Since Nina was born, Lolli has been dressing her for prison. Nina wore new baby clothes for visits to her 16-year-old father, Toney, in a juvenile detention facility not too far from their Bronx neighborhood. As Nina grew, Lolli dressed her daughter for the rarer afternoons in faraway New York State maximum-security visiting rooms. The gaps between visits gave Lolli time to save and shop for the brand-new outfits on layaway. In the inner city, being ''dressed'' has always been important: it means you are provided for, a part of bigger things. Sloppiness and stains were physical evidence of failure, of poverty winning its battle against you. The night before visits, Lolli would spend hours doing Nina's hair in her father's favorite style -- Shirley Temple curls. Nina groaned and grimaced. Lolli tugged and yanked. Nina winced whenever Lolli cleaned her ears (Toney sometimes checked). In prison, as on the street, a well-dressed family enhanced Toney's stature.

In photo, R, Nina holds to her jailed father - in a stack of pictures. She is the only one of his children to have seen him out of prison.                                                                                                                                  On a cold morning early last month, Nina, who is 12, stood on her stoop, dressed, waiting to visit her father. She was glad about going to see him, eager to go anywhere, to get away from her boring block in an upstate New York town and the chaos of her house. She has been an upstate girl for more than seven years, but like her mom, she still rocks a city style. Nina's thick, dyed blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she flashed a new pair of silver-and-pink Nikes.  She was wearing a dark blue velvet sweatsuit Lolli bought for the day. The sweasuit came from a corner store, whose Bronx-born proprietor imports the New York City ghetto style upstate.

As long as Nina could remember, the prison system held uncles and cousins and grandfathers and always her father. Nina, like Toney and Lolli, was raised in the inner city; for all three, prison further demarcated the already insular social geography. Along with the baby showers of teenagers, they attended prisoners' going-away and coming-home parties. Drug dealing and arrests were common on the afternoons Nina spent playing on the sidewalk as she and her parents hung out with their friends. People would be hauled away, while others would unexpectedly reappear, angrier or subdued. Corrections officers escorted one handcuffed cousin to Nina's great-grandmother's funeral; her favorite uncle had to be unshackled in order to approach his dying grandmother's hospital bedside. The prison system was part of the texture of family life.

Since 1974, the year Toney was born, the incarceration rate for young men in America has quadrupled. In his Bronx neighborhood, as in the poorest communities around the country, prison is now a well-established rite of passage. A 2000 study by the U.S. Department of Justice found that about half of the nation's inmates are parents of children under 18. The study also found that almost 1.5 million children had a parent in prison, an increase of more than 500,000 children since 1991.

Family portrait, Woodbourne Correctional Facility, Right: Lolli with one of her (but not Toney's) daughters.                                                                                                                                Many inmates lose touch with their families -- more than half of all fathers in state prison report having no personal visits with their children. But the family that maintains a significant connection must arrange and rearrange their relationships -- their lives -- around prison. The fact that so many young minority men spend time in jail is "felt acutely at the street level, and influence dating patterns, parenting patterns, the way people do or don't connect to work, the norms of social interactions," says Jeremy Travis of the Urban Institute. These abstractions are the reality for Nina and Lolli and Toney, with whom I have spent countless hours hanging out and shuttling back and forth to prison during the last 10 years. (To gain such access to their lives, I agreed to use only their street nicknames when writing about them." For them, as for many poor American families, prison and the street are where family life unfolds.

Love Love is a place to go in the ghetto. Like thousands of inner-city teenagers, Toney and Lolli met on the street. It was 1988, and drugs had rendered their precarious home situations untenable. Home meant cramped places where too many people and never enough money erupted in too much fighting and sadness and partying. In their Puerto Rican neighborhoods on the eastern and western ends of Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, drug dealing was a mainstay of the local economy.

Lolli wasn't a church girl, and she wasn't much of a schoolgirl either. But she wasn't truly hardened, and she had family. She liked action, although she preferred to watch from the periphery. Boys called her Lollipop because she liked to tuck lollipops in the topknot of her ponytail; her teachers called her Motor Mouth because she talked a lot. After school, she liked watching the boys fooling around in front of a nearby bodega: boys talking to other boys, boys eating Cheez Doodles, boys idly bouncing basketballs, boys on bicycles.

Toney called attention to himself just by appearing. He sported a red leather jacket with a collar trimmed in what looked like real rabbit fur. His clothes were pressed and clean. He squinted as if he had just sucked on a lime and had a hop in his sexy walk. He was 14 and looked like a boy headed somewhere.

What Lolli didn't know at the time was what Toney was running from. His mother's life was spiraling out of control, and her longtime boyfriend, a workingman who had given structure to Toney's turbulent household, had recently moved out. Toney usually retreated to his homeboys -- Four-Man Posse, as they called themselves, or F.M.P. As Toney remembers it, within no time he went from playing tag to hiding drugs in his pocket to carrying guns. F.M.P. had an M-1 rifle, a .45 and a shotgun. They hunted for victims on the subway and did a daylight robbery at a sporting goods store.

