Today, the local NPR station, WAMU, had a story about a local group of teenagers who are founding a nonprofit to provide mentorship and college scholarships to children with incarcerated parents. Yasmine Arrington, who is 17, was looking for scholarships and found those for children whose parents were deceased or in the military but none for children whose parents had been in jail or prison, like her father had been for most of her life. "And I thought, but there's a lot of them!" she said.
There are. At any given time, they represent about 2 percent of the minor population, according to the group Children of Incarcerated Parents. And that doesn't count the children whose parents have been incarcerated and are struggling to return to parenthood, find jobs, or struggle to overcome any number of insurmountable challenges. There should be a scholarship for children who face such odds; they shouldn't be punished for any crime their parents did time for, but they are.
And black and Latino children suffer disproportionately because their parents disproportionately go to jail. While there are many organizations that work to help the formerly incarcerated transition back to life on the outside, there aren't as many that consider the long-term consequences for them and their children.
-- Monica Potts
