Okay, the positives:
There is a strong emotive story in here, if you can work to bring it out and that is the story of a man who abandons his wife and child due to pressures but also to personal weakness/ambition (he has to be responsible) and this leads to an estranged relationship and to his daughter lacking a father figure and going off the rails (need to work on this section - erosion of the mother (drink, bad surrogate husband choices) and the decline of the home environment for the daughter) by a twist of fate and via poetic retribution, the daughter ends up being embroiled in a crime and being incarcerated at her father's prison. He does not recognise her at first but then does and tries to make amends (whether he succeeds or not will define the story). I think the escaped cons aspect complicates this story (though I like the way you write the parallel tale). Much easier to have the daughter's crimes be born out of her environment and her circle.
I think you need to make Mario more real, more selfish, he goes to California because it's tough being a father, he takes the easy road out. You need to create an Ashley to rival Mario because this is essentially a tale about Mario and Ashley.
Now for the bad, unless you're writing a true story, you do not need to list the passage of time and you certainly need to confine this tale to two time frames, the initial break-up of the family and the period in which Mario is a settled corrections officer and Ashley is going off the rails and seduced into committing a crime.
Your current version has 40 pages at the beginning in which nothing really happens. This could be told in one scene. You're setting up the back ground way too much, telling way too much through exposition in the dialogue throughout. Everything needs to be lean, not a word more than necessary to convey the story.
Moving forward, you need to sit down and beat out this story - just the story beats - 12 pages from start to finish, not description, not dialogue, pure story. Start with the breakdown of the family, right in the thick of it. Mario needs motive and purpose - did he want a child after all, is he half-way out of the marriage by the time the baby comes? Make him human but flawed and set the story in motion. The first 30 pages of the script will be Mario, his break-up and his new life in California. Act 2 will take us back to Ashley and her relationship with her mother, the down-slide - we have to like her, pity her, hate her but see her as a child who has been a victim of circumstances, an absent father, a mother who flipped out. Act 2 ends with Mario's realisation that Ashley is his daughter. Act 3 is reconciliation or failed reconciliation.