Toney caught Lolli's attention immediately. ''Damn,'' Lolli remembers saying to her best friend the day she saw him. ''That guy looks good.''

At first, Toney later recalled, he'd noticed Lolli the way he noticed all kinds of girls. She was pretty, ''real short and thick.'' He wanted to have sex with her. Having sex with girls was for Toney a daily goal, one he met fairly regularly. ''Different girls gave me an opportunity to experience different things,'' Toney said. But Toney found himself actually liking Lolli, and they started speaking every day. They talked and talked and then they kissed and kissed. When they began to make love, Lolli was silly and happy, not scared and sad like other girls he'd been with. Some neighborhood girls moved like somnambulists through the haze of their depressing streets, but Lolli was playful, ready to try anything. Toney said, ''She had this vitality.''

Toney was a player, and even love wasn't going to stop a boy's philandering, but Lolli was the girl he came back to, his ''wife.'' Toney also spent less time robbing and mugging once he had Lolli. It was common knowledge in the neighborhood that a girl could save a boy from the dangers of the street, but Toney wasn't looking to be saved, and Lolli wasn't looking to rescue him. She liked the adventure and wasn't thinking further than that. She started cutting school.

By the fall of 1989, Lolli was pregnant. She was hopeful: both she and Toney said they believed the relationship would go on much as it had, and that they would get help from their moms. Lolli's mother, who had her first child at 14, was less worried about the pregnancy -- lots of girls had bellies -- than about the extra hardship Toney's hoodlum lifestyle guaranteed. She had cousins and siblings who'd been in and out of prison. Her own longtime partner, who was addicted to heroin, managed to stay out of jail, but even with him at home, raising children was a struggle.

Within weeks, Lolli's mother's fears were realized: Toney was arrested. His crew was involved in a shootout. Toney took the blame -- he knew he'd get less time as a juvenile; his best friend, Pee Wee, also took the rap as a gesture of solidarity.

In 1990, Toney was sentenced to two-to-six years for attempted murder and shipped to Harlem Valley, the juvenile detention center in Wingdale, N.Y., 50 miles north of the Bronx. By this time, Lolli had quit school. She was now not only a pregnant 15-year-old, but a jailbird's ''wife.''

Toney didn't know it, but Harlem Valley would have the best conditions that he would experience during his prison years. In the early 90's, juveniles were still treated like older children who might turn things around. In addition to offering Toney a chance to get his G.E.D., the institution encouraged connection with his family. He had easy access to a phone. He could shoot his own rolls of film with a camera that the staff let the teenagers use. He mailed Lolli pictures of himself sitting in his cinder-block room on his Ninja Turtle sheets. Toney ate the home-cooked food that his mother brought for visits, which she made often, because Metro-North trains ran from New York City to Wingdale.

Toney's mother hoped that jail would teach her son the lessons she had not been able to. Prison wasn't safe, but it was safer than the street, though you had to establish that you could take care of yourself. Early on, two bigger boys beat Toney, and while he was getting stitches, they stole a pair of his sneakers. In a move that would establish his reputation in the system, Toney did them one better: he waited a week for one of the boys to wear the sneakers, jumped him and took the sneakers right off his feet.

For Lolli, prison made the relationship hard instead of fun. Face to face in the visiting room with full hours stretched out before them, Lolli and Toney had to figure out new ways to communicate. The unborn baby became their strongest link. Toney hated the idea of being an absent father, like his own father, who moved out when Toney was 2 and was in and out of prison. ''For the next four years I'm going to have to handle it,'' Toney wrote to Lolli. ''But anyway at least I have something that's mine and will never stop loving me. My kid.''

In April 1990, a healthy, full-term baby girl arrived. Lolli mailed Toney his own baby book. They charted their daughter's progress. Toney wanted Lolli to document with photographs each day he was missing. He stopped asking Lolli questions about herself and wanted to hear only about the baby: does she still have that rash? That bump on her chest? Was Lolli changing her diapers enough? The more controlling Toney became, the more Lolli avoided him. She let Toney's mother take Nina to see Toney on weekends instead. Toney fed her and changed her diaper. When the baby cried, he said, ''I ain't letting go till you get used to me.'' He badgered his mother to keep a close eye on Nina, and promised to take care of her when he got out.

Lolli's mother also helped with the baby. Lolli welcomed the break. It was summer. Her friends were hanging out and going for midnight swims at Roberto Clemente State Park. She missed having sex with Toney. One night, she and an ex-boyfriend got together. Within three months of Nina's birth, Lolli was pregnant again.

Toney was devastated -- and furious. He didn't want Lolli to turn out like his mother or his oldest sister, having babies by different fathers. Lolli loved Toney, but she could not go through with an abortion. Toney still called regularly to check on Nina -- Lolli would hold the receiver to Nina's mouth to capture sounds -- but Toney's inquiries quickly turned into diatribes. He promised to make Lolli's life miserable once he got out.

