board of supervisors for adopting the children of incarcerated parents bill of right as a resolution in 2005. this resolution, will encourage the city departments and the agencies to consider the children of incarcerated parents, bill of rights, when the decisions are made about us, we would also like to thank the san francisco board of supervisors to pass the ordinance to ban the box on housing and job applications and the efforts to end the discrimination against the formally incarcerated parents and this is an important step in reunifying the children with the parents and we would also like to thank the san francisco police commission to voting in favor of the department general order and 7.04 which is a protocol, for the police officers on how to arrest the parents when the children are parent. and we also will like to acknowledge the san francisco police department for encouraging and implementing this effort and i will now pass

it over to sophi. >> and thank you. >> and so, what we really appreciate the work of the board of supervisors and the police department as well as the police commission, there is still a lot of issues that need to be addressed firstly currently no department or agency collects data on the numbers of the experiences with the children of incarcerated parents and it is difficult to find the support services through the counseling or ad va casey that truly addresses the trauma of seeing a parent incarcerated, because of the difficulties including strict policies the children cannot maintain a consistent relationship with the parents and that is harming the family unit as a whole and when a parent is released we see a need for improved services, and so now i will pass it on to azizi. >> the youth commission feels passionate about this because of the importance of san francisco future.

having such a large population of children of incarcerated parents in san francisco is important that we provide them with the necessary resources to make sure of the future of san francisco is table and thriving, there are studies that show that the children of incarcerated parents are 6 times more likely to become involved in the criminal justice system. although, we know that we can be the exception to the statistics, as i am here, today. it is important that the city address these issues to prevent this from happening for thousands of youth in the city, with parents incarcerated. though sapeds of youth in san francisco, are affected by this issue, yet no one talks about it. the amount of under representation and disregard for this population suffering, has led to an extreme deficit, in the resources available, which has had detrimental long term effects. in my own personal experience, being denied these resources has had a drastic impact on my

life. when my father was incarcerated at the beginning of middle school, i alienated myself from my peers and i was severely bullied and teased all throughout the first months. and problems mounted at home and suddenly there was a pressure to not become my father, i had an emotional break down that led to self-harm and a string of suicide attempts. it was not until high school, that i received the help that i so desperately needed, in high school i tried other methods of coping which started with using illegal drugs, and sports, this does not go well as you can imagine, long storely short i died briefly in the ambulance ride to the hospital, this is the incident to me receiving the therapy that i needed i got off of the drugs and clean for three years. and i stuck to sports. if it took me having a series

of life threatening traumatic incidents to get the help that i needed than imagine how many other children are suffering. it is not too late to end this trend, be a part of the solution, thank you for your time. i will pass it over to danesha now. [ applause ] i want to thank my peers, zezi for sharing her very personal story. and now, i would like to introduce our two experts witnesses the coordinator of the san francisco children of incarcerated parents partnership and the chief operating officer at the center for wellness, for youth

wellness, suzy loftus. >> thank you for sharing your personal story, let's go ahead and now, i want you to come on up and make a presentation and then the commissioner you will follow. >> thank you. you know it trikes me as i listen to these young people that every civil rights movement in this nation that has been successful has been led by those affected and so i am very moved today and probably more hopeful than i have ever been in the ten years that i have been working on this issue, to see so many young people stepping up and telling you what they need. i have been working for more than a decade with the zeller box foundation and a coalition of agency and community partner and affected individuals that is so unique that the justice department has sent the urban institute to study san francisco response to these kids and it is tempting to tell you about all of the great

things that are happening in san francisco and all of the wonderful things that the public agencies are doing and in fact that was my intention and but when i listed to her, i was reminded that there are many, many children who have never heard of the bill of rights, and are not touched by these programs and policies, and are still suffering tremendous unnecessary trauma. and so, i think that the challenge now, now that we have programs established, with the police, the jail, the probation, the public defender, and child welfare, and many more public agencies is to understand, that children of incarcerated parents are not a unique or separate group of kids. we have heard a lot of numbers, but the one that i find the most compelling and disturbing, is that one in ten american kids today, has a parent in jail, in prison, on probation, or on parole. and so when you think of the number who have been touched in

their lives, every classroom, every clinic, every pediatrician's office and every grocery store, there are children of incarcerated parents, and so we really have to think about bringing all of these different efforts together and making sure that every school counselor and every police officer and every mental health worker and everyone who comes in contact with children and especially given the racial disparities with the children from the under resourced neighborhoods needs to know about the kids and know about the unique needs and meet them, and i don't think that it is a civil right and i think that the right to family is a human right. >> thank you. >> so just as a housekeeping rule, we actually kind of discourage applause in the chamber. just so that we can keep the program moving. but, if you want to express yourself but something that you have heard in a positive way, something that is really

