Parenting Skills Education

The most important thing I learned was to pay attention to your children's needs, activities and involvements. Try to communicate with them in an open way and encourage them to do the same. Expose them to positive things and support them as much as possible!
--SCI Camp Hill Participant

The Prison Society believes that high-quality parenting education can significantly improve family relationships. Furthermore, research shows that improved family relationships and contact with families dramatically reduces recidivism.

The Prison Society, with a service contract from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, provides 12-week parenting skills classes to incarcerated men and women at seven state correctional facilities in Pennsylvania: SCI Camp Hill, SCI Chester, SCI Graterford, SCI Greensburg, SCI Pine Grove, SCI Mercer and SCI Waymart. More than 3,000 men and women have completed this parenting program over the past five years.

Parenting classes are also provided by The Prison Society, with a grant from the Department of Human Services' Parenting Collaborative, in three Philadelphia County prisons. The goal of this program is to assist families seeking reunification; parents who have children in child welfare placement are particularly targeted. To better assist with this difficult process, family counseling sessions are provided when possible. The program has been implemented at Riverside Correctional Facility for women, CFCF and PICC. Although we utilize our standard curricula, we have adapted the program to run for 6 weeks, with participants meeting twice a week to complete the 12 sessions.

Our parenting classes are built around group discussion, team brainstorming and problem solving, role-playing, storytelling and self-reflection to create a collaborative learning environment in which students learn from each other as well as from the instructor.

The Prison Society has authored both a basic level and an advanced level curriculum for parents in prison. Consistent with the principles of cognitive-behavioral and social learning theories of behavior, our instructors model the values and communication skills we expect participants to acquire, creating a pro-social "family" classroom environment that promotes self-awareness, trust, healthy intimacy, and risk-taking.

Some of the session topics are:

BASIC CURRICULUM

1. Communication Skills
2. Early Childhood development
3. Effects of Incarceration on Children and Families
4. Self Parenting-Breaking the Cycle
5. Positive Parenting from a Distance

ADVANCED CURRICULUM

1. Self Awareness and Differentiation
2. Values, Culture and Goals
3. Family Intimacy
4. Coping with Change
5. Growing and Giving back