Miriam Goodman says children's mental health care belongs in community

Good afternoon, Chair and member of the committee.

My name is Miriam Goodman, and I'm the Senior Director of Clinical Care at the Women's Prison Association.

For more than 180 years, WPA has served women impacted by the criminal legal system.

We provide a continuum of care working with people in the community at Rikers, at Bedford Hills, and as they return home.

Our work includes case management, housing reentry support, and trauma-responsive clinical care.

We appreciate the intent behind Intro 453 and its recognition that children impacted by a parent's incarceration may need mental health support.

But we, along with other advocates, strongly believe that care should be provided by trained mental health professionals through trusted community-based organizations, not by the Department of Correction.

Incarceration impacts entire families.

When a parent is incarcerated, children experience that separation too.

Their lives and relationships are disrupted.

We cannot talk about healing without acknowledging the systems that have contributed to that harm.

The system that causes or compounds harm cannot also be the system we ask families to trust with their healing.

Trauma-responsive care is built on trust, safety, choice, consistency, and relationships.

Those things are incredibly difficult to create when care is tied to the very system that many families experience as a source of trauma.

Community-based providers can offer something fundamentally different, care that is independent of the correctional system and relationships that do not end when someone leaves a jail.

We see every day what that kind of care can look like.

Our team provides individual and group counseling that recognizes the impact of both interpersonal and systemic trauma.

We meet people as the whole, not as a diagnosis, a charge, or a moment in their life.

And because we work across the continuum, relationships can start in community, continuing through incarceration, and back when someone's home.

That is what we believe we should be investing in.

We urge the council to invest in community-based mental health services and fund organizations at levels that allow us to recruit and retain excellent clinicians and provide families with the quality of care they deserve.

Healing should be rooted in community with trusted providers who can be there during incarceration, through reentry, and long after someone comes home.

Thank you.

Thank you.