In October 1991, after completing the minimum two years of his sentence, Toney arrived back home in the Bronx. He stripped at the threshold of his mother's apartment door. His prison clothes formed a puddle at his feet. Prison clothes were believed to bring a house bad luck, and his mother's house had already had enough: Toney's oldest sister, who had contributed to the household, had recently been arrested on a drug charge, leaving behind three little girls.

A condition of Toney's parole was that he either get a job or return to school. He attended Bronx Community College, thinking it would be easier to skip. The B.C.C. campus was on the west side, close to Lolli's mother. Toney and Lolli soon started sleeping together again. Lolli would leave her new baby girl, Che Che, with her mother, and wait with Nina for Toney after class. Watching the students, Lolli wished she had never dropped out of school. Toney shared whatever he was learning -- math, new words. Lolli liked math the best. Within a couple of months, though, Toney stopped attending college. His mother's latest boyfriend was arrested; she was getting high, and someone needed to pay the bills. Toney took a job overseeing crack sales and tried to keep his mother in check.

Toney still loved Lolli, but wanted to punish her for becoming pregnant by someone else. He brought other girls into his bedroom at his mother's house. Lolli waited out his company. Sometimes, she and Nina slept on the couch. Even after one girl moved in at his mother's, he regularly saw Lolli; he would pass by her mother's apartment at bedtime to tuck in Nina. Lolli accepted his divided attention as punishment for having another boy's baby. But Nina, who was 2, wasn't having it. She fought on behalf of both of them. Sometimes Toney would drive Nina around in his car. If he offered a girl a ride, Nina refused to relinquish the passenger seat. ''My chair!'' she'd say, or, ''Mommy's chair!'' and the girl would have to sit in back.

The repetitiveness of drug dealing quickly bored Toney, and he started robbing again with F.M.P. He was hardheaded and 17, bursting with angry energy. He understood that his actions had consequences, but in his world, the consequences seemed less determined by action or intention than by the luck of the draw. That Christmas, after robbing a drug dealer, he came home with $25,000, intoxicated with the ease of the job. He paid his mother's overdue rent, stocked the shelves with food and bought presents for his nieces. He outfitted himself and his live-in girlfriend with sneakers and jewelry and coats. He always made sure Nina had everything she needed, and with his new money, he bought her a black leather shearling. He even bought things for Lolli's other daughter, Che Che, a gesture that Lolli interpreted hopefully.

But Toney was stopped one night and charged with driving without a license; he spent the summer of 1992 on Rikers Island for violating parole. By the time he got out that fall, his mother had been evicted. Toney quickly found a new girlfriend. One night she had a party, and everything was upended again.

Toney's friend Pee Wee became deadly when he partied, and on this night, after drinking, he got into an argument with a group of boys at a White Castle. Toney arrived and tried to calm Pee Wee in the parking lot, but couldn't. He then accompanied him inside. The trouble exploded instantly. Guns blasting, Toney and Pee Wee backed out the glass front doors. 

Pee Wee had a habit of stepping in front of Toney whenever they got into shootouts; he was shorter, and Toney fired over his head. Toney had repeatedly warned Pee Wee about this habit, but it was also a testament to the trust between them. But this time, Toney tripped. He doesn't remember pulling the trigger, but he remembers his friend going down, his chin lifting toward the sky as the bullet tore through the back of his head. Toney, anguished, spent those first hours after the shooting at his girlfriend's, muttering incoherently and threatening to kill himself. For the next several months, he lived on the lam, staying with her and with other girls. When he thought it was safe, he met with Lolli and saw Nina. These stolen moments between other girlfriends were the closest Toney and Lolli ever came to conventional family life. In January 1993, the police picked up Toney. He pleaded guilty to one count of manslaughter.

Around the same time, Lolli's mother suffered a nervous breakdown. By the time the authorities transferred Toney upstate, Lolli and her two young daughters were living in a homeless shelter. And Lolli was pregnant by Toney again.

By the fall of 1993, Toney was 19, an inmate at the Coxsackie Correctional Facility in Coxsackie, N.Y., facing 9 to 18 years. Most of Coxsackie's inmates were young, so there were lots of stabbings and cuttings and robberies. Some inmates called it Gladiator School. Toney promptly immersed himself in the mix -- conning and fighting, the prison version of inner-city streets. In the yard, he ran into his old friend Ace from the F.M.P. crew. They hung out and spoke of all the girls they'd known, or wished they'd known, and wondered which girls would answer the letters they floated into the world -- inmates called them kites.

