For most of her childhood, whenever anyone asked Taraya A. about her parents, she said they were out of town. Now the 18-year-old, a senior at Schenley High School, tells the truth -- they were locked up in the Allegheny County Jail.

Fifteen percent of children countywide have had to live with the same reality, according to preliminary results of a study released yesterday.

Researchers found that 7,000 children under 18 currently have an incarcerated parent and 35,000 have endured the experience during their childhood. These children do not always ask for help. Their needs may be overlooked because the vast majority of them are being raised by family and are not in the child welfare system.

"These children are in every school district and in every ZIP code in Allegheny County," said Jane Berger, board president for the Pittsburgh Child Guidance Foundation, a private foundation dedicated to mental health issues that is heading up a six-year initiative to address the issue.

Allegheny County Children, Youth and Families, the county Department of Human Services and more than a dozen other agencies are collaborating on the project, which began with a survey of incarcerated parents, their children, corrections officials, judges and social workers about how services are delivered to children of incarcerated parents.

The national prison population tops 2 million, according to 2003 Justice Department statistics, and more than half of the inmates are parents, the study's organizers say. Few states have begun to address the problem.

To begin with, Pittsburgh Child Guidance Foundation researchers discovered that no records or data are kept on these children. They learned, and police confirmed, that it is up to the arresting officer to determine whether children should be left with family members or enter the child welfare system. Siblings get split up and caretakers do not always explain to children where their parents have gone.

According to Marcia Sturdivant, deputy director of CYF, parents can lose their parental rights after 15 months if they neglect to maintain contact with their children.

Children grieve the loss of their parents, said Claire Walker, executive director of the child guidance foundation. Visits are emotionally and logistically difficult and phone calls are costly. A father told researchers that during a prison visit his toddler pounded her fists against the glass and cried inconsolably because she thought her mother was trapped in a cage. Some parents call a halt to the visits for this reason.

Taraya A. never once visited her mother or father in prison. (Family members asked that her last name not be published.) While her grandparents took care of her, between the ages of 6 and 13, they offered to take her to see her mother, who was locked up on and off for using narcotics.

"I just didn't want to see her in there," Taraya said. "It would make me mad that she was in there."

Like Taraya, many young people are resilient. However, the child guidance foundation notes that children of inmates are more likely than their peers to fail in school, become substance abusers and commit crimes.

Multiple generations of a family end up behind bars, said Ramon Rustin, warden of the Allegheny County Jail. During the more than two decades he has spent in corrections, Rustin said, he occasionally found a parent and child housed in the same facility. At one point, a father, son and grandson were locked up all at once. The threesome requested an in-house reunion because they had not seen one another in a long while.

"For whatever reason, these kids seem to follow in their parents' footsteps. If we address the problem, probably the recidivism rate will go down and the population of prisons will go down," Rustin said.

Several local agencies have initiated parenting classes for inmates, helped facilitate special visiting areas in prisons and set up transportation programs and counseling. The study suggests making these programs available to everyone.

Also, it said, agencies should keep uniform records on children, legislators should develop straightforward policies and training for police officers, caretakers should be consistently screened and transportation for visits should be readily available.

To improve communication, prisons could implement creative ways to help kids and their parents stay in touch -- like after-school tutoring or a program initiated over a decade ago in Maryland called Girl Scouts Behind Bars, in which incarcerated moms lead troop meetings.

Raising morally strong, self-confident kids is a challenge for any parent. From the age of 6 on, Taraya had to learn the basics without her mother, her father or her older brother, who was raised by relatives in a separate household. When Taraya was 13, her grandparents, like many older family members who become caregivers, were overwhelmed raising a young teen and passed on custody to foster care.

She finally landed, by choice, with her cousin Sharon McDaniel and McDaniel's husband and daughter. McDaniel, 43, runs an agency called A Second Chance, a non-profit organization that facilitates kinship care by training, licensing and supervising relatives of abused and neglected children so they can provide foster care for the youngsters. Taraya now tutors some of the Second Chance children in English. When she graduates from Schenley, she plans to study nursing.

Taraya recalled that it was not until she was 12 that she started telling truth about her mom and dad. "I realized they were not here and it was not my fault. It still hurt to tell people," she said.

Staff writer Caitlin Cleary contributed to this report. Gabrielle Banks can be reached at gbanks@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1370.