by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

One early morning a few weeks ago, I noticed a downcast boy alone in the park kicking a can. It was a rare sight for a school day.

I know the kid. I'll call him Jay. He's about 12. I've liked him since the first time I saw him as a gleeful six-year-old riding his bike through the lanes upon my first visit to the neighbourhood. He pointed to the duplex I'd eventually buy and excitedly warned me that "It costs a million dollars!"

I still see him around and sometimes feed his unappeasable appetite for attention with a few minutes of reckless poke-you-in-the-eye style tag. He's fleet but overuses the pivot move that crafty, slower kids employ to get to the final rounds of British Bulldog, so I caught on to his tricks.

It was sad to see him looking forlorn, kicking a can at 8:30 a.m. while strapped into the huge oversized knapsack that all kids are sentenced to wearing these days. I brought him a soccer ball, which, of course, I never saw again, and he told me that he would be in the park all day because he was suspended from school for fighting "53 times this year!" and stuttered in his newly developed speech defect all the relevant, brutal details of his pugilistic assaults.

Jay's dad is in jail in Edmonton, and will be for quite a while, something Jay argues is unjust. Jay gives a painful account of the unfair details of the regrettable incident, and he considers his father a victim of massive injustice.

One can only speculate whether Jay would have gone down this scrappy road had father never been tossed in the slammer. Perhaps dad is such a badass that Jay would have been corrupted by bad fathering anyhow. Maybe dad passed the criminal gene on and Jay's fate has long been decided. Such uncertain elements make academics hesitate before warning about the dangers of sending dads to jail. However, the surprisingly few studies conducted on the subject of paternal incarceration suggest that almost half of male prisoners' children suffer from emotional and health problems after dad gets locked up. One study suggests that almost all children of incarcerated fathers miss his attention and almost two-thirds feel lonely without him.

I rang up Reverend Chris Carr, who's retired to cottage country near Kingston after a career in the Chaplaincy program at Corrections Canada. He confirms that the kids of the jailed are in a bad way. "The experience of families [of the incarcerated] is almost identical to the victims of crime, in the sense that they feel they're ignored by the criminal justice system."

And when dad gets out of prison - we're talking men here, because the overwhelming majority of Canadian inmates are men - his social salvation hinges on a psychologically stable family. "The family is the primary social unit of the reintegration of the prisoner into society and if the family isn't in good health, then it gets to be a problem, and often the justice system doesn't help that much, although efforts are now being made to correct that."

And even jail visits to father can be a real downer for families, now that they're heavily searched for drugs. "Often families are seen as a risk element. They're suspected of bringing in drugs. The searches are so tight that even if there's a trace of drugs on your money, the alarms go off and the families are accused [of smuggling them in], even though in most cases the families have never even done drugs," says Carr.

Although Canadian immigration authorities routinely take into consideration the benefits of keeping families together, the same family-united principle is much less ingrained in the sentencing process, and I think it's time it be weighed far more.

Call me soft-on-crime but I figure Jay needs dad. Put dad in an ankle bracelet. Put video cameras in his house. Call for frequent parole officer visits. But Jay could use his father. And the rest of us might need him too, if it might stop Jay from turning into something bad himself.

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