''The whole thing is about getting women to write to pass the time,'' Toney said then. If you were a boy with a long sentence, letters reminded you of what was out there, what else was possible -- which was why some lifers preferred no letters at all. Toney cast a wide net. For starters his correspondents included Lolli and the girl he had been with right after he killed Pee Wee -- he had gotten her pregnant, and she had just had a baby. He wrote another girl named Ily, whom he knew from childhood. He wrote other girls in care of friends, because he remembered only their nicknames, buildings or blocks. He recalled telling Ace, ''We shoulda kept their addresses if this was the kind of life we was gonna lead.''

Toney feared that no girl would stick by him. He didn't doubt Lolli's love as much as her ability to remain faithful to him.

Lolli herself was overwhelmed, with two toddlers and her and Toney's new baby, Tati. Her life was a string of appointments -- recertification for welfare, screenings for public housing, the sign-ins to collect vouchers for the federal food supplement program, W.I.C. If she wasn't dressing the girls for an appointment, on the way to an appointment or on the bus ride home from one, Lolli was sitting in bleak rooms crowded with women and children in the long yawn of waiting to be seen.

Toney went through periods of writing Lolli every day -- love letters, angry letters, letters brimming with baby instructions and fathering commands. He was constantly after her to bring the children to the prison, so that Nina wouldn't forget him and so that Tati, the baby, would get to know him. He also wanted Lolli to make arrangements to bring the daughter he'd had with his girlfriend, who had dropped out of contact. But getting upstate was much harder than hopping the train to Harlem Valley; the shuttle bus cost $60, which had to be saved in advance. Often, after using her welfare check to buy her daughters what they needed, Lolli had to make $5 stretch for the last two weeks of the month. Sometimes she borrowed fare from a loan shark, but with the 100 percent interest, the loans left her weeks behind.

When Toney wasn't writing Lolli, the possibility of conjugal visits preoccupied his restless mind. His adult designation made him potentially eligible for the Family Reunion Program, known inside prison as ''trailers'' -- for the trailers on the compound where an inmate could spend a few days every three to six months with his family in relative privacy. (Although some researchers believe that strong family ties may lower recidivism rates, New York is one of only a handful of states to allow trailers.) But to qualify, wives had to be legal wives. If Toney wanted sex, he had to marry; and trailers required a girl with resources -- money for the traveling and the three days of food, persistence to assemble all the necessary documentation and fill out the required paperwork and stamina to withstand the duration of her husband's prison sentence, or ''bid.'' 

Toney needed a pretty-enough stand-up girl who did her job -- brought his children regularly to visit, gave him sex, sent him monthly food packages and put money in his commissary account. He hoped for a girl who would understand him and also check up on his mother, but he wasn't expecting that. Lolli was disorganized and easily distracted, and she was always letting him down. He considered Ily, his childhood friend. Each weekend Lolli failed to visit increased Ily's appeal. Ily wasn't enamored of the hoodlum lifestyle. She used to warn Toney to tuck in his gold chains whenever she passed him on their old Bronx streets. Prison life was familiar to Ily -- so many of her relatives had been in prison that her mother had inherited nine children. Like Lolli, Ily wanted to get out of the neighborhood, and although she was also a single mother on welfare, her family situation gave her a chance. She had only one child, and her ex-husband and mother helped out.

Lolli couldn't fix the past, but she did her best at mothering. She didn't visit Toney much, but she bought Father's Day cakes, read his letters aloud and decorated her space in the shelter with his prison Polaroids. She kissed his image at night before she tucked the girls in bed. Whenever she could afford to, Lolli took pictures of Nina and Tati and mailed them to Toney. Nina, who was now 3, posed gangsta style, like the Polaroids of her father and his F.M.P. friends -- hands on bent knees, with a menacing look, or standing, arms folded across her chest, her expression intently grim. Lolli worried about Nina's toughness, because she was already getting into altercations with her classmates at preschool; her favorite TV show was ''COPS.'' But Lolli encouraged it -- she wanted to keep alive Nina's connection to her father.

By early 1994, visiting Toney had gone from being difficult to almost impossible. The authorities had moved him four hours farther north to a prison called Southport -- nearly seven hours from the city, an unwelcome relocation that he'd earned for injuring a guard during a riot in the Coxsackie yard. Southport was an isolation-unit facility in Pine City, N.Y., where inmates were sent if the isolation units of their own prisons weren't punishment enough. Toney could still receive visits, but otherwise he faced endless days of 23-hour lockdown in a single-man cell, or box. He was desperately lonely. He started suffering anxiety attacks. The endless hours with nothing to do gave him the chance to think about the way he had lived his life. To his surprise, he missed playing with Nina more than he missed hanging out with his friends. He spent most of his time writing letters to Lolli and to Ily. Ily's mobility placed Lolli's passivity in a harsher light. But he begged Lolli to visit and to bring the girls.

One cold night that winter, Lolli, Nina and baby Tati boarded a bus at Columbus Circle, one of several private buses that haul families and friends of prisoners upstate. Without them, the visits would have been impossible; few neighborhood people had cars. Passengers often recognized one another -- from other routes, from the long hours spent together waiting in prison processing or from the neighborhood. Some of the women became friends.