successful is what are these calls, i am an expert witness. >> spirit fingers. when you hear something that you agree with, put up the spirit fingers and if you disagree, no need to boo or his, you can put your thumbs down. >> commissioner please? >> thank you. supervisor cohen and chair campos and supervisor yee and it is an honor to be here today and i am wearing a couple of hats as you all know i serve on the san francisco police commission and today i am here as the chief operating officer on the center of wellness which is the health organization in the san francisco bay view hunter's point area where we focus on treating and addressing what you have heard about today, which is the concept of adverse childhood experience and so i am going to share with you the data, what we know, and really put some research behind the experience that we have heard from the young people, from project what. so first, i talked about what the center of wellness is, we

treat the chronic adversity in the children as what it is, a health threat and what are adverse childhood experiences and i have got a powerpoint here and it is pretty powerful, and there is ten categories, physical, emotional and sexual abuse. and physical and emotional neglect and house old dysfunction of when a number of items are included and you will see the mental illness and you will see the mother treated violently and the substance abuse divorce and which is known as parental abandonment and what i am here to talk about incarceration of a relative. >> this study came from kiaser, some doctors did a analysis of 17,000 patients, and what is stunning about it is the patients were 70 percent white and 70 percent college educated

in the population and they asked them what had happened to them as children in these categories one of which was incarceration of not just a parent but a relative. 17,000 people gave their medical history, and the findings in that study were astonishing, two-thirds reported one adverse childhood experience and of the things that we talked about, abuse, neglect and household dysfunction, 12.6 percent reported a score of four or more and this is the stuff where i am going to say that i told the folks from project what to the folks who are living this and none of this is going to be a surprise, but it was a surprise to the medical community and a surprise to the policy makers today, high scores have led to a predictable out come of 2.2 times as likely to have heart disease which is the number one killer in america, and 2.4 more likely to have a stroke, and

1.9 as likely to have cancer and 1.6 more likely to have debeat ease and the reality was the pervasiveness of the obesity in childhood is apparent and the impact that it has on your out comes in life, are stunning. now what they didn't know in 1998, but we know it now, is that there is more research on what the recognition is in the body that cause thises and it is a concept called toxic stress and you should all, know that we were in sacramento, and actually on tuesday, before the health committee testifying on a resolution, to bring more awareness to ace and toxic stress and policy makers across the united states are starting to understand, there is positive stress, which is on studying for a test and i am all stressed but i am getting ready for the big game and there is tolerable stress which is the death of a loved one and something really bad happening in your life. and then, there is toxic stress, and it is extreme frequent or extended activation

of the body's stress response and this is going to be key as the policy makers in terms of the listening piece and without the buffering presence of a supportive adult and many people said that i had it hard growing up and didn't have it easy, but when you identify what were the resil ans factors and where were the supportive relationships and the positive parenting and there was some mentor ship and a moment where something happened and without that we know that the kids suffer from toxic stress, it is essentially a disrelacing of the fight or flight. there is a bear there and our body is designed to respond, you run into a bear, and it gets triggered what happens in the bear comes home every day, the body's flight mechanism is adaptive but it can become mal adaptive it is every day on the bus ride home you are seeing the community violence if there is not a supportive parent at home and you are facing the challenges that the kids that you are going to hear from are

facing your body does respond but there is a point where too much of that becomes chronic, and it activates your system that causes not only poor health out comes long term but great difficulty sitting still at school and the executive functions of the brain because of the development of the brain and body is sensitive to the environment in the childhood. and now this all sounds like bad news, but we are going to get to the good news, some of the good news is that the state of california has been keeping more data on this and we can make more determinations and the california department of public health has just released some data which shows that people who reported growing up in an incarcerated household, that was one of their aces. and their average likely score was 4.6. and now, remember, if you have 4 or more adverse childhood experiences, right? and someone who has an incarcerated family member is

likely to have at least four or more, likely not everyone, but likely. look at the stats here, i mean, that there are, and they are stunning, we talked about heart disease and stroke and cancer, 12.10 times more likely to attempt suicide, and ten times more likely to use drugs and seven times more likely to be an alcoholic. >> that is the state wide data, that is the predictable out come and i am going to say something right now for a number of reasons but because the woman who raised me is in the room, grow up as a child of a single mother i used to get mad when people said that if you are raised by a single mother things are going to happen, i am not saying that the out comes are concern for you, there are challenges that you can do, 700 children in bay view and looked at the state wide data and local dat, if you had zero adverse experiences

