The effects of parental incarceration on families | Erik Cabrera-Zamora | TEDxAustinCollege

Today, I want to share with you a part of my life that I've kept to myself. And I'm doing this because it's not a rare experience, but it's not something that people talk about a lot. My name is Eric Cabrera Zamora. I'm an Austin College alumnus, and I'm a current third year law student. But I'm also the son of a federal inmate since I was in eighth grade. I want to make it clear before I continue that this talk isn't about my father, whatever crimes he may have committed. It's more about what families and children go through when they have to go through the effects of a parent that's incarcerated. And I want to tell you about just how many inmates are parents, but that number was really difficult to find. Because although there's a lot of different studies, publications, and reports by nonprofits and by federal agencies, they're all, for the most part, dated. And to me, that tells me just how overlooked parental incarceration is. There is, however, a report, or rather a survey, called the Prisoner Survey, and it's done by state and federal prisons. And the Bureau of Justice goes through the survey responses, and they release important data in a number of reports. And one of the reports is the parents in prison and their minor children. This is from March 2021, and in the report, it says that roughly 600,000 men in prison are parents of a minor child. For women, that number is 57,700. I want to clarify that although this report specifically was released in March 2021, it's citing the 2016 survey. And when it comes to the number of kids affected by parental incarceration, this specific survey says that that number is around 1.5 million. I want to point you to another resource, and it's a policy report by the Annie Casey Foundation. And if you don't know about the Annie Casey Foundation, they're a philanthropic organization that's best known for their work regarding the well-being of children and families across the country. And in their policy report from 2016, they cite statistics from 2012 and 2011. And in this policy report, it says that from 2011 to 2012, there were 5.1 million kids in the country that had a parent in prison. For perspective, Houston, Texas is currently the fourth most populous city in the country, and that population is 2.3 million. I want to pause here so you can try to imagine a city twice the size of Houston, because it still won't be enough. It just won't be large enough. So while this is an experience that I share with millions, it's one that we don't like to talk about. And that's why I want to share my personal experience growing up with my father in prison, the general side effects for children and families that grow up with an incarcerated parent, and my personal outcome so far. And to set the scene for my father's arrest, I want to remind you what was going on in 2013. The iPhone 5S had just been released in the fall of 2013, and it was the year after the world was supposed to end in 2012, because of the Mayan calendar supposedly stopping. And although the world didn't end in 2012, my life, the life of my sisters and my mom, it changed completely. See, I come from a very traditional Hispanic household. It's just me, as the youngest, my two older sisters, and my mom and my dad. And the community that we're from is predominantly Hispanic. So what that meant for my family is that we were all practicing Catholics, my father was a breadwinner, and my mom was a homemaker. And when my father was arrested, that changed a lot. From one day, I went from being able to see my father whenever I wanted to, every single day, to having to wake up at one in the morning to drive six hours just to get a hug. And one of the other things is that because my father was a breadwinner, my mom found herself working two jobs just to keep us afloat. And our finances didn't really stabilize until we were around, I wanna say, 2017. But by then, I'd gone from having my own room and a four-bedroom home to the four of us sharing a two-bedroom apartment. Now, I wanna talk about how my family and I maintained a relationship with my dad, because it's hard. And like I said, we had to wake up really early in order to drive six hours one way just to visit him. And we didn't always have the money to pay for the gas or to pay for a hotel room to stay the extra day, because the visitation hours normally run from 8 a.m. in the morning to two or three in the afternoon. So we either had to wake up super early so we could make sure we'd make the 8 a.m. time and make the most of our time before we had to leave at three and come back. And 12 hours, I want you to think about that number. How many low-income people do you know have a car that's reliably capable of making that drive without breaking down? And going back to the visitations, I wanna explain a little bit about how the visitation rooms looked. The best way I can describe them is a room filled with gray chairs, rows and rows of gray chairs, and it was two gray chairs facing two other gray chairs with a gray table in the middle. And I wanted to describe it to you all because I'm sure most of you haven't seen one, although you may have seen one from Law & Order, some type of a show, but I really hope if you're listening to this or you're sitting here, I hope that you've never actually been in one. Now, because we couldn't always afford the money for the hotel room or the gas to drive up to see my dad, he called a lot. And those phone calls are the foundation of my family's relationship with my father. But those phone calls weren't always exactly free, especially at that first prison that he was at. There was an added charge for long-distance phone calls. I want you to hold onto that memory. There's also a rule in the phone calls. The inmates line up and they get to make two calls. And if your family or whoever you're calling doesn't pick up, you have to get to the back of the line because it's someone else's turn. So my family and I were always incredibly anxious to make sure we were all in the same place and our phones were charged if we knew that dad was calling. And years and years of that anxiety has made it so that my heart still drops when I come out of class, when I come out of work, or when I'm so dumb that I forget that my phone's on silent and I see that I have a missed call from the Federal Correctional Institute. And the calls aren't that great. And I say that because the phones at the federal prisons are horrible. The calls get dropped or there's so much static. You hear every third or fifth word that's said. I wanna go back to how my family and I have continued to maintain a relationship because despite these setbacks, despite the expenses in visiting him, despite the fact that the phone calls are hard and that they're anxiety-inducing whenever we actually manage to get one. My relationship with my father has matured and it's grown and I