A guiding hand
‘Uncle Bear’ founded a group that aids children of prisoners
Lin Minming is a man with a double identity. When he goes to work, he is the general training coach for the Fujian Province Bureau of Justice. But when he takes off the uniform, he becomes Uncle Bear, and spends his time helping the children of prison inmates.
Uncle Bear pins a blue toy teddy bear on his shirt when he’s around the children.
“The children can’t remember names, they need a symbol,” he told the Global Times.
He founded Red Apple Public Welfare, an organization that tends to the needs of these children, in 2014. He did research for a couple of years before forming the group, and found children of inmates often face difficulties in their daily lives or have psychological issues. No organization existed in China to tend to their problems.
Finding a need
Lin has always loved doing charity work and often went into rural areas to visit poor families. Once, while talking to policemen friends working at a grass-roots unit, they mentioned that children of inmates face all sorts of problems. Lin decided he should look into it.
“Even though I’m in the justice system, there’s not that much information I can find on children of inmates,” he said. “Most people in the system care about transforming the inmates, not about their children.”
Under such circumstances, the children are often unattended, or left with grandparents, who don’t usually know how to properly educate and guide the young.
Data from the Ministry of Justice shows that in 2005, there were over 600,000 children of inmates across China, and 90 percent never received any form of outside help.
Furthermore, left without proper guardians, some of these children follow their parents’ path to prison. Children of inmates make up half of the juvenile delinquents in the country.
Lin started visiting jails, grassroots policemen and the families of inmates, to try to understand the situation of these children and what their needs are.
He still remembers the first family he visited, toward the end of 2013. He had gotten a list of names of female inmates from a friend, and talked to them one by one. One of the women, who was sentenced to death with reprieve for killing a colleague, seemed worried about her child. Lin asked her for the home address.
However, it turned out to be an unwelcoming visit. Finding the woman’s home took some time, because the villagers didn’t want to point the way, since the woman had a bad reputation.
Lin found out how the woman ended up in jail. She did not get along well with her peers and was often taunted. She was introverted and didn’t communicate well. One day, she finally couldn’t take it anymore, took a knife and stabbed a colleague.
After finding the house and meeting the child, who was in the third grade, Lin was chased out by the child’s grandfather. He didn’t believe they were there to help. In the end, they lost touch with the family.
This led Lin to start thinking about how to provide help that’s ac- tually needed and can be well-received.
Benefiting all sides
Through trial and error, Lin gradually found his way. He developed an evaluation system to decide which families to help.
“First, the inmate needs to file an application, then the jail goes through a selection process, then we also visit their homes and evaluate based on their situation and what their children need,” he said.
Red Apple’s mission also gradually shifted over the years. At first, the organization only provided financial aid to the children. Then during a visit, a child’s mother told Lin that after the father was arrested, the child shut himself off from others because of discrimination. She wanted psychological help for the child.
Lin and his volunteers did some research and found more than 90 percent of inmates’ children have psychological issues and receive little to no help from school, family or society. So Red Apple started developing programs to help.
One of the more successful programs is a camp that lasts four days. Red Apple invites children, inmates and other relatives to participate. In the camp, volunteers guide parents and children to communicate, participate in group activities and role play, to try to understand one another.
“Evaluations show that inmates who went through our programs perform 15 percent better in jail” in terms of staying out of trouble, work production and having their sentences reduced, Lin said. Furthermore, none of the children the organization helped has since committed any crimes. Lin sees this as improvement and sees value in his project. He takes his own daughter on house visits, and feels she benefits from offering help too. During his birthday, his daughter sent him a WeChat message saying, “You’ve often taken me to do charity with you, teaching me how to help others … you are my role model and someone I can boast to others about.” Right now, Red Apple has 12 jailaiding centers and more than 800 registered volunteers, 70 percent of whom are policemen. But Lin isn’t going to stop there; The organization tackles new issues that keep coming up, such as solving household registration issues for the children and helping inmates get reemployed. “There are always issues that need to be solved. We’ll talk for days if I list them all,” he said.