A Miami prison is making news by holding the first ever father-daughter dance. The goal is pretty admirable:
“You are a key to the success of your father,” Federal Bureau of Prisons Director Charles E. Samuels, Jr. told the daughters,according to a bureau press statement which said “connections to families and children are critical aspects” of inmates’ reentry into society. Samuels encouraged the fathers to take an active part in the lives of their daughters, even if seems difficult from behind bars.
No pressure on these little girls, right? But this is a smart motivation–remind the prisoners that there are children counting on them.
Team Blackness also had some choice words for Andrew Sullivan, looked at hip hop therapy, and covered an uncomfortable line of questioning for Rick Perry at Dartmouth College.
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aimai
I had a cousin in a women’s prison, and her ex was in a men’s prison somewhere completely else. Friends and family shuttled her son back and forth to both prisons on a regular basis. The women’s prison, at any rate, had a system of onsite trailers where prisoners could visit with their families for a weekend. I don’t know about the men’s prison arrangements. But my point here is that
1) modern prisons often place people at a great remove from their families. So far that ordinary visits are impossible.
2) modern prisons make communications, which should be cheap and easy in the day of cel phones, extremely expensive for prisoners.
3) a father daughter dance is an extremely weird, cheap, and problematic way to try to keep children in contact with their incarcerated parents. It romanticizes and sexualizes a relationship with a potentially distant/dangerous person and places an enormous burden on the child. Telling daughters (especially but either sex children) that they are responsible for tethering their fathers to the straight and narrow is just horrible. I definitely can’t imagine anyone telling a young boy that he is responsible for helping keep his imprisoned mother from reoffending.
And its terrible from the parenting point of view, too. If you fear that a person is not mature enough to be a parent you don’t shift the burden for their behavior onto the child in the relationship. You ask the problem parent to step up and take responsibility for their own shit. Its the only way to help someone mature–more responsibility more ownership. Pleading with collateral persons to make something happen is just the wrong method.
Shakezula
Yay, let’s make sure to pound the idea that all it takes to “fix” a wayward man is a loving woman right into these girls’ heads. It’s not like this is the kind of thinking that will encourage them to stay in abusive relationships.
Color me not surprised that even when Florida tries to do something nice, it fucks it up.
Suzanne
The only thing that could make this more horrifying is if the dance was a purity ball. With rings and everything.
Once again, girls are responsible for men.
aimai
@Shakezula: Yeah. What’s next–forcing the ex wives of abusive men to show up to family events? Moving people out of the for-profit prison complex earlier, family friendly/felon friendly parole systems, halfway houses and reintegration facilities and jobs would all be a much better idea than pushing the ceremonial burden of family life onto these guys while they are in prison.
Suzanne
@Shakezula: The fact that he didn’t say that “fathers are a key to the success of their daughters” is pretty telling.
Sigh.
Full metal Wingnut
@Suzanne: I originally misread it as the opposite. Sort of a wake up call, as in “These people here are your fucking children, the future of society, now shape the fuck up so you can get out of here and raise them!”
Amir Khalid
I’m a bit surprised at the reactions here. Maybe something has escaped this foreigner’s notice, but it doesn’t seem to me that the Federal Bureau of Prisons (the Miami prison is a Federal facility, per the story) is actually laying the burden of rehabilitation on the shoulders of prisoners’ (often very young, as the photos show) daughters. Indeed, the quote from Director Samuels says they are “a key” to it, not “the key”. I don’t see that statement as controversial.
The agency’s website has quite a list of programmes and services for prisoner care and rehabilitation, and this is apparently just one small event in one of those programmes.
@Full metal Wingnut:
Your first impression doesn’t strike me as wrong.
aimai
@Amir Khalid: Well…you are a foreigner. (Just kidding). But you seem to be experiencing unwonted optimism here about motives and means. Our reaction is based on, in my case, direct experience of the evils (and the few goods) of the Prison system as currently constituted. Of course anything that can be done to keep families together and keep families functioning is a good thing and prisons and prison reformers have been working on this issue for years. My great Uncle, whose daughter was in prison, had to sue the entire fucking prison to enable imprisoned mothers to be allowed to touch and hold their own babies and toddlers. The battle to keep families together is a very meritorious one. But there is absolutely no doubt that putting the burden, even rhetorically, on young girls to keep their fathers straight and connected is brutal and badly conceived.
Suzanne
@Amir Khalid: My reaction, and probably others as well, is rooted in the longstanding cultural idea that women are a “civilizing” force on men, that “boys will be boys” until they have a woman to take care of them and teach them how to properly behave in polite society. There’s also a very fucked-up tradition in the evangelical community of father-daughter dances, at which teenage girls pledge their sexual “purity” to their fathers in the name of Jesus. So this dance takes place in the middle of that culture, ergo, comes off as damaging to girls.
Amir Khalid
@aimai:
@Suzanne:
Thank you. I come here but to learn.
dance around in your bones
@aimai: Word.
mclaren
An article like this lays bare the incredible pathology and dysfunction of American society. While the obvious solution is to avoid locking up people of color in wildly disproprtionate numbers, that’s not what anyone seems to find reasonable.
A more sinister view of this entire program?
Looks like it’s intended to acclimate the children to prison. The better to insure that when they wind up there, they won’t make trouble. You can see what’s going through white people’s minds — they basically want to put the entire black community inside a prison. Let ’em get born there, live there, die there. That’s the goal.
Why not just come right out and say so?