Jan Walker, Author

A Farm in the South Pacific

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An Inmate's Daughter

On the first day of summer vacation between seventh and eighth grade, Jenna MacDonald does the dumbest thing ever. She jumps from the McNeil Island boat dock into the water to save a little girl from drowning. McNeil Island is a prison in the middle of Puget Sound. It’s where Jenna’s dad lives, and she is there with her mother, brother, and grandparents for a visit.

Her dad was recently transferred to the island, and Jenna, her mother and brother transferred too, to live with Jenna’s grandparents. Jenna has been trying to join her school’s in-group. They’re racially mixed. She’s part Native American and they are evaluating her.

Jenna isn’t permitted to tell her new friends that her dad is in prison. It’s her mother’s rule. Prison reflects on wives and children. Keeping the fact of prison secret becomes more difficult when the newspaper runs a story about a Good Samaritan rescue at the McNeil Island Corrections Center. Jenna stays out of her mother’s way and collects the news clippings about the incident. She writes in her journal about her wish to tell the truth.

An Inmate’s Daughter is a fictional account of the reality faced by over 2 million American children with a parent in prison or jail. The children are doing time too.

Parenting from a Distance

Your Rights and Responsibilities

Over 16 million children in the United States are separated from at least one of their parents. Whether the living arrangements for these children are decided by the parents or by the courts, at least one parent suffers from the separation. More often, both parents suffer, as do the children. Child custody arrangements rarely completely satisfy anyone.

Whether the separation is due to the settlement of an unpleasant divorce or to incarceration, many parents find themselves using their energy to complain and to blame others. In time, such parents find they and their children are growing apart.

Parenting from a Distance is designed to assist parents who are separated from their children to strengthen their bonds, through learning rights they have and responsibilities they can accept, even though they are apart.

Dancing to the Concertina's Tune

A Prison Teacher's Memoir

America's soaring prison population is separated from the outside world by the Concertina, the rigid spirals of razor wire that top the high chain-link fences of state and federal penitentiaries. For nearly two decades, educator Jan Walker crossed this line at medium and maximum correctional facilities to teach adult felons who had committed such crimes as murder, rape, assault, drug-related offenses, and child sexual abuse.

In Dancing to the Concertina's Tune, Walker candidly describes her reactions to prison realities, belief in education as a door-opener for even the worst offenders, and inmates' responses to the program.