On the bus, veteran visitors had equipped themselves with rolls of quarters and crisp dollars for the vending machines, clear plastic bags for locker keys and change. Some brought along pretty outfits, whose perfection they preserved in dry-cleaning bags. The cost of the trip used up most of Lolli's money. Toney's mother's new boyfriend sent along $20 to deposit in Toney's commissary account, and Lolli had budgeted an additional $20 for the vending machines so that Toney and the girls could eat.

About half an hour from the prison, the bus pulled into a truck stop. The women gathered themselves and crowded into the cramped bathroom. They didn't want to dress in the prison bathroom -- that would take precious minutes of their visits. They tucked and scrutinized and tightened, sharing compliments and lipstick and complaints in the toasty bathroom air.

In the photo (Right), Toney's wife, Ily (getting ready for work), and their daughter, Elexis, await his release.                                                                                                                                    In a stall, Lolli slipped into a conservative outfit one of Toney's sisters had lent her -- a beige turtleneck and matching skirt, topped by an embroidered vest. Her own style was sporty, but she wanted Toney to see that she had matured. She wore sheer stockings beneath the silted skirt, so she could show Toney a new tattoo of his name that she'd gotten. Inside the visiting room, Lolli followed Nina, who searched for her father among the inmates in an interior cage in the center of the dreary room. As they headed to their seat assignment, Toney shuffled toward them, desponent, chin down, shackled in leg irons and handcuffs attached to a chain around his waist. Nina looked terrified. "Come out! she said desperately. "Come out!" she said desperately. Over here."

''Can't you see I'm chained up?'' he said, lifting his wrists slightly. ''I can't move.''

''Take them off,'' she demanded. ''Take them off! Take them off!''

''I can't.''

''Play patty-cake!'' Nina pleaded.

''Nina,'' Lolli chided.

Suddenly Nina brightened. It was as if she grasped that her father couldn't tolerate the view of himself that her panic reflected. ''Wanna hear a song?'' Nina asked. Toney squinted, as if he had suddenly recognized her voice from far away. Then she sang. Her father was smitten by her performance until she said, ''That's Che Che's daddy's song,'' referring to the father of her half-sister, and puncturing the moment. Toney looked away stonily.

Toney often smarted at reminders of Lolli's infidelity, but solitary confinement magnified his need for a reliable family. At other prisons, Lolli and Toney could bridge their troubles by hugging and kissing, but the cage between them at Southport made what was always hard more difficult. Lolli busied herself with Tati. Toney didn't tease Lolli affectionately the way he used to, or compliment her dressy outfit. He said nothing about the special Weeboks Tati wore. Nina provided distraction by exploring the visiting room, collecting compliments. Lolli didn't dare say anything; she didn't want to ruin what little time they had together with their kids.

Around noon, Toney reached through the slot and held what he could of Lolli's hand. Touch did what only touch could do. Lolli's words poured out. She told him about a new girl at the homeless shelter who was sharing her prison expertise. The girl had had a prison wedding. She had told Lolli about all the right things to bring for trailers -- satin sheets, and cream and strawberries.

Toney waited for her to finish, then said tenderly, ''Sex ain't everything.'' The box had forced him to do some thinking. If they were going to marry, they needed more than a physical connection. They needed to communicate in ways that didn't require privacy. At best, they'd have trailers three or four times a year, and fewer if Toney didn't improve his disciplinary record. Lolli bit her lip. His new hopes came across as a reprimand: ''I want it to be you love me and I love you. Where happiness comes in is when I'm making you happy and you do things to make me happy.'' Neither of them was clear on what those things could be.

All around them, couples were whispering. Some were laughing, others were scolding increasingly restless kids. Next to them, a young black man placed his head down near the slot so an older white woman could braid his hair through the wire that separated them.

''I'm starting to think about going back to that cell, and it's got me real depressed,'' Toney said with an hour of the visit left. The pending goodbye wedged between them as the remaining minutes dwindled. A guard called time. Chairs scraped the linoleum. The men tried to stretch. Children's hands clasped the grating like small claws, and men and women tried to kiss through the mesh.

''You better come next week, or I'll punch you in the face,'' Toney said miserably. ''You got my hopes up.''

Shortly afterward, Toney wrote and told Lolli to limit the girls' visits. He didn't want them to see him caged that way. He later admitted that not being able to play with Nina and hold the baby during the visit hurt more than not seeing his children at all.

If reason played a part in Lolli and Toney's relationship, its role kept changing. They broke up, and got back together, then broke up again and reunited, for reasons both of them eventually lost track of. Toney threatened and cajoled her to bring the children, but Lolli was chronically broke. Meanwhile, Toney tested Ily's level of devotion. When he left Southport and was moved farther north, to Clinton, he invited her up: ''I was the farthest I could be. If she can troop here, then I'm cool.'' Toney still corresponded with Lolli, and on the envelope of one of his conciliatory letters to her was a reminder that suggested he knew, even if Lolli didn't, the inevitable outcome of the growing distance between them: ''Use your mind to control all your body parts.''

