If you want to foster the things you want a prisoner to be involved with, you don't rip them away from him. If you want him to be a good family man, being a good family man should be part of his prison experience. It is one of the key values you want him to have, so you should teach it to him.
Rather than taking the family out of the prisoner's life, you seek to put it in.
Rather than limiting him to once-a-week visits, let him visit his family daily, if they will visit that often. But . . . these should not be unsupervised visits. A counselor or teacher should be on hand at each visit, offering correction and discipline when the prisoner or family mistreat each other. The two parties should be held to a high standard, the prisoner treating the family well, and the family treating the prisoner well. The prisoner should even be coached before many of the visits, the counselor saying, I want you to do it this way. And, the counselor should often review the visits with the prisoner just after the family leaves, making suggestions on what could have been done better and praising him for the things he did correctly.
The counselor should know the family well, calling the family and interviewing them to know what the needs and accomplishments are. And, if those things are not coming through in the family visits, the counselor should pass them along to the prisoner and encourage him to take an interest in what each member of his family is accomplishing and needing.
Prison reform should be about making a better person. It should be about instilling values. Having family values can help make the prisoner a better citizen, So, rather than ripping the prisoner from his family when we send him to prison, we should let him continue to see his family, and we should use those visits as opportunities to teach him how to treat his family.
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