The following was passed on to me by staff member Lori Nemenz. She found it on the National Black Catholic Congress site, http://www.nbccongress.org.
ECHOES OF INCARCERATION is a youth-produced documentary focusing on the impact of the prison system on children. The piece was produced by teens with incarcerated parents, and speaks to an issue facing an estimated seven million children in the United States.
It has been well documented in the last few decades that American sentencing laws have resulted in one in one hundred adults being behind bars. It is also now starting to be understood how these cycles of incarceration are gutting communities and destroying the fabric of millions of families. What are rarely heard are the experiences of the young people who are affected the most. This project gives voice to these experiences, and challenges society to take responsibility for the far-reaching impact of our criminal justice system.
A good book on this topic, written about 2006, is “All Alone in the World, Children of the Incarcerated” by Nell Bernstein.
The next time I visit one of our parishioners in prison, I am certainly going to be more aware of the children in the visiting area.
Thank you.