But it was too late. Lolli had already cheated. An old flame with whom she had been corresponding while he was in prison had been released and had paid her a visit. She was pregnant. Shortly after Toney heard the news, he proposed to Ily. They married in February 1995. He was fond of Ily, but, he said: ''I wasn't focusing on what a relationship should be -- I was focusing on what I could get out of a relationship.'' But even the limited connection motivated him to behave. ''I didn't want to get in trouble no more because I wanted to keep getting trailers,'' Toney said. ''My main concern was sex.'' 

Lolli's main concern was how to survive. Her newest baby was premature and remained in intensive care for several months. Meanwhile, Lolli had been placed in her own apartment, but dealers ruled the decrepit building, and her kitchen was infested with rats. Her mother's apartment was no better: a dealer was using one of the bedrooms as a stash house, and with all the traffic, Lolli worried for the safety of her daughters. Lolli decided to move upstate, outside of Albany, with a friend who promised to help with the children. The friend was caring for three of Toney's nieces (Toney's sister having been sentenced to 10 years in prison). When Lolli learned of Toney's marriage, she impulsively asked a boy she knew, Capone, to move away with her. She wasn't in love, but she didn't want to be alone. She cared for Capone, and he was good to her daughters. And he wasn't a player. Nina, who was nearly 5, reserved judgment, but within weeks, Che Che and Tati called him Papi, and he treated the newest baby like his own.

Despite their ties to other people, Toney and Lolli kept in touch. Sometimes they grew nostalgic and spent hours on the phone. In one call, Toney and Lolli fantasized that on his release date, he'd take Nina and Tati somewhere far away -- maybe Florida -- where they could be a family just once, before Toney returned to his legal wife. Lolli pretended more generosity toward Ily than she felt: ''Who knows? You could fall in love with your wife.'' Lolli still loved him absolutely, but felt foolish telling him -- not so much because he'd married, but because she'd let him down again.

For the next few years, Toney and Lolli had erratic contact as their lives ran along parallel tracks, each trying to scrape by financially and make their new relationships work. Nina was the glue that held them together. She was very bright, but she was starting to have disciplinary problems at school and was difficult at home. Lolli tried to control her, but she didn't know how to hold the line. If Capone got involved, Nina yelled, ''You ain't my father!''

Lolli would write Toney for advice. Sometimes she was desperate: ''I need help with your daughter so bad.'' But what could Toney do from prison? He spent more time with Ily's son, Jay, than with his own child. He asked Lolli to bring Nina to visit, but the prison was too far and money too tight. Toney wrote to Nina, but she was still too young to write back. Nina did, however, dedicate songs to him that she liked to sing with the radio, and she took seriously her job of teaching Tati that Toney, not Capone, was her dad. Nina quizzed her sister with photographs. But too many nights, Nina stomped to bed, screaming, ''I want my father,'' raging until, exhausted, she fell asleep.

At one point when things were especially hard, Lolli wrote Toney about her urge to move back to the city. But Toney thought she would be resigning herself to a lifestyle she'd tried to escape. He wrote back: ''I really don't want my daughters growing up in the Bronx. . . . I don't want my daughters to come out like you or me.''

One night, when Nina was 6, she asked her mother if she would write a letter to her father. A few weeks before, Lolli had bailed Capone out of jail after a minor charge. Nina had been preoccupied by what had happened. She dictated as Lolli scribbled:

Dear Daddy,

How you doing? Fine I hope. As for myself I'm confused about something. Mommy's boyfriend got locked up, and she bailed him out. I want to know why she didn't bail you out. . . . I don't understand. Mom tried to explain to me. I want to hear what you have to say now. Daddy I'm telling Tati every day that you love her. Daddy write back once you get my letter. I love you. Love,

Nina and Tati

Lolli didn't know where to begin the explanation. She dreaded Nina's reaching an age where she would ask serious questions. Lolli had never explained to Nina why her father was locked up, or why her sisters had different fathers.

While Nina was getting into trouble at home, Toney descended into the self-destruction of the prison mix. He had long ago decided not to join a gang for protection, but his independence meant he had to prove he was capable of doing anything. He fought often and had many enemies. He spent part of 1997 in the box for carrying a shank. In a panic, he wrote his oldest sister, who was also in prison, about his greatest fear: ''The only time I feel at ease is when I'm with Nina. Tati and my other daughter are lost to me. They don't treat me like their father. . . . Nina is all I have left. And she's slowly slipping away. . . . Once she's gone . . . I will lose myself.''

