For Families of Incarcerated Dads, Father’s Day Comes at a Premium

Date:  06-13-2017 Costs of phone calls and visiting keep children of incarcerated fathers from vital bonding

From the blog by Lucius Couloute of Prison Policy Initiative: In the U.S., we often hear ‘you do the crime, you do the time.’ But incarceration isn’t just an individual-level problem, it affects entire networks of people. This Father’s Day I’d like to bring attention to the pernicious consequences of parental incarceration and the exploitive ways in which private telecom companies profit from the separation of families. Crime has been declining for decades, yet the number of children with a father in state or federal prison is now over 1.5 million. If we include jails, 1 out of every 28 children now has an incarcerated parent. And the latest estimates suggest that Black and Hispanic children are up to six times more likely to have an incarcerated parent than their white peers. Continue reading >>>