try to visit him whenever I don't get stressed out by law school. And I know my sisters have a similar relationship with him. But my father, he's human. So he doesn't really hide his favoritism that well. And I know that because he loves to call my nephew the most out of all of us. My parents finalized their divorce right around 2018. And it was hard watching my parents try to salvage their marriage, but it didn't take an expert to know that it wasn't working out. So while I was still in high school, my mom had the idea that she was gonna go talk to my dad about possibly getting divorced. And one of the hard things about my dad being in there is there's nowhere, there's no good way to share good or bad news. You feel horrible about sharing good news because you know that they wish that they could be there and experience that with you. And you feel devastating sharing bad news because this is a visitation room with rows and rows of gray chairs. And there's no privacy. There's nowhere where my father can hear if someone's passed away. And there's definitely not somewhere where him and mom, my mom can have a tough conversation about their marriage. So I didn't really believe that my father was in the right mental space or in the right environment to have that type of a conversation. And at the risk of ruining my relationship with my mother, I visited my dad with my sisters and without my mom. And I told him that if he didn't feel comfortable talking to my mom about possibly getting divorced, that he should file for divorce and take her off of the visitation list. And at the time, my dad thanked me. He told me that he wasn't in the right mental state to handle that kind of a conversation. And I felt horrible about that decision. Sometimes I stopped to think about how I intervened in my parents' marriage. And I really wish I didn't have to make that choice or that I didn't feel forced to make that choice. Because that should have been between them, as my parents and as a husband and wife. But I felt forced to make that decision because I felt forced to be a caretaker of my father's mental health since the first time that I saw him behind plexiglass. Because that day, that was his birthday. And the only thing my family and I could give my father for his birthday that day was a can of Coke. And just this last year, I went to go see my father. And as I've grown older, he talks about things that he never would have told me when I was younger. And in this past year, I learned that my father, like other inmates, has had suicidal thoughts. And after hearing about that, I don't beat myself up as much anymore about the kind of pain that I caused my mother. Now, I wanna go back to the phone calls. See, my phone number is different from my family's phone numbers, specifically the area code. I know all phone numbers are different, but just the area code. And I mention that because I wanna go back to what I was telling you all about, the long-distance charges on calls from prison. Because there was an added charge, my area code for my number was changed to one close to the prison. So every time that I give out my phone, I feel bad when I watch people's smiles turn into confusion because first, they're like, wow, you're from X part of Texas. And I have to tell them that I'm not. And because I don't tell people about my father, I just tell them that there's no real reason for it. Because I prefer people think I'm weird than I might get judged for my father's status. And I say that because there's a face that people give you when you tell them that your parent's in prison. It doesn't matter how well-intentioned or how nice they are, everyone makes it. Now that these lights are very bright, I've seen you all make these faces as I started. And there's only been one person in my life so far that hasn't made that face, and it's one of my closest friends from law school. And although I can't describe the face that these people make, I can tell you how it makes me feel. Every time I see the face that people make, I'm transported back to the federal courtroom where that judge is telling my dad how much of a horrible person and a horrible father he is. And what I think is, if my dad's so horrible that he has to be removed from society for over 20 years, what does that make me for being his son? What do people think of my sisters? What would people say about my mom, who was married to him for nearly three decades? Now, I wanna go back to the Annie Casey policy report from 2016, because aside from all these difficulties of maintaining a relationship with my father, my father's incarceration has left my family and I with some really, really deep scars to our mental health. In the Annie Casey Foundation policy report, it says that children with incarcerated parents are likely to experience low self-esteem, depression, sleep disorders, symptoms of PTSD, higher risk of delinquency, housing instability, poor school performance, and increased chances of poverty. My family and I have experienced all of these things, except for delinquency. But I can't say that for the millions of others who experience parental incarceration. And as I said in the beginning, the statistics I gave you are dated. I don't know how many people are currently going through parental incarceration, but I know that many more people will continue to go through parental incarceration. And as I was doing the research for this, the symptoms of PTSD stood out to me. Because just this last summer, I was referred to a psychologist so that I could be evaluated for ADHD. And I was really shocked when I was told to fill out a PTSD form the day after I told them that my father has been a federal inmate since I was in eighth grade. But I shouldn't have been shocked. I keep this part of my life hidden for so long that my roommate, who I've known since elementary, who lived in the same neighborhood as I did, didn't know that my father's been in federal prison until he recorded the elevator pitch for this TED Talk. I really hope that by sharing just a small portion of my experience and the general side effects for kids with parental incarceration, that I can bring a little bit more compassion and empathy to families like mine. And I also want to say that although my father's incarceration has had a large part to play in some of my lowest points in my life, it's not without its silver lining. Because of my experience with my father's incarceration, I want to pursue a career in law. I specifically want to pursue a career in family law because it's there where I know that I can have a direct impact on families and kids at some of their lowest points in life. So on that note, I want to tell families like mine that there's a lot at the end of your tunnel. That although it may take years, eventually your holidays, your birthdays, your celebrations, eventually they won't just be reminders of who's not there. Eventually your home is gonna feel like a home again. Thank you.