With so many Californians locked up, it comes as no surprise that some prisoners are parents or children of other prisoners. But those who work with prisoners and their families, see it as a compact sign of the failures of a system that offers little to help interrupt this unhappy cycle. PNS commentator Chris Jenkins is a freelance journalist, who has contributed to The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and The Christian Science Monitor. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.

Eli Crawford, who has spent 31 of his 49 years in and out of California prisons, recites a list of names.

"Well, there's Walter Duffy and his son, they're at Folsom together," he says. "Then, Reggie Solomon. He's at Tehachapi and his boy, J.C., is at the Men's Colony. Then, there's Wayne McBride and his daughter. He's in San Quentin and she's over in Chowchilla."

Crawford is talking about parents imprisoned at the same time as their adult children.

Scores of parent-child felons are locked up in state and federal prisons in California -- most often in different facilities for separate felonies, although dozens are in the same prison -- including, last year, a daughter, mother and grandmother locked up together for separate crimes.

Crawford keeps an eye on these families because for almost 15 years he was jailed at the same time as two of his children. His daughter Maureen entered prison in Dublin, CA in 1983 for bank robbery while Crawford was there for robbing a San Francisco post office at gun point.

Then in 1990, when Crawford was in Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas, his son, Eli IV, was convicted in Pittsburgh, PA for robbery and drug charges. Crawford remembers the day he learned, in a letter from his mother, that his son was beginning a lengthy sentence.

"It's like I was crying a million years without shedding any tears. There are no words to describe that feeling of knowing that your children are going through the same hell that you are."

As the Crawfords' story illustrates, prison life has become deeply entrenched for some Americans. And they often leave behind fractured families.

"When parents and their children are both in jail, it makes it that much harder to stop the cycle of incarceration for...families," says Denise Johnston, director of The Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents in Pasadena. "Then you're even more likely to have future generations incarcerated because there has been very little stability in the family."

Crawford's family came to San Francisco in 1955, when he was five, but found no stability. His father often physically abused his mother until she moved out with their two sons.

"He was in and out of jail when we came up," Crawford says. "There was nothing she could really do but try to raise me and my brother on her own."

Crawford was in trouble with the law for most of his adolescence -- for hot-wiring cars, skipping high school, snatching purses and fighting with local gangs.

"Once I left the house in the morning, the streets really owned me," Crawford says. "There was nothing really my mother could do. And once you get caught up in that life, you're almost down for life."

By age 19, a series of gun and heroin possession charges put Crawford in San Quentin -- where his father had served time a decade before.

Crawford's daughter Maureen, born when her father was 14 and her mother 13, says the sane streets raised her. "When I was coming up I used to hear stories about my dad, how he grew up and everything, but there was no sense of family between him and us," she said.

Maureen, now jailed on charges of drug possession, imitated her father, even committing the similar crime of armed robbery. Crawford's son was reared 3,000 miles away. Like his sister and father, he grew up in a single parent household. He says he followed his father's life through letters and stories from relatives in California, but their relationship was always distant.

There is little information on how many such families there are. California correctional facilities don't ask for details about inmates' families -- even if they did, says David LeBoeuf, a researcher for the department, "people might not give accurate information. Often, they don't want us to know where their children or parents are."

Passage of Proposition 21, which increases punishment for a number of crimes and makes it easier to try children as adults will push the parent-child convict trend even higher.

To some, this represents more trouble ahead. "When you have a system that is only concerned about punishment, and unconcerned about the rehabilitating the lives of prisoners and their families, you're doing a disservice to future generations," says Jenni Gainsborogh, communications director for the Campaign for an Effective Crime Policy.

The California Department of Corrections has some new programs geared toward a woman and her child. A Family Foundations program for women convicted of non-violent drug offenses and sentenced to less than 36 months provides intensive drug rehabilitation with their children instead of prison.

"We're hoping that this will stop any potential for children winding up in the same situation their mothers have," says Terry Thornton, the department's spokesperson. But the only services for fathers remain classes in parenting skills and anger management.

Parent-child felons are an "unfortunate coincidence," says Thornton, "but ultimately there's very little than we can and will do about that population."

Crawford, on parole until 2004, is trying to break the cycle of incarceration on his own. At a rally for Mumia Abu Jamal, he was with his youngest daughter and two of his grandchildren.

"You know I never had a relationship with them, of any kind. I was too busy being locked up," he says, pointing to his 9-year-old granddaughter as she skipped by, "But I have the rest of my life to make it up to them, so I can somehow stop all this mess that's happened to my family."