership.

Crain, 33, is the child of incarcerated parents — learning, as she said, to grow up with “criminally justice involved” parents. Her mother and father had felony convictions before she was 5 years old.

“I lived with those restrictions, everything from (my parents’) employment to the stigma to the emotional part,” she said. “It doesn’t define us, but it definitely shapes our opportunities.”

At the age of 16, Crain was called to the principal’s office over the schoolwide loudspeaker. At the front desk, in front of a large group of people, she was told that her father had been arrested. She learned later he was charged with murder.

With Crain’s help, the San Francisco Unified School District has since implemented policies to protect the privacy and needs of children with parents in prison.

“So now the counselor is telling them behind a closed door. They might get excused for the day. They can identify their caregiver before (the Department of Child Support Services) gets to school so they don’t have to go into the system,” Crain said. “It’s no secret state custody isn’t necessarily the most healthy option. You’re losing a lot in a day and it’s not necessary just because a parent was arrested. That doesn’t mean they’re guilty.”

Sawyer, with the Youth Empowerment Project, said she would love to have a more comprehensive network of service groups established in New Orleans to help children with incarcerated parents, something similar to the San Francisco model.

The challenge, Sawyer said, is in finding how to pay for it.

“One of the challenges we have as a city is we have a lot of unfunded mandates. Resources are so limited here in the city that too often you see providers who are doing the best they can just to keep their own doors open,” Sawyer said. “I do believe budgets are moral documents and these are the kind of issues we have to get in front of.”

The Oklahoma initiative

Oklahoma has attacked the burden on children and families with a loved one in jail from both a criminal justice and a social services standpoint. Voters approved a new ballot measure in November that reduces all simple drug possession charges and property crimes under $1,000 from felonies to misdemeanors, with the savings going towards substance abuse and mental health treatment. This will help to reduce the numbers of incarcerated parents and prevent them from becoming felons, which creates obstacles to housing and employment, said Lisa Smith, director of the Oklahoma Commission on Children and Youth.

“The majority of Oklahomans are aware of prison overcrowding,” Smith said. “Oklahomans want violent offenders locked up, but people with mental health and

substance abuse disorders, they want to get them treatment.”

Louisiana and New Orleans have passed similar measures, drastically decreasing the penalties for marijuana possession, though possession of harder drugs such as cocaine and heroin remain felonies.

Oklahoma also created within its Commission on Children and Youth an advisory committee that focuses on the issues surrounding children with incarcerated parents. It includes an online tool kit that serves as a clearinghouse of information and resources for children and their caretakers.

The committee was established in 2011 because Oklahoma incarcerates more women per capita than any other state, 127 per 100,000, which is double the national rate, Smith said.

“Ultimately what ends up happening is these children will have school issues, trouble with friends, guardians, suffer depression as a result of their parents’ incarceration,” Smith said. “I think the child feels helpless, and the parent as well, because there is no controlling the judicial system.”

Oklahoma conducted a survey of its state prisoners in 2011 and discovered that on any given day there are 26,000 children with a parent behind bars, not including mothers and fathers being held in county jails. The survey also revealed that one in every four women in prison was the child of an incarcerated parent.

The collection of data was vital in determining the scope of the problem and how to come up with solutions, Smith said.

“When we started looking into this the biggest issue is that there is no agency tracking these children when Mom was sentenced to prison. So these children are flying below the radar screen of all state systems,” Smith said.

Oklahoma’s ultimate goal is to be able to track these children from time their parents enter the criminal justice system, to ensure they can access vital services such as Medicaid, Smith said.

“Only 10 percent of those children are in any type of child welfare custody. The rest are in informal placements with relatives and neighbors,” Smith said. “And when you’re in an informal placement it’s harder to get services for these kids, harder to get them in school if you’re not the legal guardian, harder to access mental health services for them.”

The New Orleans approach

While New Orleans doesn’t have policies that specifically address the issue of parental incarceration, Mayor Mitch Landrieu said its overall criminal justice overhaul efforts can have a direct impact on the problem by keeping families intact when they would otherwise be torn apart.

As part of a $1.5 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the city has set a goal to reduce the jail population by 21 percent, or 340 people, by 2018. Part of this will be accomplished by reducing the number of nonviolent offenders jailed while they wait for their trial date simply because they are too poor to pay bail.

