Hour Children’s work begins inside New York State prisons.
Believing that a strong family connection maximizes a child’s stability and a woman’s chances of success upon reentry, Hour Children works to nurture happy, healthy, and caring relationships between incarcerated mothers and their children.
Hour Children provides programs for women incarcerated at Bedford Hills and Taconic Correctional Facilities, both located in Bedford Hills, New York, and the Rose M. Singer Center located in New York City.
Residential Nursery
Hour Children operates the Nursery inside Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where mothers can live with their infants for up to 18 months, providing infants born during their mother’s incarceration with critical bonding time with their mother. During the day, while mothers are attending school, mandated programs, or working, the infants are cared for in the Child Development Center, which is staffed by Hour Children employees and women who are incarcerated at the facility.
Visiting Programs for Children
Visits are essential for maintaining mother/child bonds during a period of separation due to incarceration. Travel logistics and expenses are often insurmountable barriers for children and families. Hour Children provides transportation to children who reside throughout New York State, and beyond. Children might visit for one day, or take advantage of our multi-day visiting programs, during which they stay with local host families.
Children’s Center Playroom
The Children’s Center Playrooms in the visiting rooms at Bedford Hills and Taconic serve to enrich family visits by providing a child-friendly environment, with age-appropriate games and seasonal creative arts projects that are designed to encourage mother-child bonding and the creation of valuable memories. Birthdays are also celebrated in the Playroom during a child’s visit.
Parenting Education and Advocacy
Hour Children helps women to use their time in prison to improve themselves as parents and as people. In our parenting education classes, women explore topics that impact their role as mothers.
The Advocacy Program helps mothers to maintain vital communication regarding issues that may impact her children. Mothers have regular opportunities to reach out to their children, family members, guardians, teachers, social workers, counselors, and doctors.
Rikers Island Advocacy Program
For the last dozen years, Hour Children has conducted an advocacy program at the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s jail at Rikers Island. Our work includes meeting with women in custody, assisting them with contacts to their lawyers and for those who express an interest in Hour Children, giving them information. We have also led reading groups, programs in parenting, and helped smooth their transition to Bedford if they have been sentenced. In addition, twice a year we furnish each woman with soap and at the end of the year give them socks, soap, and personal items. Our mentoring program serves women detained at RMSC who have children for whom they would like an adult mentor.
Visiting and Family Assistance Program at the Rose M. Singer Center Correctional Facility
Hour Children and the Osborne Association provide services to justice involved people detained at the Rose M. Singer Center Correctional Facility and their families in order to strengthen family connections during detention, facilitate long-term stability, and increase family reunification outcomes. Our services include virtual visiting support, individual counseling, individual parenting support, assistance maintaining family relationships, reentry referrals and connections, family court advocacy, community support programs for families and children, and community referrals for families. Through supportive counseling, we are able to offer assistance on how to best utilize virtual visits, how to have developmentally appropriate conversations around incarceration with their children, and discussions around reentry services that would be helpful upon release.
For more information:
Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, Debra Rigano, 914-241-3100 ext. 4050
Taconic Correctional Facility, Debra Rigano, 347-330-8847
Photo credit: Diana Berrent Photography
Hour Children Celebrates Thanksgiving at Taconic
On November 21, 2019, Hour Children staff and volunteers served a Thanksgiving meal to the women incarcerated at Taconic Correctional Facility, in addition to staff at the facility. We served 460 hot meals, which included all of the traditional Thanksgiving fixings. We are grateful for the support of the facility’s administration and to the donors who made this celebration possible. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Hour Children was not able to celebrate Thanksgiving in 2020 with the women at Taconic.
Become a Host Family
Hour Children runs visiting programs several times a year at the Bedford Hills and Taconic Correctional Facilities. We provide transportation for unaccompanied children from across the state—and sometimes beyond—to Bedford Hills so they can visit with their mothers for an extended period of time. We pick the children up at their homes, and while in Bedford, the children stay with local host families. The families bring the children to the facility each morning and return to pick them up when visiting hours are over. Host families are the glue that holds this program together, year after year. Host families are needed during the summer and also during long weekends and school breaks. To learn more, please email Deb Rigano.
A Donation You Can Feel Great About
Hour Children believes that a woman can be an effective and loving parent from prison. We also believe in a child’s right to receive love and attention from his or her incarcerated mother, and a family’s right to prepare for their mother’s release and potential reunification with her family.
We couldn’t do it without your support.