With your love and support she can get through anything that comes

June 14, 2013 12:55 PM

Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration is a bilingual initiative to help children cope with an incarcerated parent.

The project is partially funded by defense contractor BAE Systems.

Not everyone is supportive

posted by roomthreeseventeen (3 comments total)

Not everyone is supportive

Well they're not supportive of overcriminalization and the number of people the U.S. has in jail, but they don't seem unsupportive of the idea itself.
posted by Jahaza at 1:00 PM on June 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

I recently read a dust-jacket blurb for a social science book which described the US as a "Carceral State" -- meaning that our society's idea of "fixing a problem" usually entails "find somebody to blame for this problem and throw them in jail".

It's really infected virtually every facet of our society that we simply cannot comprehend a political system -- left or right -- that does not involve mass incarceration of Bad People. Until we change that, kids videos like these will become increasingly common.

Btw about 1% of our total population is under lock and key. That number rises every year, and there is no real end in sight.
posted by Avenger at 1:10 PM on June 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

"The growth of incarceration in America has intergenerational impacts that policy makers will have to confront. According to this analysis, more than 1.2 million inmates—over half of the 2.3 million people behind bars—are parents of children under age 18. This includes more than 120,000 mothers and more than 1.1 million fathers. The racial concentration that characterizes incarceration rates also extends to incarcerated parents. Nearly half a million black fathers, for example, are behind bars, a number that represents 40 percent of all incarcerated parents. The most alarming news lurking within these figures is that there are now 2.7 million minor children (under age 18) with a parent behind bars.(See Figure 9.) Put more starkly, 1 in every 28 children in the United States—more than 3.6 percent—now has a parent in jail or prison. Just 25 years ago, the figure was only 1 in 125. For black children, incarceration is an especially common family circumstance. More than 1 in 9 black children has a parent in prison or jail, a rate that has more than quadrupled in the past 25 years. (See Figure 10.)" -p.18
The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010. Collateral Costs: Incarceration’s Effect on Economic Mobility.^(PDF) Washington, DC: The Pew Charitable Trusts.
posted by Blasdelb at 7:18 AM on June 23, 2013