New Orleans is also implementing an alternative diversion program that will give officers the discretion to divert people suffering from mental illness or substance abuse into treatment programs, as opposed to arresting them for nonviolent offenses. It is based on the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program in Seattle and is expected to be in place by mid-year.

Landrieu criticized the “three strikes, you’re out” and the “lock them up and throw away the key” attitude as having the potential to do more harm than good by ignoring the mental health and substance abuse aspects of crime.

“What you wind up doing is having individuals in jail for the wrong reasons for the wrong amount of time. And when they’re incarcerated for those reasons then all of a sudden every ecosystem they’re supposed to be an essential part of, as a father or brother or sister or mother, an aunt or an uncle, dissipates as well, and it has long-term consequences,” Landrieu said.

“We would be a lot smarter and get to a better result, a much healthier community, less crime, less expense, if we really thought about it from that perspective and not get cowed by people saying, ‘You’re being soft on crime.’ You’re actually not, you’re being harder on crime because you’re being a realist.”

Parent sentencing alternatives

Laws in several states allow for parents convicted of nonviolent crimes to be diverted into alternative programs through which they can avoid prison and the taxpayers can save money. It costs approximately $60,000 per year to imprison someone, compared to between $1,400 and $13,000 per year to provide treatment, according to the Osborne Association, a New York-based nonprofit organization that focuses on the children and families of incarcerated parents.

Washington’s Parenting Sentencing Alternative gives judges the flexibility to waive sentences in favor of community custody and treatment for offenders who meet the following requirements: they have physical custody of minor children, were sentenced to no more than a year, and do not have current or past convictions for violent or sexual crimes.

Inmates who have children can serve the final 12 months of their sentences at home, under electronic monitoring, as long as they meet those same eligibility conditions.

Other states, including California and Oregon, have enacted similar programs.

Since Washington’s program was enacted in 2010, only 7 percent of parents who completed it returned to prison on new felony charges. Louisiana’s overall recidivism rate is 42.3 percent.

In addition, 44 children of approximately 140 parents participating in the first two years of Washington’s program avoided the foster care system, while eight were removed from the system and reunited with their parents, according to the state Department of Corrections.

Maintaining these family bonds is a significant measuring stick for the program, as 39 percent of formerly incarcerated parents lose custody of their children or have their parental rights terminated, according to a 2015 report by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. The loss of those family bonds has been shown to increase the risk of recidivism for the imprisoned parent.

Andrea James, founder of Families for Justice as Healing, sponsored a similar alternative sentence bill that was put before the Massachusetts Legislature last year. It died in committee, but James said that given the bipartisan push for criminal justice reform across the country, she is hopeful it will eventually be passed into law.

“It requires judges to pause to get the story about who the person is, the mitigating factors, the human factors that currently aren’t taken into consideration,” James said. “This person is more than just this person. This person affects children. This person affects a household. This person affects entire communities.”

James said she realized the importance of such an alternative when she was serving two years in a federal prison for wire fraud. The majority of her fellow inmates were in for drugs, she said.

“I remember sitting on my bunk one day and saying, ‘My god.’ There were generations of the same family of women in that prison,” said James, who had a 5-month-old boy at the time of her incarceration. “You had grandmothers, mothers and daughters in the same prison. Who is left taking care of the children?

‘Some children are just allowed to grow up’

Two organizations in New Orleans provide mentors for children of incarcerated mothers and fathers: Cornerstone Builders, an offshoot of Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans, and Volunteers of America, which has a program called “Mentoring Children of Promise.”

The Rev. Walter Parker has been a mentor with the Volunteers of America program since 2008. He said he currently mentors 100 children, a caseload he calls a “bottomless pit. It just never ends,” he said.

There are not enough people willing to volunteer as mentors, especially men, and they are the ones needed the most, Parker said.

“I heard someone say that some children are raised and some children are just allowed to grow up. And a lot of what we’re getting out there now are just children who are allowed to grow up. And man, we’re going to have problems with that group,” Parker said.

“But if we can help raise them and guide them, it lessens that possibility of them falling into that area of crime. It’s clearly a problem for all of us. We can’t just let children grow up anymore.”