three percent of the children had learning or behavior problems. and bay view hunters point, and if you had 4 or more adverse childhood experiences 51.3 percent reported learning or behavior problems in school. so the links are there and here is the good news and then i will wrap up and this will lead to the policy options that are before all of you. the good news is that neuro plasticity, it is experience, dependent and i think that you heard the sheriff talk about this, and our public district attorney, social emotional buffering, the type of works that happens with the project what and the type of investment that we make in building, community and healthy attachment and social and emotional skills are some of the factors that actually do bring healing. and we shared with all of you a white paper and sent it to your offices and it is called an unhealthy dose of stress and we

encourage you to look at how toxic strels effects young people, and give every child in san francisco, a chance to grow up healthy, thank you. >> excuse me. thanks for the presentation, i have a question. >> sure. >> the toxic stress that you talk about, as you indicated, enters in today's for, and part of the trauma of a child seeing their parent or a relative get incarcerated in front of them, is a factor, and it is not, generally, it is, and there are other factors that will be associated with that environment i guess. but, sometimes, the question that i have is where do you,

where does the city, or, how do we identify quickly how we could intervene and maybe i am answering my own question, it seems like one point of identification is it in fact, when the occurrence of one getting arrested, that we should have a system that automatically provides certain things to a child, or children. maybe a whole family, maybe. and i guess that the question is do we have such a system? because, as i said, you could have these other factors going on, but nobody might know about them. >> it is actually a really good question, and it goes back to the work that we do, and essentially, how do you identify kids, one of them is that we have to use the screening tools that are validated at various points

where the children interact with the system and the argument that we will make is that the well child visits with the pediatrician and most of the kids have to get the immunizations and you have to get that at four and a half or five before you start and as a system we need to start a lot earlier in screening because often times, for example, dr. burke in her clinical practice will identify a 3-year-old whose mom is homeless and there is domestic violence and the mom is challenged with substance abuse and when she does a full physical exam of that 3-year-old there are no symptoms and so the idea is how can we start earlier and often, and part of what we have to do is develop the screening tools and i think that every place where a child is, identify appropriate ways to screen for these risk factors because that is really what they are, and they are risk factor and if we ignore them then the out comes are predictable and if we intervene, we have great stories to tell. >> i am the true believer that the sooner you catch it the better. >> yeah.

>> and when i heard this young lady's story and it seems like, it was in the system. >> to really help people like her. >> yeah. >> and at a much earlier time. >> that is right. and i will leave that to the city agency to talk about how they could have intervened at various points or did. >> thank you for your time. >> all right. >> you got some spirit fingers back there. >> so, are you guys finished? >> no, okay. welcome on back. >> i want to thank our two speakers, again, for sharing that information with us. our hopes for today are to hear from the city departments about existing service model programs for working with the children with incarcerated parents and to hear from the departments regarding the challenges and supporting the children with incarcerated parents. >> we also would like to assess what kind of training

leadership and data collection will be best in addressing this population and build the basis for a future conversation among the department leaderships on the children with the incarcerated parents. >> okay. >> so lastly, on behalf of all of us, i just like to say a few thank yous. thank you to supervisor cohen for sponsoring this hearing and thank you for supervisors campos and avalos and breed and kim for co-sponsoring. and we would also like to thank the representatives of the city departments and community organizations for the ongoing commitment to this it you and i would like to thank you, the neighbor's services and safety committee for giving us your time. >> thank you. >> thank you very much. >> next speaker is going to come from the department of children, youth and families. >> perfect. >> hello.

hello, supervisors thank you for having me. i am the director of programs and planning for the department of children and youth and their families, and i am here today to just do a brief presentation on some of our efforts so far around this issue. and as well as talk about excuse me, some of our next steps, and some areas that we have to focus moving forward. so i want to start by just kind of focusing on and really kind of recognizing some of the things that the other folks have said around some of the needs with this population, so, according to our community needs assessment back in 2011, we found that there was 16,196 san francisco children who had a parent in custody at a county jail at some point during that year. in addition we also found and

this has already been stated but the parental incarceration obviously has a few adverse impact including financial instability and instability in family relationships, and residential mobility. and then, finally, familiaral incarceration comes with shame and stigma and that can also lead the young people to associate themselves with the labels that are placed on their parents and i think that in pointing out these statistics there is a high level of need and clearly the people who are affected by this issue with a range of adverse impacts and furthermore on this last bullet point is crucial and it is also been stated previously and that there is a high chance that a young person that is a child will also become incarcerated

