children of incarcerated parents

In a new children's book by Renée Menart, a boy copes with his mother's incarceration with support from relatives and a teacher.

As the crippling coronavirus shutdown heads into its seventh month, children of incarcerated parents remain even more isolated from their loved ones behind bars – a still largely invisible population under special strain during COVID-19.

Anyé Young remembers the first time she went to Dave and Buster’s without her dad. The arcade was where Young and her father forged many happy memories together, a special place that Young considered “our thing.”

The first-ever National Children of Incarcerated Parents Conference drew 285 attendees from around the globe and offered three full days of sessions on innovative programs, family-focused policy and lived experiences. Among the breakout session topics: immigration policy’s impact on families and children, alternatives to incarceration in Oregon and Washington, research on loss and children’s resiliency, the benefits of overnight contact between incarcerated mothers and their children, peer-parent support programs, and much more.

Research shows that “people of color are more likely to be stopped, frisked, questioned, charged and detained,” and while African Americans and Latinos make up 30 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 60 percent of its inmates. One of the consequences is that around one million fathers are behind bars, and around one in nine African-American children has a parent in prison.

In the New Industries Building on Alcatraz Island, window panes that have broken in the years since the prison closed have been left shattered. Walking through the exhibit The Sentence Unseen: Portraits of Resilience, which opened there on June 13, the crumbling space could be seen as a reminder of the devastation to families when a parent goes to prison.

Excited to be home from school, five-year-old Luna Garcia was playing with her little brothers in the front room of her apartment, her grandmother in another room, when she heard a hard knock on the door.