The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

During much of this time, I was traveling around the country speaking in person and on talk radio about my book, "All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated." Everywhere I went, without exception, I heard the samething: My family has been touched by this, too.

Once, after a radio interview, the engineer told me that he had been arrested in front of his children. Another time, the engineer was a young grandmother trying to gain custody of her incarcerated son's children. During yet another interview, the host announced on-air that his brother-in-law had done time, leaving his children fatherless.

In reporting my book I spoke with children across the country whose families had been severed by incarceration, and particularly by the drug war, which is single-handedly responsible for the boom in the prison population. Many of these children were black: African-American children are nine times more likely than white children to have an incarcerated parent. But plenty were
white: the drug laws, while disproportionately targeting blacks (who use drugs at almost exactly the same rate as whites -- and so make up about 14 percent of the nation's drug users -- but comprise 74 percent of the nation's drug prisoners), are so broadly written that they inevitably reach beyond these targets.

When I set out to promote my book, I hoped to let those who had little first-hand experience of the criminal justice system see that system through children's eyes. I hoped to spark new ways of thinking about crime and punishment. Think of it, I imagined myself exhorting the unenlightened, as if it were your children.

This instruction, I quickly learned, was superfluous. Everywhere I went, someone told me, This is my child. This is my story, too.

A reading at a Borders Books in Phoenix quickly devolved into a tearful group therapy session. One woman -- a black child-welfare worker -- was struggling with whether to take her young son to visit his incarcerated father. Another -- a middle-age white woman who looked every inch the soccer mom -- had been visiting her daughter, a grad student picked up for her first DUI, in the county jail for the past several months, and was stunned by the hostile indifference she met as a family member.

At a university in New Mexico, a student thanked me for the book; she came to the reading, she told me, because of her younger brother, who is growing up in the shadow of their mother's incarceration. She herself, she hastened to add, was no longer affected; she was grown up now and able to care for herself. Then, in the lobby of the student center, she began to shake.

I spent five years researching my book, talked to hundreds of children; I thought I had limned the pain caused by our policy of indiscriminate incarceration. I may have tested the depth of that pain, but I underestimated its breadth.

Is it desperation that leads me to find hope in these numbers? One of the basic functions of incarceration is invisibility: We place our prisons in remote rural counties, build high walls and lock out the media. Then we fortify those walls with stigma, so that those who have been there, or seen family sent there, will keep that journey secret.

But an elephant can grow only so large before people start remarking on its presence in the living room. One in 10 American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision today -- in jail, in prison, on probation or parole. The number does not include those who have had this experience at some point in their lives, or those who will. Those who have lived or worked inside a prison, or seen a family member spirited away, have seen what we are hiding from ourselves, and they are beginning to speak out. I have to believe that it is their voices, their experience, that will turn back the tidal wave that incarceration has become.

Last month in Florida, Governor Jeb Bush signed an executive order aimed at rolling back the multiple restrictions on employment that make it virtually impossible for those leaving prison to get back on their feet. He's got occasion enough to be concerned: Each of his three children has had run-ins with the police, and his daughter Noelle has found herself behind bars, albeit briefly, because of her drug problem.

At a drug policy conference in Florida after his daughter's arrest, Jeb Bush wept at the podium as he talked about his family's struggle. Critics were quick to cry "hypocrite," for Bush had previously cut state-funded rehab programs. But rather than pointing fingers, why not ask Bush to join hands with the thousands of parents whose children are locked up in his state prisons for non-violent drug crimes; the thousands of children who won't have Dad there to bail them out when they forge a Xanax scrip (Noelle's crime), because Dad is incarcerated, too.

The reasoned arguments against the drug war have been made ad infinitem, and new ones emerge every day. A study released in April, for example, found that Proposition 36, California's treatment-instead-of-incarceration
initiative, has saved the state's taxpayer's $7 for every dollar spent.

The economic argument against indiscriminate incarceration is irrefutable, but that doesn't mean it can't be ignored. What may bring it home is a river of tears, from governors and grandmothers -- the millions of Americans who have seen their families shattered by our insistence on answering addiction, and myriad other social problems, with incarceration only.

In Phoenix, I told the weeping soccer mom with the DUI daughter how powerful her testimony was, and encouraged her to share it more widely. Not now, she said; not while her daughter is still in the clutches of the state. But soon, she promised, we'd be hearing from her.

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