themselves. i would call the indirect indirect, and so our direct investments are really those programs that we fund that are directly working with young people who are the children of incarcerated parents. and we currently fund two programs, one of them is obviously spoken already today and that is project what, and in addition we also fund, another program of community works that is the roots program at balboa high school and both of those programs are providing the types of support, and types of opportunities and skill building, and that helps the young people to address some of the issues that they are dealing with, and to be or to work with the adults who are knowledgeable around these issues who understand the challengers and who are cap able of providing the services and the things that they need. >> mr. gomez. >> yes. >> in the interest of time, yes. >> my friend, i am sorry. >> you are going to have to give us the highlights. >> no problem. >> and for all of the speakers that are coming up after.

>> you have five minutes to make your presentation and just give us the highlights and the take away. >> thank you. >> sure. >> so i will go to the next steps. that is really the key thing here. so, for us, i think that it was mentioned that there is a lack of solid data collection around this issue and we have called out this population in our last community needs assessment back in 2011, we are currently in the process of doing our community needs assessment once again, that will filter into the children's service plan ta will be used to put into the rfp and we will continue to fund what we are doing now and including the programs that we do fund and we fund a range of violence prevention programs and we are serving a lot of young people who are children of incarcerated parents in those programs as well. and we would like to increase some of our data collection and continue serving program participants so that we can get

a better sense of how they access our programs and then finally and i think that this is really the key thing and what is really the nature of this hearing, and that is that we will continue to work with our funding partners and the city department, to coordinate our current services and also, to work towards future service and so i think a key thing there and this has been mentioned by the other speakers that there are things that can be done currently to try to lessen some of the barriers for the young people who are dealing with these issues, and some of those things we already have relationships with several departments and we closely with them and pleat with them regularly and we will continue to do that. >> and we will continue to do tla as well and try to increase the types of services that we are doing around this area to better meet the needs of young people with these issues, thank you. >> thank you very much. >> and okay, everyone we have a

rules committee meeting in this room at 2:00, so come on rebecca, today she is representing the district attorney office. >> that you have three minutes. >> okay. >> i will make it brief. >> thank you. >> we are looking for ways to help to rehab tait and not sever the connections between the family and we are looking to consider all aspects of prosecution to make the rehabilitation connecting families as as effective as they can and our office actively participates in the san francisco children of incarcerated parents partnership where we work with the other law enforcement partners to make the improvements to the systems, we are proud of the colleagues, as

you know that we have an alternative sentencing planner who vaoe views the cases to be sure that we will use the best resources for the non-violent offenders and that puts together a program to address the root cause of the crime and obviously a root cause is to make sure that the families are connected and getting the support that they need and that they are not, suffering from the stress and the health issues that we have heard about earlier. and he includes family information in those reports so that they are approaching these individuals, again with a holistic approach. >> and they were trained of the convictions on families, and these are beginning steps, and we look forward to working with everyone at this hearing to make sure that we are again, making sure that the families remain connected through the criminal justice system. >> great. >> thank you very much. >> and our next presentation is going to be from the san francisco police department,

captain joseph mcfadden. >> thank you, supervisors. >> thank you. >> i want to talk to you today, about what sophie brought up from project what is that was our department general order of 7.4 which i presented to the police commission and was adopted on may 7th of this year, and its main goal is to minimize the trauma to the child and the care for the child in the place when a parent is arrested. and prior to 2006, the parent was arrested outside of the home and you left the child on a street corner waiting for someone to pick them up or you had the children left at school or the children left with strangers or neighbors and that is how the children were cared for, and you did not follow up on it because our deal was to

do the law enforcement part of it, in 2008, the children of arrest td parents, they approached the chief at that time about it and we started a bulletin, regulating exactly what the officers do at these arrest scenes, and that was in 2007 and there was a bulletin put out about that every two years, until 2013, at which point with the chief, and along with the children of incarcerated parents, project what, cps, which is the fcs and the occ and poa, put together the general order, 7.4 and it came forward and we had it adopted and what specifically that it does is it, it makes

sure that the rights are not violated so in making an arrest, the officers at the scene and the first responders have to inquire about the presence of the children in the home, and if possible, make the arrest out of sight of the children, second, it is safe to do so, allow that arrested parent to speak to their children prior to going away from the scene. and if it is not safe to do so, because of that, then the officers obliged to explain to the child the reason for the arrest and reassure the child about the safety and the care of that child. they will do the back check to be sure that the person that we are leaving the child with is safe and does not