In 1998, he almost did. After not seeing his daughters for more than a year, Toney arranged for Ily to bring Nina and Tati along with Ily's son during their next trailer visit. The trailer happened to coincide with Nina's 8th birthday. For weeks, it was all she spoke about. But at the last minute, the trailer was canceled -- there had been a fight at the prison, and Toney had been slashed. In the mix, such trouble was inevitable. He was thrown into protective custody, with 29 stitches across his back. Nina was crushed. And Toney was once again shipped back to solitary confinement at Southport. 

In the hole again, without distractions, Toney felt the pain that he'd caused his family outside. In addition to having to cancel his trailer with his daughters, he was looking at one to three more years added to his term for possessing the shank. Serving time for killing his best friend was justice; hurting his wife and children was unbearable.

The trailers forced fidelity to a single woman and exposed him to a more conventional notion of family. Temporarily losing the trailers made him acutely aware of what he needed. Not just the sex, but something he'd never had in his own home: three days of living in peace. ''The first time I've ever been truly able to be part of a family has been at those trailers,'' he said.

Prison had been the perfect place for shutting down, and when Lolli became pregnant with another boy's baby all those years back while Toney was in juvenile detention, he'd sworn never to make himself vulnerable again. He'd been conning Ily all along -- not thinking about what he could offer her but scheming to make sure that she didn't stop taking care of him. Ily, on the other hand, had stood by him, throughout all his prison troubles, with a faith that he could barely imagine for himself.

''She gave me her life,'' he said later, still stunned at the enormity of it. He wanted to be the family man he was on those weekends. To be there for his children he had to plan for a future. For that, he needed hope. And there was no way to hope without being vulnerable.

By the spring of 1999, after turning 25, Toney had finally stepped out of the mix and kept to himself. Toney said, ''I was either gonna end up killed or murdering someone, and I thought about how that would make my daughter feel, to come to my funeral for that.''

He volunteered as a speaker for teenagers from juvenile hall. Toney told them about his own days in juvenile, wanting to be a gangster, being locked up. The interactions inspired him, but he remained troubled at the paradox. He was a better father to others' kids than he was to his own.

He stopped writing to other girls and told Lolli their relationship was truly over. It hurt Lolli, but her feelings for Capone had been growing, and eventually she said that she was happy for Toney. They'd failed each other, but still had their kids.

By early 2000, Lolli was dealing with her fifth child, a son with Capone. And Ily was pregnant with Toney's baby. Toney had wanted to wait to be sure that his marriage would hold before having another child. He also wanted to focus on the children he already had. But Ily thought a baby would prove Toney's commitment to a positive future, and Toney felt he was in no position to resist.

In July 2000, Toney's security status was reduced, and he was sent to a medium-security prison, Woodbourne, the calmest of all the prisons he'd been in. Most of the inmates at the prison, which was in Woodbourne, N.Y., were in their late 30's and older. Toney was used to prisons where stabbings happened daily; at Woodbourne, months passed between incidents. His relative freedom was exciting. Toney's enthusiasm for the tiny, substantial pleasures was contagious. He beamed like a child.

Two years ago, he signed up for an inmate-run college program. Higher education for New York State inmates was a rarity. Of the 30 men who signed up, only half stayed on. Toney was one of them. The inmates were tough professors. He loved school.

But Nina weighed heavily on his mind. Lolli's letters showered Toney with worries about Nina, who was expressing interest in boys and edging closer to the street. At home, Nina, who was now 10, inherited more responsibility. Lolli was working hard hours at a factory, and Capone, who was unemployed, was supposed to watch the children. But Lolli would often arrive home after her shift and find Nina taking care of the kids and Capone hanging out with his friends on the street. At school, Nina would fall asleep in class or be disruptive and resist authority -- she refused to open her book or salute the flag and pounded the computer keys. Her exasperated teacher often sent her off to the nurse's office or to the guidance counselor, where Nina inevitably napped.

By the spring of 2001, after many suspensions, Nina was expelled from fifth grade and placed on probation. Until the academic year ended, a home tutor visited Nina an hour a day. The rest of the time she spent watching TV and watching her siblings, yearning for something interesting to do. After Nina's suspension, Lolli mailed Toney a copy of the thick packet of Nina's school records. In his cell, he pored over the many pages and said sadly, ''It's like reading a book about myself.'' 

Toney was taking parenting and psychology classes, and the more he learned, the more he hungered for news about Nina that was positive. In his letters to her, he made a point to acknowledge her strengths instead of just reprimanding her for her weaknesses. He hated the long gaps between the visits with Nina and Tati. ''I don't think it's fair, you know. But I'm not saying it's Lolli's fault. I gotta understand that she got all them kids, and she's going through her own problems, and sometimes I say, You know, I ain't got it that bad.'' The absence of Lolli and the kids was underscored by the growing connection he had with Ily, her son, Jay, and their new baby, Elexis, whom he saw nearly every weekend. He was a better father now. When Nina was Elexis' age, Toney said, ''I was more curious about what was happening in New York City, what girls was over there, what's going on in the street.'' Now he spent hours playing with Elexis in the walled-in children's room.

