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Learn Digital #Loveletters From Children Of The Incarcerated

Back inward February, we announced a novel endeavor from Google.org focused on racial justice, including back upward for organizations working to destination majority incarceration. This is a critical resultant inward the United States, which represents five percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s prison theater population. And Blacks are incarcerated at nearly 6 times the charge per unit of measurement of whites—in fact, the United States of America of America imprisons a larger percent of its Black population than South Africa did at the pinnacle of apartheid.

An oftentimes overlooked fact of majority incarceration is that many first-time, nonviolent offenders who have prison theater sentences are parents. There are 2.7 1000000 American children amongst a raise behind bars, as well as Black children are 7.5 times to a greater extent than probable to convey a raise behind bars than their white counterparts. The sense of having a raise inward prison theater is traumatizing to a child: a novel study from the Annie E. Casey Foundation flora that the incarceration of a raise tin convey equally much impact on a child’s well-being equally abuse or domestic violence.

So this Mother’s Day as well as Father’s Day, inward an endeavor to heighten awareness of the impact of majority incarceration, we’ve partnered amongst NGOs on Love Letters: a serial of videos that incorporate children’s messages of dearest for a woman raise or begetter inward prison. These digital dearest letters are demonstrations of the unbreakable dearest betwixt raise as well as child, as well as of the hurting of growing upward without a raise present.

The videos divulge a side of majority incarceration that many people don’t overstep away a conduct a opportunity to see. They allow us to deport witness, to endure proximate to the really human costs of incarceration. Before I joined Google, I spent years equally a human rights lawyer working on criminal judge reform. When I visited women’s prisons, I saw how broken women prisoners were because almost all were mothers to small-scale children. Few received visits from trouble solid unit of measurement or children because of how remote women’s prisons normally are. When children did visit, some weren’t allowed to hug or touching their mothers. I likewise visited detention centers for girls, where many were the daughters of incarcerated mothers. The girls had been trafficked or arrested for running away from grouping homes or abusive foster placements, as well as they shared amongst me the hurting of non having a woman raise at that topographic point to learn them as well as protect them.

The impact of majority incarceration is generational as well as devastating. I promise that afterwards watching these videos, you’ll conduct to acquire to a greater extent than virtually the critical move organizations similar The Osborne Association, Hour Children, as well as Google.org grantees Essie Justice Group, the Ella Baker Center as well as the Equal Justice Initiative are doing to back upward children affected past times incarceration as well as to advance criminal judge reform. You tin likewise acquire to a greater extent than virtually majority incarceration on vera.org as well as contribute to the conversation amongst #LoveLetters on social media.