View ProfileI was sitting in an Atlanta federal courtroom when Rebecca Hauck was sentenced to six years in prison and payment of $1.2 million in restitution for her part in a crime spree across five states that included bank and wire fraud, identity theft, money laundering, and conspiracy. The real estate scheme bilked homeowners out of $15 million.
Once, she and her partner Matthew Cox topped the Secret Service Most Wanted list (the agency that prosecutes security fraud). But on her day in court, the bravado was replaced by concern for her sixteen-year old son who sat weeping alongside his grandmother.
Petite and pretty with bright blue eyes and an impish haircut, Hauck didn’t look the part of a hardened criminal. Yet, she is not an anomaly. In 2005, Women in Prison, an activist organization, reported that females made up 50.7 percent of all people arrested for embezzlement. The total number of women incarcerated increased 173 percent from 1994 to 2004.
Since 80 percent of women in prison are mothers, an entire generation of children is being raised either in foster care or by relatives. The impact of the mothers’ absence has far-reaching consequences.
In Georgia, where I live, there are 8,000 children with mothers in state prisons. These kids are more likely to act out and do poorly in school and five times more likely to go to prison themselves. Nationally, 46 percent of parents in prison had a family member who was incarcerated and 50 percent of children in the juvenile justice system have a parent in prison.
Related Story: Children Do Hard Time for Their Parents’ Crime: Mothers and Prison
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