Last January, Toney graduated near the top of his class. Lolli was proud. She always knew he was intelligent -- just like his daughters -- and she admitted her admiration for the steadfastness of his wife. ''I got to give it to her, sticking by him all this time,'' Lolli said. Lolli was experiencing her own evolution. She had held several full-time jobs, and had recently found one in which she thrived. She did ''disaster restoration,'' chemically cleaning up after fires, floods and bloody crimes. Though the days were long -- she sometimes worked a 16-hour shift -- the pay was poor and the job was dangerous, she liked helping people. And she was considered one of the best workers in the region.

Now that Lolli was a working woman, being a prison wife was a lifestyle she could no longer even imagine. But she and Toney worried that its lore beckoned to Nina. Toney blamed Lolli for burdening herself and Nina with too many children. But mostly he blamed himself. He'd been in prison for most of Nina's life. Nina was 12, and all they'd really had together were the rare, timed phone calls, and rarer visits.

Last month, I took Nina to see her father. Woodbourne -- a 90-minute drive from her front stoop -- was the 10th prison Nina had visited of the 12 that had housed her father over the past 13 years. Lolli rarely sees Toney anymore, but he speaks to his daughters periodically. Lolli is happy to pay for Toney's calls when she can: the fathers of her two other daughters have been out of prison for years, but they rarely call in.

In the Woodbourne visiting room, Nina bought her father his favorite snacks from the vending machines -- inmates cannot handle money -- walked over to their assigned table and sat down. Toney came over and stood above her, radiant and wanting.

''C'mon!'' he said, pulling Nina up from her chair to hug him. She reluctantly stood, grinning shyly into his broad chest. He reached across the table, grabbed her pale cheeks and pinched.

''Stoppit!'' she yelled, burying her delight.

''How's your new school?'' he asked excitedly.

''They trying to give me a disability,'' she continued, the current of connection tugging her toward her trouble. The disability referred to a school meeting she faced in a few weeks time, the purpose of which she didn't understand. It involved assessing whether or not Nina should be placed in special ed. ''They didn't tell me what for -''

''They are probably going to say you are psychologically unstable, and have an attitude that they can't control -''

''Tell me what they mean,'' Nina asked, frustrated by the verbiage.

''I am,'' Toney said, ''psychobabble -''

''Just stop please with them big words -''

Toney paused, and tried again.

''They're saying you're crazy.''

Wounded, Nina replied, ''But I'm not.''

Toney looked hurt. ''I'm not saying you are.''

Toney explained how the same things had happened to him before he dropped out of junior high. ''I want you to learn from my mistakes. I don't want you to walk in these footsteps. If I was home, I would take you on a crash course on the streets. I'd show you for real what the streets are.''

''I know what the streets are like,'' she said. Toney nodded. ''That's what I'm worried about.''

These days their infrequent visits often went this way: Toney lecturing, determined to cram in life's larger lessons in their limited time, while Nina demanded to know why she couldn't have a boyfriend or get an eyebrow ring. Toney saw through the surface to the dangers Nina couldn't see -- a street culture that pooled around their lives and whose currents were made stronger by the absence of other, more positive things. Toney tried humor. He tried facts -- rape, early pregnancy, drugs. He tried to explain that both he and Lolli had grown up too fast, that there was life beyond the street. But, he later admitted, he didn't really know what that life was. It was a world he himself was trying to reach.

Nina had some inkling of that larger world. After being on a waiting list for two years, she had been assigned a Big Sister mentor. Each week they spent time together outside Nina's neighborhood. They have gone apple-picking and have carved pumpkins, things Nina had never done before. The match is not unlike Toney's marriage to Ily, a vital relationship, but one that exists in a vacuum.

Toney knew that Nina's future rested on what he had learned the hard way -- how to create some sanctuary within yourself. For him it was a precarious balance -- holding out hope for a normal life while still needing to cope in the prison world. Nina faced a similar challenge: how to find a future she couldn't know, while navigating the minefield of adolescent street life.

Toney, now 28, is scheduled to appear before the parole board in May. He has four children and has never held a legitimate job. But he is better off than most inmates like him: he managed to acquire some higher education, and he has a home life waiting for him.

As she did on every visit, Nina begged her father to give her his gold chain, a cross he has had from the beginning of his bid. As he always did, he told her he didn't want her to have something from prison. ''Kind of like superstition,'' he said. Nina wanted to make the bad time good. ''If I have that, it's like I have him, because that was him those years,'' she said.

Toney knew that their shared past was lost. He could look forward only to the future and hope that Nina would be a part of it. She will soon be the same age that he was when he met Lolli. ''Everything at the tip of your fingers,'' Toney said, ''and at the same time slipping away.''

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc has written for The Times Magazine about female gangs and other topics. This article is adapted from ''Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx,'' to be published next month by Scribner.

Copyright The New Times Company. Reprinted from The New York Times, Sunday Magazine, of January 12, 2003.