And this is what the prisons do....

We had been visiting her father in prison regularly for over two years at the same place. It wasn't great. It's prison. But it had a playroom for kids and she was used to it. Then his sentence hit the under 4 years mark which made him eligible for minimum security, and at that time, due to mindless, ruthless, robotic Corrections population management (and a very lazy counselor), her dad was moved to a min security place without a playroom and no accommodations for small children let alone an autistic child who can't sit still in a chair and who would be disturbed by the crowded, noisy room without a kids playroom to go hang out with daddy. So....mean mad mommy bear came out swinging with the emails, phone calls and letters, bugging them until the even lazier counselor there cried mercy and shipped him out to a place only 10 mins away from us (no more 4 hour round trip drive) that has an AWESOME play room. Well, I should have known it was too good to be true. We got to visit him two weekends in a row, and miraculously, her meltdowns subsided and I was almost wondering if we would need the psychological evaluations scheduled for later this month (the psych eval appts were from the 2 months we couldn't see him due to lack of accommodations for us). Well, turns out we will need them, because the Oregon Department of Corrections cares NOTHING for the needs of children of inmates. They just throw the whole family away with the inmate. They arbitrarily picked him up and moved him to a work camp up in the mountains, and not only is it UP IN THE MOUNTAINS, but there is NO PLAYROOM! So we are doubly screwed now. He has talked to his counselor there whom I understand is not nearly as much lazy as she is a complete and total heartless bitch and she says our predicament does not qualify as "legitimate hardship" in order to move him back close to home. How about if I call her during one of our daddy meltdown sessions around here? She can explain what "legitimate hardship" means to my 3 1/2 year old autistic child with receptive language disorder and emotional problems. I don't think my daughter will understand it any better coming from her than she will from me. But I'm the one who gets to handle the nonstop meltdowns now. So look out psych evals, here we come!

Oh, and the move up to the mountains to the work camp isn't a punishment. It's only for inmates with the best behavior scores. Nice way to reward good behavior, by tearing someone from their family and making a little girl cry. Oregon Department of Corrections claims to value family as part of rehabilitation, but their practices show the opposite. They are a despicable operation. No wonder recidivism rates remain high. Inmates are not able to maintain family ties due to being moved out of reach and it's too expensive to call home because of the ROBBER phone company the DOC contracts with - we're talking anywhere from $5 - 25 per 30 minute call depending on where you are in the state.

It's easy for outsiders to believe if they were in our situation that they would take the "tough love" approach and take the incarcerated father out of the child's life. Sure, yeah. The statistics for children growing up without a father are just....wonderful. That approach might make sense if the father was dangerous or violent or was never much a part of child's life anyway. In our case, my kid is a daddy's girl. He was her first parent while I was recovering from emergency c-section. Before the duii accident, he had a home business so he was a work at home dad, while I worked outside the home. I made the choice to keep him in her life even after he threw us away with his decisions, because our daughter doesn't understand that. What she understands is this, "I have a daddy. I have a mommy and a daddy" -- as she most recently says -- and I'm not going to take that away from her.