http://vimeo.com/58756777
SUMMER CAMP TAKES KIDS TO SPEND TIME WITH INCARCERATED DADS
A unique summer camp program aims to bring kids and their incarcerated fathers—who are often housed far away from their kids, making visits difficult—together for a week of much-needed bonding time.
Dads have to have good behavior for one year, and take a parenting class to be eligible to participate in the “Hope House” summer camp program.
NPR’s Shereen Marisol Meraji spent a day with the boys and girls at their camp, and went with them to spend time with their fathers at the Western Correctional Institution in Maryland. The program, which is in Maryland and North Carolina, partners with California summer camps, as well.
Listen to the Weekend Edition episode to hear the kids tell their stories, but here is a clip from the accompanying text:
Carol Fennelly founded Hope House in 1998, after a Washington, D.C.-area prison was closed, sending thousands of inmates to far-flung institutions. That made it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for relatives to visit.
Today there are three Hope House camps: one in North Carolina and two in Maryland. Fennelly also partners with groups that run summer camps in New Hampshire, Texas and California.
Inmates usually find out about the program through word of mouth or prison social workers. Dads are eligible if they have clean conduct for a year and take a parenting class.
MONEY AND MILITARIZATION OF POLICE
The conflict between armor-clad cops and angry citizens in Ferguson, MO, this week has reawakened the conversation about militarization of police forces, the offender-funded justice system that has emerged along side it, and the mistrustful barrier these tactics put between citizens and the cops whose job it is to protect them.
The New Yorker’s Sarah Stillman says that the offender-funded criminal justice system is a less obvious element of police militarism that should not be overlooked. Things like unpaid traffic tickets, probation and incarceration fees, and court costs can land people in jail for their inability to pay, creating a modern day debtors prison. Here’s a clip:
The crisis of criminal-justice debt is just one of the many tributaries feeding the river of deep rage in Ferguson. But it’s an important one—both because it’s so ubiquitous and because it’s easily overlooked in the spectacular shadow of tanks and turrets. Earlier this year, I spent six months reporting on the rise of profiteering in American courts, which happens by way of the proliferation of fees and fines for very minor offenses—part of a growing movement toward what’s known as offender-funded justice. Private companies play an aggressive role in collecting these fees in certain states. (Often, this tactic is aimed at the poor with unpaid traffic tickets.) The reports from Ferguson raise questions about how militarization and economic coercion feed a shared anger.
Missouri was one of the first states to allow private probation companies, in the late nineteen-eighties, and it has since followed the national trend of allowing court fees and fines to mount rapidly. Now, across much of America, what starts as a simple speeding ticket can, if you’re too poor to pay, mushroom into an insurmountable debt, padded by probation fees and, if you don’t appear in court, by warrant fees. (Often, poverty means transience—not everyone who is sent a court summons receives it.) “Across the country, impoverished people are routinely jailed for court costs they’re unable to pay,” Alec Karakatsanis, a cofounder of Equal Justice Under Law, a nonprofit civil-rights organization that has begun challenging this practice in municipal courts, said. These kinds of fines snowball when defendants’ cases are turned over to for-profit probation companies for collection, since the companies charge their own “supervision” fees. What happens when people fall behind on their payments? Often, police show up at their doorsteps and take them to jail.
From there, the snowball rolls. “Going to jail has huge impacts on people at the edge of poverty,” Sara Zampieren, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. “They lose their job, they lose custody of their kids, they get behind on their home-foreclosure payments,” the sum total of which, she said, is “devastating.” While in prison, “user fees” often accumulate, so that, even after you leave, you’re not quite free. A recent state-by-state survey conducted by NPR showed that in at least forty-three states defendants can be billed for their own public defender, a service to which they have a Constitutional right; in at least forty-one states, inmates can be charged for room and board in jail and prison.
America’s militarized police forces now have some highly visible tools at their disposal, some of which have been in the spotlight this week: machine guns, night-vision equipment, military-style vehicles, and a seemingly endless amount of ammo. But the economic arm of police militarization is often far less visible, and offender-funded justice is part of this sub-arsenal. The fears that Cobb and Ahmed describe—court debts that lead to warrants and people who are afraid to leave their homes as a result—compound the force that can be wielded during raids or protests like those on the streets of Missouri. Debtors’ fears change their daily lives—can they go to the grocery story or drive a child to school without being detained? “It deters people who have legitimate problems from calling the police, and removes the police’s ability to do what they’re supposed to be doing—helping people in the community respond to emergencies,” Karakatsanis said. It erodes the community’s trust in and coöperation with law enforcement.
HAVING A LOCKED UP FAMILY MEMBER NEGATIVELY AFFECTS KIDS’ HEALTH INTO ADULTHOOD, SAYS NEW STUDY
Kids living with an incarcerated family member have a higher risk of poor health-related quality of life through adulthood, according to a new study published in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.
Access to the full report is restricted to specific institutions, but here’s the abstract:
Background. Incarceration of a household member has been associated with adverse outcomes for child well-being. Methods. We assessed the association between childhood exposure to the incarceration of a household member and adult health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in the 2009/2010 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System controlling for age, race/ethnicity, education, and additional adverse childhood experiences. Results. Adults who lived in childhood with an incarcerated household member had higher risk of poor HRQOL compared with adults who had not… Conclusions. Living with an incarcerated household member during childhood is associated with higher risk of poor HRQOL during adulthood, suggesting that the collateral damages of incarceration for children are long-term.
The War on Poverty has been a resounding success. Every day we are gaining ground through sustained attack as the poor grow weaker until their ultimate destruction.