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There is a simple solution that would contribute to alleviating our children’s suffering: REHABILITATE AND EDUCATE THEIR INCARCERATED PARENTS. Instead of doling out lengthy sentences to felons, which simply serve to “warehouse” prisoners, while costing taxpayers millions of dollars, it would be more effective to teach prisoners different behaviors while in prison than the destructive lifestyle and behaviors with which they are familiar, and which led them to commit the crimes that led to their imprisonment.

It is expensive to send a person to prison, who, without rehabilitation, is 85 percent likely to return to prison. Money that is spent on “warehousing” a person could be better spent towards rehabilitation and education. IT IS A FACT THAT IT COST THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY TO HOUSE AN INMATE ANNUALLY AS IT DOES TO SEND HER TO HARVARD UNIVERSITY FOR ONE YEAR.

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—	Kim Mikesell, Children Do Hard Time for Their Parents’ Crime \| Women and Prison: A Site for Resistance

Fifty-three percent of the 1.5 million people held in U.S. prisons by 2007 were the parents of one or more minor children. This percentage translates into more than 1.7 million minor children with an incarcerated parent.

African American children are seven and Latino children two and half times more likely to have a parent in prison than white children. The estimated risk of parental imprisonment for white children by the age of 14 is one in 25, while for black children it is one in four by the same age.

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—	Judith Greene and Patricia Allard, Children on the Outside: Voicing the Pain and Human Costs of Parental Incarceration \| Women and Prison: A Site for Resistance

Beyondmedia Education: Women and Prison »

“Beyondmedia’s Women and Prison programming supports formerly incarcerated women and their families to voice their stories through the arts, engaging their issues and experiences to create opportunities for dialogue, healing and community organizing. Since 1998 Beyondmedia has collaborated extensively with formerly incarcerated women and girls to create interdisciplinary, multimedia forums on women and prison. The invisibility of women’s perspectives and experiences in discussions of the growing prison industrial complex constitutes a serious gap, given that the numbers of women in this male oriented system are increasing at an alarming rate. The incarceration of women is linked to a multitude of interconnected issues facing poor women, drug-addicted women, women of color, lesbians, and women in prostitution, including interpersonal and state violence, poverty, racism, reproductive oppression, homophobia, harassment, lack of quality healthcare, homelessness, and more. By making the issues of women prisoners more visible, we expand the analysis and strategies being developed to seriously challenge the criminal justice system and work to end the cycle of crisis it creates for women and their families.”